Can white privilege be real if white poverty exists?

The inherent power that comes with always being in the majority

I met this little boy a couple of summers ago in a small village in Ghana.

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How to have a sensible discussion about white privilege. I thought about the topic after reading a piece by Cathy Young for Arc Digital.

That piece is here: The problem with “white privilege” discourse.

This isn’t a direct response to that piece or pointing out where I agree or disagree, just an attempt to detail how I’ve been discussing this issue for several years, long before 2014, the year Young cites as the time the term became more popular or mainstream.

My muddled thoughts on white privilege:

White privilege is to academicians what God’s grace is to Christians. Each is an attempt to describe something unearned that is given freely and can’t be relinquished even if you wanted to. Each is a way to describe “favor.” I’m not talking about the prosperity gospel version of grace, but the version of Christianity that tries to explain blessings of all sorts, big and small, including say, surviving a cancer scare. It is a blessing to survive cancer, not a right, not a guarantee. Accepting the reality of God’s grace is simply recognizing that we only have so much control over our lives. It asserts that we are neither the sole captain of our fate nor the lone master of our soul - that we are more than just a collection of the decisions we make.

Denying that there is white privilege in the U.S. is kind of like denying that there is a height privilege in the NBA just because not every 7-footer becomes a Hall of Famer and sometimes a Spud Webb wins the dunk contest. The game of basketball was built to favor tall men, not short ones, just as the U.S. was built to favor white people, not black people or Native Americans. That doesn’t mean short (or shorter) men can’t find a way to dominate in the NBA or black people or Native Americans can’t thrive in the U.S. It just means they have a unique set of obstacles to navigate.

The term white privilege, when considered seriously and soberly, tries to explain that secular reality the way God’s grace explains a faith-based one, particularly in a nation which is majority white and whose foundations were largely built by white wealthy men often in the service of white wealthy men. Having said that, it’s important to understand that when it comes to race, we should first ask ourselves if we are talking about the micro or macro. White privilege is a great term when trying to describe the macro, structures, but is less effective (though still somewhat accurate) when it comes to micro realities. It’s why the seemingly contradictory can be true nonetheless, that white privilege can be real even if white poverty is also.

The discourse runs into problems when we reduce such a complex concept into a bumper sticker slogan. White privilege, properly understood, can help explain why black boys in wealthy or well-off black families are more likely to be adversely affected by the criminal justice system than boys in poor white families, for instance.

Or this from a 2016 story in the New York Times:

In fact, a New York Times analysis of 2014 census figures shows that income alone cannot explain, nor would it likely end, the segregation that has defined American cities and suburbs for generations.

The choices that black families make today are inevitably constrained by a legacy of racism that prevented their ancestors from buying quality housing and then passing down wealth that might have allowed today’s generation to move into more stable communities. And even when black households try to cross color boundaries, they are not always met with open arms: Studies have shown that white people prefer to live in communities where there are fewer black people, regardless of their income.

Structural problems are real. That’s just one of many examples. Not all of them are caused by racism, but it makes little sense to believe that a bulk of the racial disparities between blacks and whites in this country aren’t heavily influenced by race.

But when we begin to thrust “check your privilege!” in a white person’s face because they disagree with us on an issue concerning race or because their lives might have been easier than ours, that’s where the discussion goes off the rails. That’s why it’s important to recognize when we are misusing a term to explain micro realities when it is better suited to help us understand structural ones.

Take the young boy in the photo above. He lives in a village where cocoa farmers live in literal huts in the middle of large fields. He attends a school, where we met him, where the roof is barely a roof, where there are no windows and they are lucky to get books to share, let alone computers. That’s his reality - his micro reality - though I’ve never forgotten him because of his smile. It would be foolish to use his reality to deny broader social structures, including the ones we witnessed while in Ghana which showed that that boy was far from alone, but also that there are many Ghanaians who live in homes they own, who work in hotels the likes of which would fit well in the middle of Manhattan or downtown Chicago, who are doctors and lawyers and hospital administrators. All of those things are true at once. That boy is Ghanaian but his story isn’t the only true Ghanaian story. There are many and varied true Ghanaian stories. That’s true for every people, for every group. That truth is not contradicting.

It’s just truth.

The same can be said of white people in America. Any time the discussion turns to white privilege, the specter of poor white people is conjured up as if to suggest that the two can’t co-exist. But that’s a blinkered way of looking at race, which is a social constructed that is muddled and often seemingly-contradictory. Why would it be any different for white people, poor or otherwise?

For those who don’t know me well. I was born and raised in South Carolina. I know black poverty as well as white poverty. The few white students who stayed in our mostly-black schools - most white parents put their kids in a different, majority-white school as soon as they could - were as poor as we were. They wore oil-stained T-shirts to the IGA to get a hot lunch during the summer the way we wore oil-stained T-shirts to the IGA to get a hot lunch. I’ve known white kids growing up with drug-addicted mothers who couldn’t take of them while their fathers would pimp their mothers out. As a guardian ad litem, I’ve had to make the painful decision to recommend that in some of those cases the kids would be better off in a foster home. I’ve been there at Christmastime when grown white men and black men sobbed uncontrollably during a labor stoppage at a steel plant in Georgetown, S.C. No one has to teach me that there are indeed struggling white people, something I’ve known long before researchers coined the term “deaths of despair.”

White privilege isn’t an assertion that all white people here have it worse than all black people, isn’t an assertation that all white people have more resources than all black people. That would be asking a term to be precise in a way no term can, particularly one as malleable as race. And neither is white privilege simply about economic status or having the right not to be disproportionately killed or brutalized by police.

