One of the frustrating things about living in Iowa City – a cozy, liberal-for-the-Midwest sort of town – is that I’ll make friends with intelligent people, considerate people, well-spoken, literate people, who nevertheless will pull out phrases like “I don’t believe in white privilege” when I have discussions with them.
To them, I dedicate this. (Originally posted on my own blog, http://magistrate.dreamwidth.org/.)
Hey, college- and grad-school-age friends of mine, which, to be honest, could cover everyone I know who’s reading this blog. (Except, perhaps, for those of you who have already obtained your graduate degrees, but one never knows. You might be looking for more.) I want to pose a simple exercise to you:
Let’s say that you were scoping out colleges to apply to. Could be for an undergraduate degree, could be for a writing workshop, a Masters program, a PhD program, a few one-off classes in a summer session, whatever. You’re shopping around, you’re thinking of campus visits, you’re calling up admissions offices and asking for pamphlets. It’s a good time. Here’s the exercise.
I want you to take out a piece of paper, or boot up a copy of TextEdit or NotePad, of just toss some thoughts around in the back of your mind, and answer this: what are the things you look at in deciding where to go?
How about things like cost? Availability of scholarships and student aid is a big thing, availability of student jobs. In-state vs. out-of-state tuition is a deciding factor for a lot of people, I know.
Location? Will it be close enough to visit family? Will it be close enough that they’ll expect you home every weekend?
The programs, obviously, should be a major factor. What’s the learning environment like? Do they have an engaged faculty in the stuff you want to learn? A complete department, or a few professors teaching classes on it here and there? How does one school’s program stack up against the others’?
Hmm. The campus itself should be a concern. Is it walkable? Bikeable? Does it feel like you’re going to be living in a bustling downtown, or a manicured garden?
And the city. Are the local politics conservative or liberal? Is it a metropolis or a hamlet? Is there an arts scene? Shopping? Public transportation?
All of the above sounds fairly reasonable, right?
What else do you think about?
Take some time.
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How’s this: when you’re looking through schools and programs, do you stop to think, If I go down here, am I going to be in danger because of the color of my skin? Do you wonder if you’ll have to worry about getting profiled or pulled over if you drive somewhere? Do you think, if I get into something and the cops are called, are they going to be biased against me?
Do you wonder if you’re going to have to fight a constant battle against people’s preconceptions of you – your intelligence, your citizenship, your economic status, your language skills?
Do you wonder if you’ll be othered or tokenized, if your race will become a big issue because diversity on campus is low, or if you’ll face an expectation to associate with people of your own race or be considered a race traitor? Do you worry that you’ll become someone’s “black friend” or “Latino friend” or “Asian friend” or any other “attribute friend”?
Do you wonder what percentage of your time is going to be spent educating others about your race, your racial history, or the nation of your perceived origin? Do you wonder which of your actions will be taken as reflecting your race as a whole? Do you wonder if people will expect certain things from you, culturally, interest-wise, background-wise, because of your race?
Do you worry that you’ll be forced to mis-represent your race – say, as “black” when you are in fact biracial – when filling out official forms, because no accurate category exists for you?
Do you wonder if exchange programs have provisions for your safety, if you were to go out of the country? If, say, you wanted to study in Moscow, where race crimes sextupled in early 2008, would the program have people who would know how best to protect you? Or would you be allowed to go?
Are these concerns for you?
If these thoughts haven’t crossed your mind when looking at those programs, if you’ve never had (at the bare minimum) a list of options in your life cut apart by these concerns, then you experience a kind of privilege I have never had. And if you think I’m blowing this out of proportion, that I’m being overcautious in worrying about these things, let me tell you a few stories.
My father got into a minor car accident once, and when the police arrived on the scene, they determined that he was at fault. This was either a rear-ending or a sideswiping of his car, mind you. He decided to contest the matter and took it to court; on walking in, his first day, he discovered that the court had assigned him a Spanish translator, despite the fact that he didn’t speak Spanish (our surname is recognizable as a Yoruba – that is, Nigerian – name, and resembles a Spanish/Latino surname not at all), and despite the fact that he was a professor of English at the University of Nebraska.
Once, when I was riding in a friend’s car, she was pulled over for something like a broken taillight. At one point she got out of the car to talk to the officer who had pulled her over, and when she got back in, she told me that the officer had asked her if I spoke English. This happened in Iowa City, which is for the most part a very friendly, liberal town. Bear in mind that when this happened, I was studying at the University – an institution of about 30,000 students in a town of about 67,000 altogether. Bear also in mind that I was born and raised in Nebraska, and English is in fact the only language I fluently speak.
