RE: My privilege as a straight, white, cisgender, middle class thin male
December 30, 2014 at 11:37 am
I think the point of discussing priviledge is to help people empathize with those who have fewer or different privilges. It shouldn't be a contest of what individual has the most or least privileges.
I was raised in grinding poverty for a good part of my youth, and in regular poverty for most of the rest of it. So being white didn't give me a head start on economic advantages. But I'm now a front-line manager in large corporation, so I have achieved middle-classdom without those advantages. No help with college, no down payment on a home, none of that sort of thing that's common among the middle class. But I'm a white man in South Carolina. Though I'm aware of no overt racism in my favor, I look around my division and see no black men in management. Plenty of women, and black women aren't poorly represented, but no black men in a county that's around 40% black. I suspect I may have wound up economically benefitting from being white after all, in the long run.
Being aware of that helps me understand the frustration a black man might feel at the difficulty, say, of breaking into mangement. Knowing that, unlike me, a black man can't take for granted that he won't be shot by a cop if he reaches into my car for the ID just requested, helps me be aware of another privilege I have. Knowing I'm less likely to be followed around a store by security or considered armed and dangerous if I pick up a BB gun at Wal Mart also helps me be aware of the privilege I have.
And THAT awareness helps me understand how people could become so fed up with being treated as inferior and dangerous because of something they have no control over that they become irrational and riot over something minor because it was the fucking last straw. Which helps me not be one of those guys who are like 'Why do they bust up their own neighborhoods? Why can't they be sensible like us white people'.
Because I've been that guy. It took a lot of steps to be a different guy.
I was raised in grinding poverty for a good part of my youth, and in regular poverty for most of the rest of it. So being white didn't give me a head start on economic advantages. But I'm now a front-line manager in large corporation, so I have achieved middle-classdom without those advantages. No help with college, no down payment on a home, none of that sort of thing that's common among the middle class. But I'm a white man in South Carolina. Though I'm aware of no overt racism in my favor, I look around my division and see no black men in management. Plenty of women, and black women aren't poorly represented, but no black men in a county that's around 40% black. I suspect I may have wound up economically benefitting from being white after all, in the long run.
Being aware of that helps me understand the frustration a black man might feel at the difficulty, say, of breaking into mangement. Knowing that, unlike me, a black man can't take for granted that he won't be shot by a cop if he reaches into my car for the ID just requested, helps me be aware of another privilege I have. Knowing I'm less likely to be followed around a store by security or considered armed and dangerous if I pick up a BB gun at Wal Mart also helps me be aware of the privilege I have.
And THAT awareness helps me understand how people could become so fed up with being treated as inferior and dangerous because of something they have no control over that they become irrational and riot over something minor because it was the fucking last straw. Which helps me not be one of those guys who are like 'Why do they bust up their own neighborhoods? Why can't they be sensible like us white people'.
Because I've been that guy. It took a lot of steps to be a different guy.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.