It is a privilege to live in a country in which just about everywhere you show up, you will be in the racial majority. It is a privilege to live in a place where many of your basic ideas and ideals and cultural norms are so ingrained they are considered not just the default but the “right way” to live and think and study and be excellent and worship God and wear your hair and clothes. Think about that luxury. For black people, showing up at a place and finding out you are in the minority in that setting - in school, at the bank, in upper-level academic classes, at the grocery store, at the playground or park - is so commonplace it can be a bit jarring when you find yourself in the majority. That’s what happened to me in Ghana. It was weird, but exciting, to see so many black faces everywhere. Though I grew up in a segregated school system, that was the first time in my life I had truly experienced such a thing. I could feel my blood pressure lower by the day. I didn’t have to think about race in the way I’ve had to think about it every day growing up and living in the Carolinas.

Yes, it is a privilege to be white in this country for that reason alone, and white people get to experience that almost all the time. That’s not a small thing, but because it is such the norm many white people don’t even recognize it as a privilege. It’s certainly not a right. And yet if you argued for an increased level of immigration that would speed up the browning of the United States, it would offend or scare the hell out of a lot of white people - because even though it is not a right to be in the majority, it is such an ingrained privilege that it feels like a right, something so sacrosanct that to question it is to offend.

Being in the majority means you don’t have to fight to have voices like yours heard, faces like yours shown, principles and ideas you hold dear used as guiding lights for the country into which you were born or accepted into. In fact, it is so powerful that if there is just a small shift away from your predominance, it comes to feel like a threat to who you are personally, to what you think is “right,” to “your” country. That’s why the Democratic Party can talk about things the white working-class should supposedly approve of until it’s blue in the face with no major shift in how that part of the electorate votes: higher wages, better-more comprehensive health care, stronger safety net, more affordable housing and education, etc.

White privilege isn’t just about an economic and financial reality. It is about, yes, an identity that has been forged over the past two and a half centuries on this soil. It’s why men like Donald Trump will look attractive to many white people because even if he does nothing of significant about their economic plights, they know men like Trump will still help them maintain white privilege, which can’t be summed up in charts about which racial groups have the highest median income. It’s true that the white-working class and the black working class have a lot in common economically, as well as the burden they bear when it comes to which groups are most likely to send troops off to war or be killed by guns at home. But time and again we’ve seen politicians be able to entice the white-working class away from policies that might help both groups by tapping into the white-working class grip on white privilege. Until that connection is broken, we are headed for troubled waters as this country continues to grow more racially diverse.

On one level, it makes sense that those in the majority would fear a change that threatens their majority status. That isn’t necessarily about racism. Change, no matter how good or necessary, comes with stress. That’s something I’ve learned more about as a dude who speaks with a severe stutter than a black man who grew up in the Deep South. There is nothing wrong with the way I speak, and yet when new people hear me speak for the first time, most are taken aback, if only for a few seconds. They aren’t mocking me or thinking less of me; they are simply being human beings encountering something out of the norm. After the initial shock, most people calm down and just try to listen to me through my stutter. For a long time, I judged that initial reaction harshly, thinking they were trying to belittle me. I was wrong.

Recognizing that distinction has helped my own mental health and taught me about the need but real struggle to accept others where they are. And yet I can still say that most of you reading these words likely have a fluency privilege you don’t recognize, because the world has been crafted for people who speak like you, not like me. That doesn’t mean I think you’ve done something wrong because you have such a privilege, because you haven’t. But I know that if people with that fluency privilege don’t use some of it to make space for people who speak like me, our journey through life will be unnecessarily hard.

Still, we have to allow people space to mourn the passing of what they’ve long known, even if it is being replaced by something better. Yes, that means in some cases avoiding harshly judging white people clinging to white privilege even if they don’t know that’s what they are doing. Is that fair? Probably not, given our racial history and present. But is it necessary? I say yes. The problem is the use of that fear by politicians and others to gin up resentment in an effort to gain or regain power. That’s what Trump did. That’s what many are doing in Trump’s wake.

That doesn’t mean that black and brown people (however you define such terms) must stand back and take whatever comes our way. We shouldn’t. We mustn’t. We must resist efforts by anyone to galvanize that white fear in a way that will further root in inequality and other problems. We must speak freely and boldly and not looking the other way in the face of white fragility, the kind that is driving a moral panic about critical race theory. That means respecting and understanding that fear but not giving into it, not allowing it to become the priority.

White privilege is real even though there is white poverty. And white angst and hardship are no excuse for bringing to power men like Trump. We should say that clearly and loudly and repeatedly.

I’ll end it this way. We are learning a lot more about how “toxic stress” affects a child’s development, how it can literally rewire a child’s brain. On the macro level, the evidence for that truth is overwhelming and has been building for the past quarter of a century. But on the micro level, no top “toxic stress” researcher can say with any level of certainty if the behavior of a particular kid is evidence of the effects of toxic stress. I know because I’ve have the pleasure of interviewing and working with a few of them, including at Harvard University.

Consider that for a second. Not even something as precise as neuroscience can tell us if that individual young black boy “acting up” in his fifth grade class is doing so because of toxic stress or something else, yet many of us are attempting to use something as nebulous as race - a social construct - to answer many if not most of the questions we have about individuals and groups.

Race is imprecise. White privilege is imprecise. That doesn’t mean they aren’t useful ways to better understand our world. But we must commit to using them wisely.