I had a good friend in high school, a fellow member of the Speech & Debate team, who mentioned one day after 9/11 that he’d been accosted in a store by a man who had told him, “We don’t want your kind here.” He was an Indian Hindu, which didn’t seem to matter; he’d been othered because he was nonwhite, lumped into a group he had no relation to, and harassed. In his case it was only verbal, but that’s not always true.
Racism is not over, folks. It’s become a bit quieter, but it’s still virulent. The three stories above all happened to me and people I personally knew, in Lincoln and Iowa City, which are known for being friendly places. That’s not even scratching the surface of places where it does get loud, where it does get violent, where it’s systematized, where it’s routine.
Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as white privilege. And male privilege, and cisgender privilege, and able-bodied privilege, and heterosexual privilege, and educational privilege, and economic privilege, and national privilege, and thin privilege, and a hell of a lot of other kinds. And if you never have to think about them, that probably means you have them. And you can say that you never have to think about them. But don’t you dare try to tell me they don’t exist.
A friend of mine in Iowa City, a man of Middle Eastern ancestry, but born and raised in the US, once told me about an interaction he had with several patients:
Patient: You speak English very well.
Friend: …Thank you…
Answer he wanted to give: “Yes, New York City public schools really aren’t as bad as you might think.”
The sad thing is I’m pretty sure that the patients in question were trying to be friendly. Maybe also trying to subtly probe for more information about his origin, but really not meaning to be racist or to make him uncomfortable.
When I’m feeling more articulate, I’ll have more to say than just “thank you for this.”
Why not stop being friends with such persons when they reveal their horrid opinion?
I’ve never had to think about thoes things. I’m truely sorry that you have. I wish racism was dead, but I know it is not. Hence some white reporters comments about President Obama’s stat of the union address “I forgot he was black for an hour” Sometimes I am ashamed of my skin color. Thank you for your honesty, it was heartfelt and brillantly put. I hope we can change this. By changing ourselves and our mindsets.
A lot of good points in this. However:
If I go down here, am I going to be in danger because of the color of my skin?
Any white person who doesn’t think this when going into a strange city is downright naive. You don’t think that there are areas near schools where a white person won’t have to think this? Hell, areas AT the schools?
our surname is recognizable as a Yoruba – that is, Nigerian – name,
Recognizable to who? I don’t care how diverse your campus is – how many people do you think could pick out someone’s name as being Nigerian, never mind a Yourba name?
As a person born in Iowa and with relatives there and who went to school in Nebraska, if you stopped being friends with such persons when they reveal their horrid opinion, you’d have almost no friends. When the majority around you says things like this, you’d have to literally never talk to anyone to avoid it. That really isn’t an option.
But I think that is exactly the point. It is a privilege to have a recognizable name that people don’t make incorrect assumptions about. John Smith is likely not going to have any interpreter waiting for him at the courthouse unless he asks. Worse than that, I once sat with someone responsible for hiring who looked through the list of applicants and eliminated anyone with a spanish surname because he didn’t want to deal with people who couldn’t speak English. I suspect that the majority of them were several generation American-born who were fluent in English.
‘Any white person who doesn’t think this when going into a strange city is downright naive. You don’t think that there are areas near schools where a white person won’t have to think this? Hell, areas AT the schools?’
leave the thread, ron.
@ Megalodon: For the most part, in the groups I travel in, the problems seem to be motivated more by ignorance than malice; it’s tempting to say “I’ve never seen evidence of this in my life, so I have no reason to think it exists” without considering that you’re in some way protected from it, or that it could be going on around you in a way your attention isn’t called to. There have been people I’ve stopped associating with because they seemed uneducable, but in the absence of that evidence I’d rather educate one person than lose one friend.
And as Lexie pointed out, if I restricted my friendship to people who had never shown ignorance on topics like privilege, I’d soon have no friends left. Not even myself.
@ interestingly unstable: Thank you for reading and for taking the time to respond. Though don’t take away that your race is something to be ashamed of: the point is to educate, enlighten and inform, not to shame.
@ RonF: The Yoruba ethnic group is among the largest in West Africa, and has experienced a not insignificant amount of study as one of the groups well-represented in the Atlantic slave trade, as well as for contributions to major religions such as Santeria and Candomble. All these factors mean that anyone with some familiarity with West African culture or its influences on American culture could be expected to identify certain names as Yoruba.
When I say that it’s recognizable as a Yoruba name I don’t mean that it’s self-evident, I mean that it is recognizable in the same way ‘sociolinguistics’ is recognizable as a Latinate word or y = mx + b is recognizable as the slope-intercept form for linear equations: certainly there are people who would not recognize it as such, but a passing familiarity with the subject matter should render it clear. (And this isn’t an entirely theoretical argument: I have had it recognized.)
