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As the nation weeps for the victims of the horrific bombing in Boston yesterday, one searches for lessons amid the carnage, and finds few. That violence is unacceptable stands out as one, sure. That hatred for humanity, for life, or whatever else might have animated the bomber or bombers is never the source of constructive human action seems like a reasonably close second.

But I dare say there is more; a much less obvious and far more uncomfortable lesson, which many are loathe to learn, but which an event such as this makes readily apparent, and which we must acknowledge, no matter how painful.

It is a lesson about race, about whiteness, and specifically, about white privilege.

I know you dont want to hear it. But I dont much care. So here goes.

White privilege is knowing that even if the Boston Marathon bomber turns out to be white, his or her identity will not result in white folks generally being singled out for suspicion by law enforcement, or the TSA, or the FBI.

White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for whites to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening, or threatened with deportation.

White privilege is knowing that if the bomber turns out to be white, he or she will be viewed as an exception to an otherwise non-white rule, an aberration, an anomaly, and that he or she will be able to join the ranks of a pantheon of white people who have engaged in (or have plotted) politically motivated violence meant to terrorize and specifically to kill but whose actions have resulted in the assumption of absolutely nothing about white people generally, or white Christians in particular.

Among these: Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols and Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph and Joe Stack and George Metesky and Byron De La Beckwith and Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton and Herman Frank Cash and Robert Chambliss andJames von Brunn and Lawrence Michael Lombardi and Robert Mathews and David Lane and Chevie Kehoe and Michael F. Griffin and Paul Hill and John Salvi and Justin Carl Moose and Bruce and Joshua Turnidge and James Kopp and Luke Helder and James David Adkisson and Scott Roeder and Shelley Shannon and Dennis Mahon and Wade Michael Page and Jeffery Harbin and Byron Williams and Charles Ray Polk and Willie Ray Lampley and Cecilia Lampley and John Dare Baird and Joseph Martin Bailie and Ray Hamblin and Robert Edward Starr III and William James McCranie Jr. and John Pitner and Charles Barbee and Robert Berry and Jay Merrell and Brendon Blasz and Carl Jay Waskom Jr. and Shawn and Catherine Adams and Edward Taylor Jr. and Todd Vanbiber and William Robert Goehler and James Cleaver and Jack Dowell and Bradley Playford Glover and Ken Carter and Randy Graham and Bradford Metcalf and Chris Scott Gilliam and Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder and Buford Furrow and Benjamin Smith and Donald Rudolph and Kevin Ray Patterson and Charles Dennis Kiles and Donald Beauregard and Troy Diver and Mark Wayne McCool and Leo Felton and Erica Chase and Clayton Lee Wagner and Michael Edward Smith and David Burgert and Robert Barefoot Jr. and Sean Gillespie and Ivan Duane Braden and Kevin Harpham and William Krar and Judith Bruey and Edward Feltus and Raymond Kirk Dillard and Adam Lynn Cunningham and Bonnell Hughes and Randall Garrett Cole and James Ray McElroy and Michael Gorbey and Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman and Frederick Thomas and Paul Ross Evans and Matt Goldsby and Jimmy Simmons and Kathy Simmons and Kaye Wiggins and Patricia Hughes and Jeremy Dunahoe and David McMenemy and Bobby Joe Rogers and Francis Grady and Cody Seth Crawford and Ralph Lang and Demetrius Van Crocker and Floyd Raymond Looker and Derek Mathew Shrout and Randolph Linn.

Ya know, just to name a few.

And white privilege is being able to know nothing about the crimes committed by most of the terrorists listed above indeed, never to have so much as heard most of their names let alone to make assumptions about the role that their racial or ethnic identity may have played in their crimes.

White privilege is knowing that if the Boston bomber turns out to be white, we who are whitewill not be asked to denounce him or her, so as to prove our own loyalties to the common national good. It is knowing that the next time a cop sees one of us standing on the sidewalk cheering on runners in a marathon, that cop will say exactly nothing to us as a result.

