Elana Baurer
“Somewhere down in our guts we understand that in an oppressive system such as white supremacy, the unearned privileges with which we live are based on the suffering of others. We know that we have things because others don’t.”
-Robert Jensen
Whiteness as Privilege
While it may be easy to recognize that racism exists and that certain individuals may be oppressed by the color of their skin, it is not easy to implicate ourselves in that racism. Nor is it easy for a white person to recognize that hir whiteness provides many advantages that serve to benefit white people in a society founded on racial hegemony. The ability to refuse to acknowledge the advantages to having white skin is, in itself, a privilege. “The definition of privilege {is} the institutional power of individuals to construct systems based on their needs and values.”[1]
Robert Jensen describes this in The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege. He writes, “…Part of white privilege {is} the privilege to ignore the reality of a white-supremacist society when it makes us uncomfortable, to rationalize why it’s not really so bad, to deny one’s own role in it. It is the privilege of remaining ignorant because that ignorance is protected.”[2] Frances E. Kendall adds to this idea when she says, “Being white enables me to decide whether I am going to listen to others, to hear them, or neither. I also silence people of color without intending to or even being aware of it, by talking over them, talking around them, not asking their opinions, or not considering the omnipresence of race as I view a situation… White privilege allows us not to see race in ourselves and to be angry at those who do.”[3]
The Challenging White Supremacy Workshop defines privilege as the “right, advantage, favor, or immunity specially granted to one, especially a right held by a certain individual group or class and withheld from certain others or all others (Webster’s Dictionary, italics added by CWS). U.S. institutions and culture give preferential treatment to people whose ancestors came from Europe over people’s whose ancestors are from the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Arab world and exempt European Americas – white people – from the forms of racial and national oppression inflicted upon peoples from the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Arab world. This web of institutional and cultural preferential treatment is called white privilege. In a white supremacy system white privilege and racial oppression are two sides of the same coin.” [4]
Another aspect of white privilege that Kendall brings up is using personal hardship to distance ourselves from our responsibility for those privileges we receive as white people. He writes:
The pain and sense of being less-than, often based in reality, may emanate both from our personal life experiences (for example, my father died when I was four) and from our membership in groups from which privileges are systemically withheld (being poor or Jewish or gay or deaf). In our minds, this somehow lessens our responsibility for receiving or colluding in systemic white privilege… We shift the focus back to us, even when the conversation is not about us. A classic example of this is white women crying during conversations about racism because they feel guilty about being white and women of color having to put their pain aside to help the white women who are crying. African Americans and gays and lesbians, in particular, are expected to take responsibility for other people’s responses to and discomfort with them.[5]
In Peggy McIntosh’s widely-quoted article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” she says, “White people are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege… whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us.’” McIntosh goes on to list some of the privileges of whiteness including examples such as: “I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time”; “When I am told about our national heritage or about ‘civilization,’ I am told that people of my color made it what it is”; “I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race”; “I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the ‘person in charge,’ I will be facing a person of my race”; “I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.”[6]
Banking, housing, employment policies, education systems, the criminal law system, etc. are some of the areas in which people of color are systematically disadvantaged and white people are systematically privileged. The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is a perfect example, as Joy James points out. She writes:
The racist bias reflected in sentencing has created a society in which a black person is eight times more likely to be sentenced to prison for committing (or being convicted of) a similar offense as a white person. Defendants receive the same sentencing for the sale or possession of one unit of crack – considered a black or latino urban drug – as for one hundred units of powder cocaine considered a white suburban indulgence. Although the majority of cocaine and crack offenders are whites, most of those sentenced to prison for drug use and sale are African American and Latino.[7]
Additionally, James points out “In nearly every death penalty case, the race of the victim is white; in fact, a person is four times more likely to be sentenced to death for being convicted of killing a white person than for killing a black person. Of the 229 executions in the United States since the reinstatement of the death penalty, only 1 involved a white defendant for the murder of a black person. The American Bar Association has called for a moratorium on executions given the racial bias in death sentences.”[8] For additional specific examples please see our “White Privilege” list on page ______.
Jensen additionally points out, “In most cases, white people can decide whether or not they want to go into a predominantly black neighborhood. In most cases, black people have no choice but to deal with a predominantly white world.”[9] Therefore, white privilege extends beyond the political system into daily experiences like buying a magazine or turning on the television.
