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1. Trolling: the privilege of way too much time on your hands

As some of you probably know, I also administer The Hathor Legacy, which looks at how film and TV portray women. It’s a feminist media site. I founded it in 2005, and I’ve been proud of it. But here’s where a subtle shift in perception can uncover a glaring bit of privilege.

Hathor was always intended to be about women and how they are marginalized. It wasn’t that I didn’t care how other people – people of color, queer people, etc. – were treated by the media. I’m very interested in those issues, too. I was just sticking to the issue of women because it’s where my expertise lies.

A few months ago, it hit me: some women are queer. Some women are of color. If you don’t cover them, it’s not a feminist media site. It’s just a site about white heterosexual women, and how we get marginalized.

Privilege enabled me to start a site about white straight women, written primarily by white straight women, about things that affect white straight women, and think I was doing something for women in general. Because white and straight are the default, and I fell right into that thinking.

Eh. I got over the cringe effect with realizing I have inherited privileged views and prejudices a few years ago. I tell myself it’s self-centered to worry about how embarrassingly dense I’ve been, when surely there’s something I could to to make up for it. And in that vain, I took action and posted a shoutout requesting women bloggers who are not white and/or not heterosexual to come and write columns on the site.

Maybe it’s not so much how enlightened we are as how enlightened we’re willing to become.

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1. To the university that’s banned this blog
2. Mind-boggling example of male privilege

I have a friend who’s Mexican-American by descent but her family’s been in the US for several generations. She has brown skin. Her English is as native as mine. She works in IT and can get more performance out of cheap-ass computers than anyone I’ve known. But on a recent trip to the eye doctor, he leaned in as if speaking to someone hard of hearing and asked her in a tone of Great White Concern: “Do you have insurance to cover this prescription?”

Because we white people have heard Mexican-Americans are frequently uninsured or something (sorry, one of the kids yelled over part of the soundbyte, but we’re sure it was that you’re all downtrodden and stuff). We worry about you, you know. Our way of showing that we care is to single you out for special assumptions attention and make ourselves feel good about a total non-deed let you know we’re here for you. Isn’t that nice of us?

Sarcasm aside, I’ve never had a doctor ask me if I was insured. I have had them ask which insurance company I’m with. It’s a slight shift in meaning, but oh so telling.

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1. Compulsory health insurance and no end to inflated medical costs
2. We do what we can

• “Being white didn’t give me all these privileges you’re talking about.”
• “I know plenty of [minority] people who are better off than I am.”
• And the advanced version, which I’m guilty of using myself: “It’s really more about class than it’s about race.”

I am “poor white trash”. I can relate to all of the statements above. I grew up looking the part of Average White Girl, but middle class white people always pegged me as “different”. This left me vulnerable to losing opportunities and even jobs to white people who “fit in” better. Also, after my family made its great escape from White Trash Hell into Middle Class Purgatory, I learned to my surprise that there were black kids in the world who’d grown up with more money than I ever had. And so on, and so forth.

Here’s where the confusion comes in. Yes, I have a legitimate grievance against the system. Yes, I’ve lost out on things because I didn’t have the $20 to invest or know the magic social password that would have marked me “normal” (read: “middle class, preferably white”). And yes, it hurts when you don’t fit in with your own race because of your class, and you don’t fit in with your class because of your race. It’s hard to see privilege around that stuff, but the examples are out there.

Wealth gets you a ticket, but it doesn’t guarantee you a seat

One of the black kids I went to school with whose family was richer than mine? We discovered we’d given identical answers on a test, and she’d gotten some of them marked wrong while I got 100%. When we examined her other papers, we realized the teacher had been doing this for some time: “giving” the black girl a lesser grade. And one of the Jewish girls I knew whose family was richer than mine? When she was absent for a Jewish holiday and missed a test, one of her teachers decided to teach her a lesson by refusing to let her make up that test anytime but on a Saturday – the Jewish sabbath. The teacher offered truly pathetic excuses why after school, during lunch and during the girl’s study period wouldn’t work. Sunday wouldn’t work because it was the teacher’s Christian sabbath! The girl’s mother had to call the principal and threaten to bring the ACLU into it before she got a proper time slot to retake the test.

I’ve never been pulled over for “looking like you’re out of your neighborhood” (unless you count the time I was lost in a snotty part of Beverly Hills in an American car, gasp!). I’m not nearly as likely to get pulled over for traffic violations as black or Latino people, even if they grew up with more money than I did. Taking things a step further, I’ve never felt pressured to join a gang just to survive. I’ve never worried I’m going to get shot in my own neighborhood (and I’ve lived in some neighborhoods the white middle class considers “bad”).