White privilege is knowing that if you are a white student from Nebraska as opposed to, say, a student from Saudi Arabia that no one, and I mean no one would think it important to detain and question you in the wake of a bombing such as the one at the Boston Marathon.

And white privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her dont get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we wont bomb Belfast. And if hes an Italian American Catholic we wont bomb the Vatican.

In short, white privilege is the thing that allows you (if youre white) and me to view tragic events like this as merely horrific, and from the perspective of pure and innocent victims, rather than having to wonder, and to look over ones shoulder, and to ask even if only in hushed tones, whether those we pass on the street might think that somehow we were involved.

It is the source of our unearned innocence and the cause of others unjustified oppression.

That is all. And it matters.

See the article here:
Tim Wise Terrorism and Privilege: Understanding the ...

Tim Wise, the White anti-racist lecturer, found himself mired in controversy over confrontational remarks he made on his Facebook page. While Wise recent response to what he perceived to be personal attacks over his Facebook was the culminating point, the controversy started as far back as July when Wise received criticism for speaking at a Teach for America conference and he responded in an aggressive manner.

Here is Wise summarizing the conflict on W. Kamau Bells show, Totally Biased. I disagree with some of his rhetoric; for example, Whiteness is not like being tall. However, I think that the interview humanizes a person that is clearly in a place of pain.

Personally, Ive always thought that Tim Wise work was designed for White people. I think its important for White people to work with White people on confronting systemic White supremacy and its influence on them as white people. Tim Wise can have that struggle, and other White people should join him.

Im not interested in talking to White people about race and racism for the rest of my life. Besides, Tim Wise has access to White spaces that I dont and White people are more likely to believe him than me; thats how a White supremacist power structure works. Instead of fighting for Tim Wise access, I would much rather work to destroy systemic White supremacy.

I dont find it meaningful to criticize Tim Wise the person, and judge whether hes living up to some anti-racist bona fides. Instead, I choose to focus on the paradigm of White privilege upon which his work is based, and its conceptual and practical limitations. Although the personal is political, not all politics is personal; we have to attack systems. To paraphrase the urban poet and philosopher Meek Mill: there are levels to this shit.

There are power structures that shape individuals lived experiences. Those structures provide and withhold resources to people based on factors like class, disability status, gender, and race. Its not a benefit to receive resources from an unjust order because ultimately, injustice is cannibalistic. Slavery binds the slave, but destroys the master. So, the point then becomes not to assimilate the underprivileged, but to instead eradicate the power structures that create the privileges in the first place.

The conventional wisdom on privilege often says that its benefits are unearned. However, this belief ignores the reality and history that privilege isearned and maintained through violence. Systemic advantages are allocated and secured as a class, and simply because an individual hasnt personally committed the acts, it does not render their class dominance unearned.

The history and modern reality of violence is why Tim Wise comparison between whiteness and tallness fails. White supremacy is not some natural evolution, nor did it occur by happenstance. White folks *murdered* people for this thing that we often call White privilege; it was bought and paid for by blood and terror. White supremacy is not some benign invisible knapsack. The same interplay between violence and advantage is true of any systemic hierarchy (class, gender, disability, etc). Being tall, irrespective of its advantages, does not follow that pattern of violence.

Unfortunately, I think our use of the term privilege is no longer a productive way for us to gain a thorough understanding of systemic injustice, nor is it helping us to develop collective strategies to dismantle those systems. Basically, I never want to hear the word privilege again because the term is so thoroughly misused at this point that it does more harm than good.

Andrea Smith, in the essay The Problem with Privilege, outlines the pitfalls of misapplied privilege theory.

Those who had little privilege did not have to confess and were in the position to be the judge of those who did have privilege. Consequently, people aspired to be oppressed. Inevitably, those with more privilege would develop new heretofore unknown forms of oppression from which they suffered Consequently, the goal became not to actually end oppression but to be as oppressed as possible. These rituals often substituted confession for political movement-building. Andrea Smith, The Problem with Privilege

Dr. Tommy Curry says it more bluntly,Its not genius to say that in an oppressive society there are benefits to being in the superior class instead of the inferior one. Thats true in any hierarchy, thats not an aha moment.