Kendall explains, “All of us who are white receive white privileges. They are bestowed on us impersonally and systemically, but they affect us personally. We can’t not get them, and we can’t give them back. Our choice is to use them in such a way as to dismantle the systems that keep the superiority of whiteness in place. One of the primary privileges is having greater influence, power, and resources. White people make decisions that affect everyone without consulting anyone else. As white people, we keep ourselves central, thereby silencing others. We can include or exclude others at our whim.”[10]
White privilege extends beyond the tangible to language itself. Kendall writes about her observations of whiteness shaping language. She says:
I have watched politeness and civility become cardinal rules in predominantly white institutions. More times than I can count, I have observed the stated need for ‘civility’ used to silence faculty, staff, and students of color, and white activists. We use our white privilege to define the parameters of conversation and communication, keeping our culture, manners, and language central. We do this by requesting a ‘safe’ place to talk about race and racism. This often means ‘safe’ from hearing the anger and pain of people of color while being able to say racist things without being held accountable for them. We set up informal rules for communicating in the organization, failing to share those rules with people who are different from us, and penalizing them publicly and heavily when they make mistakes. We create institutions that run by our culture’s rules but we act as if the rules are universally held, such as what time meetings start, how people talk to one another, the ‘appropriate’ language to use.”[11]
Whiteness as Property
Another way that whiteness functions is as a form of property. At the time of the foundation of the United States of America, whiteness literally legally defined whether or not an individual was considered human and was therefore synonymous with very tangible economic, psychological and social benefits. While slavery is now abolished and persons in the United States can no longer be legally considered property, Cheryl Harris discusses how property does not only refer to “things” but the “right to things” and “rights in things.” Harris expands upon this by citing James Madison:
In James Madison's view, for example, property 'embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right,' referring to all of a person's legal rights. Property as conceived in the founding era "included not only external objects and people's relationships to them, but also all of those human rights, liberties, powers, and immunities that are important for human well-being, including: freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom from bodily harm, and free and equal opportunities to use personal faculties."[12]
Therefore Property is, itself, a right.
Harris suggests that we focus on the modern concept of property which “emphasizes the more contingent nature of property.” She explains that property, in a broader sense, “encompasses jobs, entitlements, occupational licenses, contracts, subsidies, and indeed a whole host of intangibles that are the product of labor, time, and creativity, such as intellectual property, business goodwill, and enhanced earning potential from graduate degrees.”[13] In an extension on that idea, Harris explains that in a society founded on racial subordination, white privilege became the expectation and therefore the “property for personhood.”
If whiteness is property, then there is a clear interest on the part of owners of that property to protect and maintain it. That is to say, it has been and continues to be in white people’s best economic and social interests to maintain a system that places property value on whiteness. This interest is both individual and collective; therefore, racism does not only fall on the individual but rather on the systems that both uphold and are upheld by individuals. As Harris writes, “When the law recognizes, either implicitly or explicitly, the settled expectations of whites built on the privileges and benefits produced by white supremacy, it acknowledges and reinforces a property interest in whiteness that reproduces Black subordination.”[14]
Maintaining the racist systems of our society also preserves the concept of whiteness as essential to determining a person’s humanity. An extension of this is the automatic Othering of all people who do not identify as white or who are not identified as white –if they are not white then they are not “real” persons and therefore they are “less than” human. The consequence of such Othering is exclusion and oppression. Hand in hand with this Othering comes the normalization of whiteness.
Whiteness as Power
What is the difference between prejudice and racism? Jensen explains, “Prejudice - negative or hostile attitudes toward members of a group based on some shared trait, perceived or real – becomes racism when one group has the power to systematically deprive the members of another group of rights and privileges that should come with citizenship and/or being a human being.”[15]
It is not hard to recognize that whiteness provides Power – one must only look at the people in positions of power in our country. But it is not enough to recognize that most of the people in positions of political and economic power are white; it is important to acknowledge that whiteness on the more collective, systematic scale is also powerful. Like all Power systems, it works to perpetuate itself and maintain the monopoly on Power. Kendall writes, “We have created and sustain a pathological system in which our positive sense of self is based on the negative sense of someone else. Our whiteness and superiority are dependent on others being nonwhite and inferior.”[16]
The term “white supremacy” is therefore clearly much more than just a label for openly racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan; it applies to a far more subconscious, systemic thought process and the repercussions of that belief system. According to the CWS Workshop, white supremacy is “an historically based institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent for the purpose of maintaining and defending systems of wealth, power, and privilege.”
The idea that our society is a white supremacist one goes back to the white European foundation of the United States. In his discussion of white supremacy, Jensen explains:
By ‘white supremacist,’ I mean a society whose founding is based in an ideology of the inherent superiority of white Europeans over non-whites, an ideology that was used to justify the crimes against indigenous people and Africans that created the nation. That ideology also has justified legal and extralegal exploitation of every non-white immigrant group, and is used to this day to rationalize the racialized disparities in the distribution of wealth and well-being in this society. It is a society in which white people occupy most of the top positions in powerful institutions, with similar privileges available in limited ways to non-white people who fit themselves into white society.[17]
The continuous maintenance of the system by whites is an essential part of white supremacy. As Jensen writes, “In any struggle to end a system of oppression, those on the bottom of the hierarchy have an obvious motivation to resist the system… however powerful that argument from justice, we can observe that it does not always motivate people with unearned privilege to work to change the system that gave them the privilege.”[18]
Ian F. Haney López talks about how legal precedent suggests that Whiteness has considerable value to white people and therefore “Whites are much more likely to embrace than dismantle their identity.”[19] Haney López says, “…When confronted with the falsity of racial lines, many Whites – even those in the highest positions of public trust and under the greatest charge to do justice – will choose to entrench White identity and privilege rather than allow its destabilization.”[20]
Whiteness as Terrorism
Some white people think that after the Civil Rights movement, racism ceased to exist in America. A common defense that white people present when confronted with the idea of the United States as a racist society is that the civil rights movement created equality under the law and therefore created social equality as well. Most white people who acknowledge that racism is still a reality tend to distance themselves from it and deny any role in racism or investment in white supremacy. When a white person makes a racist comment that person is often still not called racist, rather ze is perceived to have “made a mistake.” (Noteworthy examples of this are the Michael Richards incident and Don Imus’ comments on the Rutgers women’s basketball team).
