[Marxism] The Brain-Rotting Properties of White Privilege

[Greg McDonald <sabocat59@xxxxxxx>]

Tim Wise
www.zmag.org

  Full: http://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/whiteness07.htm

To truly understand a nation, a culture, or its people, it helps to  
know what they take for granted.

After all, sometimes the things that go unspoken are more powerful  
than the spoken word, if for no other reason than the tendency of  
unspoken assumptions to reinforce core ways of thinking, feeling and  
acting, without ever having to be verbalized (and thus subjected to  
challenge) at all.

What's more, when people take certain things for granted, anything  
that goes against the grain of what they perceive as "normal" will  
tend to stand out like a sore thumb, and invite a hostility that  
seems reasonable, at least to those dispensing it, precisely because  
their unspoken assumptions have gone uninterrogated for so long.

Thus, every February I encounter people who are apoplectic at the  
thought of Black History Month, and who insist with no sense of irony  
or misgiving that there should be no such thing, since, after all,  
there is no White History Month--a position to which they can only  
adhere because they have taken for granted that "American history" as  
told to them previously was comprehensive and accurate, as opposed to  
being largely the particular history of the dominant group.

In other words, the normalcy of the white narrative, which has  
rendered every month since they popped out of their momma's wombs  
White History Month, escapes them, and makes the efforts of  
multiculturalists seem to be the unique break with an otherwise  
neutral color-blindness.

Sorta' like those who e-mail me on a semi-regular basis to insist, as  
if they have just stumbled upon a truth of unparalleled profundity,  
that there should be an Ivory Magazine to balance out Ebony, or that  
we need a White Entertainment Television network to balance out BET,  
or a NAAWP to balance out the NAACP.

Again, these dear souls ignore what is obvious to virtually all  
persons of color but which remains unseen by those whose reality gets  
to be viewed as the norm: namely, that there are already two Ivory  
Magazines--Vogue and Cosmopolitan; that there are several WETs, which  
just so happen to go by the names of CBS, NBC and ABC; and that the  
Fortune 500, U.S. Congress and Fraternal Orders of Police are all  
doing a pretty good job holding it down for us white folks on the  
organizational front. Just because the norm is not racially-named,  
doesn't mean it isn't racialized.

Likewise the ongoing backlash against affirmative action, by those  
who seem to believe that opportunity would truly be equal in the  
absence of these presumably unjust efforts to ensure access to jobs  
and higher education for persons of color.

We are to believe that before affirmative action things were fine,  
and that were such efforts abolished now, things would return to this  
utopic state of affairs: to hell with the persistent evidence that  
people of color continue to face discrimination in employment,  
housing, education and all other institutional settings in the U.S.

So if the University of Michigan gives applicants of color twenty  
points on a 150-point admission scale, so as to promote racial  
diversity and balance out the disadvantages to which such students  
are often subjected in their K-12 schooling experience, that is seen  
as unfair racial preference.

But when the same school gives out 16 points to kids from the lily- 
white Upper Peninsula, or four points for children of overwhelmingly  
white alumni, or ten points for students who went to the state's  
"top" schools (who will be disproportionately white), or 8 points for  
those who took a full slate of Advanced Placement classes in high  
schools (which classes are far less available in schools serving  
students of color), this is seen as perfectly fair, and not at all  
racially preferential.

What's more, the whites who received all those bonus points due to  
their racial and class position will not be thought of by anyone as  
having received unearned advantages, in spite of the almost entirely  
ascriptive nature of the categories into which they fell that  
qualified them for such bonuses. No matter their "qualifications," it  
will be taken for granted that any white student at a college or  
University belongs there.

This is why Jennifer Gratz, the lead plaintiff in the successful  
"reverse discrimination" suit against Michigan's undergraduate  
affirmative action policy, found it a supreme injustice that a few  
dozen black, Latino and American Indian students were admitted ahead  
of her, despite having lower SATs and grades; but she thought nothing  
of the fact that more than 1400 other white students also were  
admitted ahead of her and her co-plaintiffs, despite having lower  
scores and grades.

"Lesser qualified" whites are acceptable, you see, while "lesser  
qualified" people of color must be eliminated from their unearned  
perches of opportunity. This is the kind of racist logic that people  
like Gratz, who now heads up the state's anti-affirmative action  
initiative with the financial backing of Ward Connerly, find acceptable.

This kind of logic also explains the effort of whites at Roger  
Williams University to start a "white scholarship fund," on the  
pretense that scholarships for students of color are unfair and place  
whites at a disadvantage.

This, despite the unmentioned fact that about 93 percent of all  
college scholarship money goes to whites; despite the fact that  
students of color at elite and expensive colleges come from families  
with about half the average income of whites; despite the fact that  
there are scholarships for pretty much every kind of student under  
the sun, including children of Tupperware dealers, kids whose parents  
raise horses, kids who are left-handed, kids whose families descend  
from the founding fathers: you name it, and there's money available  
for it.

While there are plenty of whites unable to afford college, the fault  
for this unhappy reality lies not with minority scholarships, but  
rather with the decisions of almost exclusively white University  
elites to raise the price of higher education into the stratosphere,  
to the detriment of most everyone.

But to place blame where it really belongs, on rich white people,  
would be illogical. After all, we take it for granted that one day we  
too might be wealthy, and we wouldn't want others to question our  
decisions and prerogatives come that day either.

Better to blame the dark-skinned for our hardship, since we can take  
it for granted that hey're powerless to do anything about it.

Whites, as it turns out, take most everything for granted in this  
country; which makes perfect sense, because dominant groups usually  
have that privilege.

We take for granted that we won't be racially profiled even when  
members of our group engage in criminality at a disproportionate  
rate, whether the crime is corporate fraud, serial killing, child  
molestation, abortion clinic bombings or drunk driving. And indeed we  
won't be.

We take it for granted that our terrorism won't result in whites as a  
group being viewed with generalized suspicion. So Tim McVeigh  
represents only Tim McVeigh, while Mohammed Atta gets to serve as a  
proxy for every other person who either has his name or follows a  
prophet of that name.

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