In any case, I see no reason a Yoruba surname – examples of which include Ogunbowale, Awobuluyi, Soyinka, Oyeniran, and Balogun, should be assumed in Nebraska to belong to a Spanish speaker.
As to your first point, I don’t doubt that there are places to be found in the country where any given trait or attribute would put you in danger. I do doubt that institutionalized racism and discrimination – here distinguished from prejudice in that discrimination possesses power to do something about it – against whites is so epidemic as racism and discrimination against people of color.
Hi,
I think this was wonderfully succinct and approaches the problem very cogently. I was thinking that this could so easily also be applied to a situation of caste privilege, in India (where I am from)…it is so easy for upper and middle class English speaking liberals in India to feel that because we (since i am one of those middle class English speakers) do not beat and abuse and obviously harass people who are born into different castes, there is no caste privilege in the situation. The notion that upper castes do not have caste privilege because they/(we) do not abuse dalits on the road is what goes around as common sense, unless forced to reconsider itself in the light of debates on reservation for Other Backward Classes.
Thank you for this.
I agree with you, in that racism is not dead, and considerations of fear or intimidation or verbal or physical attack based on race are absolutely necessary for a vast number of people, even if they are not the front and foremost in many people’s decision-making consciousness.
I have just applied for a PhD, and I have severe mobility issues and chronic pain. There are NO universities that I can apply to in the UK that are fully disabled-access and that offer supervision for my studies. The privilege for a lot of people is not having to factor these issues in.
Since Ron was asked to leave the thread, his most recent comment has been moved to an open thread.
I never had to think about any of that stuff you mentioned when I went off to college.
I learned stories like yours later. I knew a woman who could pass for white. She told me a story how she talked to someone about buying their home–a very expensive home in a wealthy area. Everyone was happy, all was good. Until, she said, her husband and her two children “brown like tootsie rolls” showed up, and then mysteriously the deal was off.
They sat in the restaurant that was supposed to celebrate the purchase of their lovely new home, too sick with disappointment to eat. I never forgot that story.
My favorite librarian, *ever*, used to tell me stories too. How there were towns where he and his white wife never got out of the car. How he had to reassure people when running down the street, so they wouldn’t be frightened of him. In a town where a third of the population is black, no less. He was an incredibly friendly soul, and he didn’t seem especially bitter about it, but I thought it was sad. He moved away because his wife didn’t think our schools were good enough. I still miss him.
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Lately I’ve been having discussions with a Scot who claims none of those things, (wait, economic yes: she’s poor) but especially not sexism, is any longer a problem in the UK. The mind boggles. It’s incredibly frustrating.
It “isn’t an option” only to the extent that having friends is compulsory.
If having such friends is a source of frustration, what is the net benefit of affiliating with them? Does the camaraderie outweigh the frustration of their obliviousness?
I do not know if magistrate is currently in an academic/university setting or in the work-a-day world (or both). As for the persons he refers to, most white persons do not hear terms like “white privilege” until they reach the university setting. If one is around persons who repeat the term, even if to say how they don’t believe in it, odds are there are persons in the vicinity who are familiar with the term and do believe in it, especially if they are in a university/college setting.
Megalodon:
1) This probably applies to a lot of people by now, but I just noticed it when Megalodon commented. Magistrate prefers gender neutral pronouns, as in sie and hir. (Sie writes blog posts. The blog posts are by hir.) I screw this up a lot, but please try.*
2) This is not a moderation comment, Megalodon. I am not telling you to cease and desist. However, your comments read somewhat aggressively to me and somewhat like you’re trying to tell Magistrate how sie should decide to befriend people, which is obviously a very personal decision.
I have been friends with people who have trouble with the concept of male privilege, and I would find it deeply upsetting to have people call those relationships worthless. I also understand that others don’t want to have friendships with people who are ignorant enough to act in painful, oppressive ways, and I completely respect that decision. I agree that it’s probably good to ask people to interrogate whether they are friends with clueless oppressor-class people because they want to be, or because they are socially pressured to be, but I feel like that question is getting mired in the mud of personal feelings about personal examples.
It might be helpful to pull this back to an abstract level.
Or perhaps Magistrate is comfortable with the conversation and I’m over-reading based on how I would feel (or would have felt when I was as new to blogging in a big forum as sie is). As hir former teacher, I have a few years left of feeling like I need to puff up my mother hennish feathers.
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*I’ve read this comment over several times, but I bet I *still* screwed it up somewhere…