White Privilege & Not a False Crisis

WhitePrivilege.com: "Segregation and Spirituality
by Eric Stiens

It is not often in this country, even on public radio, that we hear frank and lucid talk about the structural forces that created and continue to maintain black ghettos in the United States. Sometimes, we seem too steeped in individualist rhetoric and moralistic judgements to talk about and begin to address the intentional and unintentional policy choices in this country that have created.

On PRI’s “Speaking of Faith” today, there was a one hour program with Dr. David Hilfiker, a affluent white doctor who has been living in and practicing medicine in inner-city Washington DC for two decades now. He talks about the structural forces that perpetuate racial segregation in this country, white privilege, and the deep religious conviction that injustices harm us collectively and spiritually.

Also, some very well-written and engaging listener reactions to the program.

Racism, Race and Public Policy, U.S. History
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pre script! I HAte EngLISH! despite a huge vocabulary, and previously-flawless spelling
in other words: I spelled PRIVILEGE with a d like knowledge... and
my email spell-checker was stumped, so that's how I got back to a few
of my favorite pointy topics here, FYI, now you know.
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Katrina, Language, and the “Third World”

by Eric Stiens

Mukoma Wa Ngugi writes an interesting piece examining possible reasons why “[t]he devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina is being compared to disasters in the “Third World”.”He writes that:

The American citizen has been stewing in nationalism, manifest destiny and the myth of the democratic society that errors but never oppresses or marginalizes for so long that even a natural disaster cannot be seen and understood outside this lens. And the fact that most of the victims are predominantly poor and African American is not being understood as a creation of very specific domestic policies and conservative ideologies; it has to be filtered through the “Third World”. As if a disaster from that “part of the world” somehow managed to sneak through the porous Mexican borders.

Meanwhile, a new UN report on global inequality makes the claim that for many poor people of color in the United States, daily living conditions and access resources, especially health care, are worse than those in developing countries.

Paul Vallely, analyzing the report in the UK paper The Independent, writes that “yesterday’s UN report provides statistical proof that for many - well beyond those affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - the great American Dream is an ongoing nightmare…the infant mortality rate in the US is the same as Malaysia, which has a quarter of America’s income…Blacks in Washington DC have a higher infant death rate than people in the Indian state of Kerala…Throughout the US black children are twice as likely [as white children] to die before their first birthday…Hispanic Americans are more than twice as likely as white Americans to have no health cover[age].”

===================== oops, time for GOP to foist the vegetative FACADE, again : ===

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

• Daily effects of white privilege
• Elusive and fugitive
• Earned strength, unearned power

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http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/whiteprivilege.htm

.../...

White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is complex. In a white supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not they are overtly racist themselves. There are general patterns, but such privilege plays out differently depending on context and other aspects of one's identity (in my case, being male gives me other kinds of privilege). Rather than try to tell others how white privilege has played out in their lives, I talk about how it has affected me.

I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of northern European heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the country. I grew up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by racism, both personal and institutional. Because I didn't live near a reservation, I didn't even have exposure to the state's only numerically significant non-white population, American Indians.

I have struggled to resist that racist training and the ongoing racism of my culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I "fix" myself, one thing never changes--I walk through the world with white privilege.

What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission to a university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don't look threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me for those things look like me--they are white. They see in me a reflection of themselves, and in a racist world that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of them. I am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am cut some slack. After all, I'm white.

Fundamentalism

.../... As Henry Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action policies were in place for the next hundred years, it's possible that at the end of that time the university could have as many mediocre minority professors as it has mediocre white professors. That isn't meant as an insult to anyone, but is a simple observation that white privilege has meant that scores of second-rate white professors have slid through the system because their flaws were overlooked out of solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and ideology.