Paulette Goudge writes, "It is not easy to demonstrate the existence of something which is, on the whole, kept well-hidden, and of which most of us who are in some way implicated are entirely unaware, though it nonetheless constantly and profoundly impacts upon both what we say and what we do... Furthermore, the absence of overt recognition of imbalanced power relations renders them less likely to be subject to any form of challenge."[21]
Furthermore, Kendall explains, “Racism is one of several systems of oppression. Others are class, sexism, heterosexism, the institutionalized primacy of Christianity, and able-bodiedism. These systems work toward a common goal: to maintain power and control in the hands of wealthy, white, heterosexual, Christian, able-bodied men.”[22]
Beyond individual instances of racism, it is important to understand the systematic racism that pervades our society. Kendall writes, “…African Americans ‘still hold less than 1 percent of senior-level corporate posts.’ Unless we believe that white people are inherently more capable than men and women of color, we have to acknowledge that our systems are treating us unequally.”[23] As Jensen says, “It is relatively easy for white people to focus on the struggle to change racist behaviors and attitudes at the personal level but ignore questions at more systemic levels.”[24] This systemic oppression perpetuated by whites is a form of terrorism.
The term “terrorism” is most often used to describe acts that threaten white bodies and/or white supremacy. Inherent in this definition is the idea that whiteness can never be terror. bell hooks explains, "...One fantasy of whiteness is that the threatening Other is always a terrorist. This projection enables many white people to imagine there is no representation of whiteness as terror, as terrorizing."[25]
Yet, whiteness is terrorizing and has been since the first white people stepped foot on this land. From the time Europeans touched “American” soil, white bodies terrorized, killed, exploited, and enslaved nonwhite bodies. hooks continues:
If the mask of whiteness, the pretense, represents it as always benign, benevolent, then what this representation obscures is the representation of danger, the sense of threat. During the period of racial apartheid, still known by many folks as Jim Crow, it was more difficult for black people to internalize this pretense, hard for us not to know that the shapes under white sheets had a mission to threaten, to terrorize. That representation of whiteness, and its association with innocence, which engulfed and murdered Emmett Till was a sign; it was meant to torture with the reminder of possible future terror.[26]
In many ways white supremacy is synonymous with white racism. The idea of whiteness and its inherent Othering and subordination of non-whites maintains a system of white supremacy and therefore maintains oppression and terror. It follows, then, that every white person is implicated in the system of whiteness as racism and terror. While imagining oneself as contributing to terror and oppression is painful, so is the terror and oppression painful for its victims. To truly understand white privilege and white power is to look at the historic meanings of whiteness and to acknowledge the history inscribed on every body. White bodies are inscribed with the terrorism that white people have perpetuated throughout history and which continues today. This must be realized for the systems of oppression and domination to be changed.
Kendall writes, “…Racism is as devastating, as costly, and as psychically obliterating as robbery and assault; indeed they are often the same. Racism resembles other offenses against humanity whose structures are so deeply embedded in culture as to prove extremely resistant to being recognized as forms of oppression... As in rape cases, victims of racism must prove that they did not distort the circumstances, misunderstand the intent, or even enjoy it.”[27]
[1] Kendall, Frances E Understanding White Privilege 59
[2] Jensen 10
[3] Kendall 67
[4] Challenging White Supremacy Workshop, Tides Center
[5] Kendall 71-72
[6] McIntosh, Peggy “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”
[7] James, Joy Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics 24
[8] Ibid., 26-27
[9] Jensen 10
[10] Kendall 62-63
[11] Kendall 72
[12] Harris, Cheryl. "Whiteness as Property.” Black on White. 104
[13] Harris 106
[14] Ibid., 108
[15] Jensen 16
[16] Kendall 35
[17] Jensen 3-4
[18] Ibid., xix
[19] Haney López White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race 107
[20] Ibid., 197-198
[21] Goudge, Paulette The Power of Whiteness: Racism in Third World Development and Aid. 41
[22] Kendall 63
[23] Ibid., 63. Bold added.
[24] Jensen 17-18
[25] bell hooks "Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination." Black on White 50-51
[26] Ibid., 50-51
[27] Kendall 73
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