How Does the Expression “White Privilege” Make You Feel?
“The system does not change until it’s forced to.” – John Oliver
Over at an academic blog, Crooked Timber, which we occasionally read and infrequently comment on, there’s an arcane and convoluted discussion unfolding between one of its front-pagers (Chris Bertram), who’s published two posts in the past week on “White Privilege” (here and here), and the blog’s commenters, who’ve come out in droves to chime in. The first of Bertram’s posts was in response to a piece by Kenan Malik (here); yesterday, Malik replied in a guest post (here).
Whew, now that we’ve got that out of the way: Bertram feels the term – while not perfectly descriptive of the sorts of intangible (and tangible) benefits, aka privileges, conveyed by being white – is useful. Malik, on the other hand, disagrees – mostly, if we understand his argument correctly, because there are many white persons who do not partake of the privileges/benefits deemed to accrue to their skin color.
The reason for this is that they are poor. And despite their skin color, they suffer nearly the same absence of privilege in many respects as Blacks. Malik accepts that racism exists, but feels that “white privilege” is something which is closer aligned to “white economic privilege” vis-à-vis the absence of such privilege of (many) whites and (even more) Blacks.
In other words – we’re simplifying considerably – Malik places the emphasis on “class” (socioeconomic status, SES) rather than on “race,” while Bertram places it on “race.” This is one of the most difficult and troubled disputes in sociological, political, and economic thought in the U.S.
The commenters – who are not all Americans, or even British (Bertram and Malik are British, however, and this may influence their views somewhat, given that racism in America has the unique feature of being the social descendant of slavery) – seem to feel on the whole that the phrase “white privilege” is useful for thinking about the birthright benefits they’ve (largely, unconsciously) enjoyed up to now in their lives. (Note: The blog seems to be read mostly by academics and a highly-educated progressive international Anglophone audience, although we’re inferring this from the level of discourse and the odd personal anecdote; only two commenters have explicitly identified themselves as Black.)
Here are some observations for all those who think it is “useful,” presumably because it’s made them more consciously aware of how they’ve gotten where they are partly because they’re white, or at least, they haven’t had to encounter all the same barriers/impediments as their Black peers:
We’ll start from the “aha!” moment. What, specifically, has realizing you’re a beneficiary of “white privilege” accomplished in terms of concrete actions towards achieving racial equality over the past four months (the term’s been around since 1988, but its use has increased since the George Floyd killing in May)? Do you employ it in speaking with yourself (interior monologue)? Do you employ it in speaking to your family? Your friends? Your colleagues? Do they respond with a similarly “aha!” moment when the light goes on? [Note: If anyone responds, “I’m not a racist, but …” then the light hasn’t gone on.]
More specifically, how is the realization that you’ve enjoyed “white privilege” as part of your racial birthright in America (we can’t speak for Britain) going to change your behavior with respect to the structural roots of that privilege?
Without a massive, concerted and multi-racial campaign to reverse all the state-sanctioned means by which Blacks have been historically discriminated against – in housing, in healthcare, in terms of the built and natural environment, in justice, in education, not to mention the implicit bias which haunts them throughout life – acknowledging that because you were born white, you were in one sense “lucky” (what philosopher Bernard Williams referred to as “moral luck”) and you’ll therefore be more conscious (appreciative?) of that “luck” in future – isn’t going to eradicate the systemic causes that enable that privilege to exist.
Unless the systems themselves change, your children will wake up one day at a similar (or more violent) moment in history and experience that very same “aha!” moment. In the meantime, the structures that have led to where we are today – structures this blog covers daily – won’t have changed. In fact, they may have become even more rigid and blatant.
Without a mass movement for structural change, white privilege for some will continue along its historical trajectory. Blacks will continue to own $0.07 for every $1.00 of white wealth, they will continue to be excluded from access to loans to purchase homes and start new businesses, they will continue perforce to live near environmentally degraded sites (petrochemical plants, for example, or county incinerators), because the fact that they lost 150 years in accumulation of generational wealth (in the U.S. this is primarily acquired through home ownership) means that they can’t afford to live somewhere else, even assuming that the consequences of 1930s redlining are no longer “legal”: “wealth” has now replaced “race” as a discriminatory factor. Their schools will be poorer because local property taxes support 50% of school spending on average, which means that it will be harder for them to gain admission to universities – and, given the wealth gap, to pay for such education. It is a circle which has long been unbroken.