Conceptually, privilege is best used when narrowly focused on explaining how structures generally shape experiences. However, when we overly personalize the problem, then privilege becomes a tit-for-tat exercise in blame, shame, and guilt. In its worst manifestations, this dynamic becomes Oppression Olympics and people tally perceived life advantages and identities in order to invalidate one another. At best, we treat structural injustice as a personal problem, and moralizing exercises like privilege confessions inadequately address the nexus between systemic power and individual behavior.

The undoing of privilege occurs not by individuals confessing their privileges or trying to think themselves into a new subject position, but through the creation of collective structures that dismantle the systems that enable these privileges. The activist genealogies that produced this response to racism and settler colonialism were not initially focused on racism as a problem of individual prejudice. Rather, the purpose was for individuals to recognize how they were shaped by structural forms of oppression. Andrea Smith, The Problem with Privilege

However, the problem with White privilege isnt simply that Tim Wise, a white man, can build a career off of Black struggles. As Ive already said, White people need to talk to White people about the historical and social construction of their racial identities and power, and the foundation for that conversation often comes from past Black theory and political projects. The problem for me is that privilege work has become a cottage industry of self-help moralizing that in no way attacks the systemic ills that create the personal injustices in the first place.

A substantive critique of privilege requires us to get beyond identity politics. Its not about good people and bad people; its a bad system. Furthermore,White people arent the only ones that participate in the White privilege industry, although not everyone equally benefits/profits (see: Tim Wise).Dr. Tommy Curry takes elite Black academics to task for their role in profiting from the White privilege industry while offering no challenge to White supremacy.

These conversations about White privilege are not conversations about race, and certainly not about racism; its a business where Blacks market themselves as racial therapists for White people The White privilege discourse became a bourgeois distraction. Its a tool that we use to morally condemn whites for not supporting the political goals of elite black academics that take the vantages of white notions of virtue and reformism and persuade departments, journals, and presses into making concessions for the benefit of a select species of Black intellectuals in the Ivory Tower, without seeing that the white racial vantages that these Black intellectuals claim theyre really interested in need to be dissolved, need to be attacked all the way to the very bottom of American society. Dr. Tommy Curry, Radio Interview

The truth is that a lot of people, marginalized groups included, simply want more access to existing systems of power. They dont want to challenge and push beyond these systems; they just want to participate. So if we continue to play identity politics and persist with a personal privilege view of power, then we will lose the struggle. Barack Obama is president, yet White supremacy marches on, and often with his help (record deportations, expanded a drone war based on profiling, fought on behalf of US corporations to repeal a Haitian law that raised the minimum wage).

Adolph Reed, writing in 1996, predicted the quagmire of identity politics in the Age of Obama.

In Chicago, for instance, weve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics. Adolph Reed Jr., Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene

Although it has always been the case, Obamas election and subsequent presidency has made it starkly clear that its not just White people that can perpetuate White supremacy. Systems of oppression condition all members of society to accept systemic injustice, and there are (unequal) incentives for both marginalized and dominant groups to perpetuate these structures. Our approaches to injustice must reflect this reality.

This isnt a nave plea for unity, nor am I saying that talking about identities/experiences is inherently divisive. Many of these privilege discussions use empathy to build personal and collective character, and there certainly should be space for us to work together to improve/heal ourselves and one another. People will always make mistakes and our spaces have to be flexible enough to allow for reconciliation. Though we dont have to work with persistently abusive people who refuse to redirect their behavior, theres a difference between establishing boundaries and embracing puritanism. Privilege has become an exercise in personal puritanism.

Fighting systemic marginalization and exploitation requires more than good character, and we cannot fetishize personal morals over collective action. Privilege is not the answer and we must do better.

Read more from the original source:
Tim Wise & The Failure of Privilege Discourse ...

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