That white skin would get you a seat, if only you had a ticket

My approach is to look at all the types of privilege that affect an individual. Take me, for example. I have white privilege and heterosexual privilege and able-bodied privilege working for me; I have class privilege and male privilege working against me. In the case of poor whites, the class privilege often takes more from them than the white privilege gives them (i.e., the college admissions board prefer my skin color, but if I can’t somehow pay tuition, I’m not getting in). In my personal experience, white privilege may be a total bust, and I have the right to feel that way: I do not have the right to muddy a discussion of white privilege with all my anti-privileges. But before I learned to separate the types of privilege, I’m afraid I probably did that once or twice. Not in the “minorities have it so easy” tone that marks one type of troll; I just couldn’t figure out which part of this stuff I wasn’t getting.

Not a credit to our race

I will probably write a whole post on this someday, but I’ll leave you with one last point to consider. In my experience, poor whites are one group of people that even PC folks think it’s okay to take potshots at. Make a “dumb blonde” joke, and someone sooner or later will call you on your sexism; make a “you know you’re a redneck when…” joke, and chances are everyone will take it as good clean fun. This is something that makes me generally distrustful of the supposedly “progressive” thinkers out there, and I assume it affects other poor whites simiarly. See, we’re an embarrassment to the white race. We’re proof that whites are not invulnerable to the repressions they’ve visited on other races. So we’re taught to keep quiet. On one level, we know we shouldn’t take that crap. On the other hand, experience has taught us if we take a stand, we’ll stand alone. I don’t know how many times I’ve endured jokes about my homestate when a potential new friend asks me where I’m from. And if you know me, you know I’d never let an insult to my gender go by without comment.

And if we have an accent of any sort – many of us do, since by definition it’s the higher classes who get the privilege of their accent being declared “no accent” – we’re supposed to put up with being made fun of and/or being fetishized. Or being expected to change it, if we’re “serious” about getting certain jobs or promotions. We’re vulnerable to class assumptions that we’re ill-educated, lazy, immoral or even criminally perverse (only in redneck jokes is incest somehow a topic for humor!).

While these points still aren’t germaine to a topic about white privilege, I’ve seen them get dismissed in discussions about privilege and bigotry in general, and in those cases they are relevant. Hopefully, something in this post will help someone weed out trolls and/or communicate more effectively with sincere poor whites who mistake a lack of class privilege for a lack of white privilege.

Related posts:

1. Greed and the end of the middle class
2. White guy asks: why do you need to bring race into it?
3. Gee, thanks, but I’m actually not exceptional at all

I mean, I myself am an “angry guy”, but I don’t really feel the need to add race into it. So my question is, why is there a need to put race into the picture?

Wow, dude, the privilege is like right there and you don’t see it. ABW nails the problem: her race is making Angry White Guy uncomfortable.  He wants her not to mention it for all the reasons she says.

“White” is not a race.  It is a cultural (delusional) default.  It’s everyone who’s something other than white who belongs to a race.  White people have the privilege of being race-less.  Angry White Guy feels no need to bring race into it because he doesn’t belong to a race.  He simply belongs.

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1. Personal Privilege List

Explorer Captain James Cook, who gave this plant the botanical name of “intoxicating pepper”, first discovered kava kava. Kava has been used for over 3,000 years for its medicinal effects as a sedative, muscle relaxant, diuretic, and as a remedy for nervousness and insomnia.

My first thought was a sarcastic “Wow, Captain Cook predates Jesus!” because, obviously, if it’s been in use for 3,000 years and he was the first to discover it, he must have lived 3,000 years ago.

Of course, this isn’t what the writer means. The writer means “Of the Anglo sect of humanity from whose perspective I write and you are forced to read, Captain James Cook was the first to encounter this ancient herb.” Kava had no existence before it was found by whites: after being found by them, its prior existence became a simple “history”, suitable for books and encyclopedias. No more alive in today’s world than the Spanish Inquisition.

After my initial sarcasm, however, I was sobered by the realization that I’d grown up hearing similarly idiotic statements and I’m not sure at what age I stopped accepting them without thinking. “Christopher Columbus discovered America! And a bunch of people living on it! Who, um, somehow had no idea it was there until he pointed it out to them!” And for a nice added dash of Anglo privilege, let’s not forget the man’s real name was Don Cristoval Colon – but if that’s what we’d learned in the first grade, we’d have immediately recognized he wasn’t of Anglo descent and perhaps gotten the dangerous idea that people other than English speakers could contribute to society (or whatever it was he did). As an added bonus, we gloss over the fact that he thought he was on the other side of the world and the natives he met were therefore Indians. Instead of getting a good laugh for that one, we just didn’t make the distinction for about 200 years – and when we did suddenly realize how unfair that was of us, we didn’t bother to consult the people we’d been calling Indians. We just came up with the name “Native Americans” and patted ourselves on the backs for being so PC. “American Indians” saw it a bit differently, however:

At an international conference of Indians from the Americas held in Geneva, Switzerland at the United Nations in 1977 we unanimously decided we would go under the term American Indian. We were enslaved as American Indians, we were colonized as American Indians and we will gain our freedom as American Indians and then we will call ourselves any damn thing we choose. –Russell Means

Freedom, sure – but you’ll also need history privileges if you want to make it stick.

Related posts:

1. Trolling: the privilege of way too much time on your hands