Our system – the dominant economic system in the Western world for the past 200 or so years – requires that for profits to continue to accrue to ownership, the costs of production have to be minimized. One way of accomplishing this is to drive down the cost of one component of production, viz. labor. The cheaper the labor, the higher the profits for owners/managers/PMC. And, in the 18th and 19th centuries in the U.S., the cheapest form of labor (until 1865) was slaves, at least in the South. In the North, women’s and children’s labor largely staffed the great Northeastern mills and clothing-production factories. Men built the railroads, the factories, worked in steel mills and automobile factories and coal mines.
Following the labor movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – up to the period following World War II, perhaps as late as the 1970s, male laborers – a fair number of them unionized – earned middle-class wages. But since around 1980, this has changed. A lot of heavy production (automobiles, for example) and once-female production (the entire clothing industry, from spinning to finishing) has been outsourced and off-shored to developing countries where workers earn pennies a day. This has kept profits high, even as U.S. workers’ income has stagnated or declined comparatively over the past 30-40 years – for example, today the U.S. federal minimum wage is $7.25, the same as it was in 2009. If it had kept pace with inflation since 1968, today it would be $24 an hour.
Why this quick overview of U.S. economic history? Because it’s related to Malik’s argument that there are many white people who do not enjoy the “privilege” the term Bertram approves is believed to confer on their race. And Malik’s right. There has pretty much always been a white underclass which, apart from being born white, has had precious little access to the “good things in life” that “white privilege” theoretically should confer.
We are used to thinking of Appalachia as the home to a permanent white underclass – the rural, mountain-locked poor whose only significant middle-class interlude was in the days when Coal was King. But this underclass has now spread far beyond Appalachia, and it’s still spreading; if you want to see where it lives today, just look at a map showing where the opioid epidemic has spread throughout the U.S. in the past twenty years. These are people who once had better- or good-paying production jobs, jobs that enabled them to purchase a house in a neighborhood with good schools, schools from which their children graduated before going on to college.
These people – the traditional underclass + those who have slipped/are slipping into the white underclass with the loss of industrial production over the past 40 years – are those Hillary Clinton referred to “deplorables.” Now they work at Walmart and at Amazon fulfillment centers for near-minimum wages, or do odd jobs; they live in houses which have fallen into disrepair; they can’t afford to go to a dentist, or pay their electricity or water bill; their children face few if any prospects of a better life than that of their parents.
There are now entire cities in America whose populations have fallen victim to deindustrialization in the last generation – think “Detroit,” or “Flint” – or, more tellingly, “Kenosha,” which was at one time a major auto manufacturing center. [Note: Here’s an excellent Twitter thread by a former resident of Kenosha which gives a good sense of what the city has become.]
What remains for the former industrial working class, we wonder? What is left?
Well, their whiteness remains, and just as there’s the phrase “white privilege,” there’s also a phrase that connotes the privilege of being white when all other privileges have been lost.
To return to the question of whether “race” or “class” should be the predominant consideration in discussions of “privilege” and its benefits: both are important, and they overlap, though we note that “race” has deeper state-sanctioned and abetted roots than class. Nearly everyone at the top of the capitalist pyramid is white – there’s still plenty of privilege there, including plenty of heritable privilege. Nearly everyone Black falls near the bottom (20%) of the pyramid.
But there are millions of historically poor whites, now being joined by newly-poor whites struggling to stay just below the middle – and failing fast. They too have been left behind by the system – and they are angry and despairing.
Now they’ve taken to the streets of Minneapolis, and Portland, and Kenosha. It’s no longer a question of “what next?” but “where next?”
Addendum: Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth (from Friday):
“It’s a great place to live, it’s a great place to raise a family. We have great schools. We have great parks and lakes. … And when all of this calms down, like I hope it’s trending toward right now, if you really go outside this small area right here, life goes on as normal in Kenosha County and the City of Kenosha.”
“Life goes on as normal …”: that’s kind of the problem right there. We have two Americas, and the phrase “one half doesn’t know how the other half lives” seems particularly apt.