Race and Privelge

So, the Prof just delivered a righteous rant about how race issues -- and especially privilege -- are popularly presented.

Two points I took home critical of the concept of privilege are that, a) it would appear to be immutable. If one is born into having a certain socially constructed advantage  (for example, I'm taller than average), then that personal could never overcome the limited perspective that privilege brings and will necessarily be insensitive to the travails of short people. Therefore, be ashamed (that is snark). Furthermore, b) it feeds into a culture of victimhood, where these stations in life are forced on us and remove us from responsibility for how things are or for doing anything constructive to change it. Privilege is not a useful framing for problems of race.

I agree mostly.

Taken to the extreme, however, if one is removed from awareness of privilege, one could make the fundamental attribution error in the form of thinking that any success they enjoy in life is solely a function of their own superior choices and actions -- their all-around better character.  Whereas other people (who just happen to have more integumentary melatonin) have made poor choices and wallow in a dysfunctional culture, thus exacerbating the racial divide.

You can't say it's all about character and nothing about circumstance and more than you can say the reverse. Moderation in all things.

As for my own racial experience as a tall white man, I can tell you it's painful for me to look at the world the way it stands. I don't experience nearly the level of pain as those "on the other side," but it hurts me. My best friend in early grades was black. We were inseparable, and felt so much alike that the differences between us were not even a topic. I grew up in lower-middle-class suburbs that were relatively well integrated. We were all from working families in the relatively prosperous 70's. Things began to change.

In the early to mid-80's I went to a white liberal hippy public college (UCSC) via grants and good financial aid. It was all about awareness -- of ways that women, minorities, Native Americans, the Earth, LGBT folks (no so much the latter, because it was the era of AIDS and people were scared of gay people). Most of the black people were in Oakland, and the whites were in Palo Alto. I remember a black guy telling me how weird he felt entering a friends house via the side gate because someone in the neighborhood might call the cops because of his skin.

As much as I like to think that I am the most egalitarian guy in the world, I'm nervous in Spring Valley, because black people there don't know that about me. Someone looking at me might be cognizant of what people who look like me have done -- and continue to do -- to people who look like him or her. They may treat me with suspicion, because they don't know how I feel about people who look like them. It has nothing to do with us, but people who look like us.

That is painful and it sucks. I work my day job with a lot of differently colored, gendered and self-identified people. We get along great, because we know each other as people through communication.

One more unrelated point then I'll leave this. I am quite certain that racism continues to survive and stop us from communicating with each other on deeper levels because keeping it this way serves powerful interests. Because if we understood that the things we have in common far outweigh our differences, we would stand together and take back some of that power and wealth that has been taken from us. Divided we fall.

 I could go on. . .