Educating My White Privilege

I started this post some time ago, but recent events have made me feel that now is the time to finish and post it. Several days ago black teenager Mike Brown was gunned down by police. He was unarmed and had his hands in the air, and still the police officer shot him again, and again, and then left him for dead.

I have a lot of privilege. I am white. I was raised in an upper middle class family. I am cisgendered and present as straight. I grew up in an evangelical community that was 100% white and attended an evangelical megachurch that is predominantly white. My family lived in a rural area surrounded by farmland, so we didn’t really have much in the way of neighbors. Everyone I knew attended our church, or went to the Bible club we were involved in, or one of the homeschool co-ops we participated in. My upbringing and community was very, very white.

When I was around twelve or so, my parents invited a family from our church over for lunch. The father was black, and the mother was white, and there were four children, all significantly younger than me. After they left, my parents told us what an amazing family they were. My dad praised them up and down. He said this was the solution to black poverty—to stop feeling sorry for yourself, to clean yourself up, and to work hard. Looking back, I can see that he was saying that if black people would act the way he, with his white lens, wanted them to act, he would accept them. Otherwise, no such luck. This was the only time we ever had this family over.

My father used to talk a lot about affirmative action. He told my brothers that as white males they were the most discriminated against group in the United States. He told them they would be passed over for jobs and raises, and that women and minorities would always be chosen before them. He told us about an African American woman at his work who was an engineer but supposedly had to be told the word “pipe,” she was so inept and untrained. He told my brothers that they would never be able to get an internship at his work, because only women or minorities get those. I never asked him how, years later, a white college student who went to our church landed one of those internships, and I never told him how sketchy his story about his black female coworker sounds—something I sensed even then.

Somewhere along the line I learned to associate African Americans with crime, drugs, and laziness. I’m not sure how much of this was little things my parents said and how much of it came from the magazines our family subscribed to or the bits of mainstream American culture I had contact with. It’s not that African Americans were irredeemable—if they accepted Jesus as their savior and gave up their dependency on handouts, I was given to understand, they could become upstanding and worthy Americans. The problem, it seems as I look back, was black culture. Today I can see this I’m-not-racist-I-just-disapprove-of-black-culture routine for the sham it is, but at the time it was simply a part of life.

In addition to the stereotypes was the simple distance. I didn’t know anyone who was black, or Hispanic. I didn’t feel comfortable around racial minorities. They were different. They were strange. They were other.

On top of the white privilege was class privilege. My parents are well educated, and college was always in the cards for my siblings and I. We never wondered where the money would come from, and we never questioned our ability to get academic scholarships. It would be hard for a child to grow up in my family and not come out educated, and college-bound, on scholarship. This, actually, was part of my watershed moment. When I was in college, a friend pointed out to me that a child growing up in my family, or his family, would have to work to fail while a child growing up in so many other places and situations around the country would have to work to succeed. And that’s when it hit me, just like that, this idea we call “privilege.” The playing field is not level. Different people start at different points, through no fault of their own. At this moment I stopped judging other people the way I had in the past.

When I was first in college, I had to attend a mandatory training session about rape and sexual assault—or, how-not-to-get-sexually-assaulted-and-what-to-do-if-you-are. I had to do this because I was a woman. Men do not have to worry about being sexually assaulted in the same way. I realized, as I saw and read more of the world beyond my upper middle class white bubble, that this same principle applies to race. White fathers don’t have to give their sons “how-not-to-get-shot-by-police” talks. Black fathers do. This is something I would not have known if I’d relied only on my own experience—because I’m white. Just like men may be unaware of what women face if they rely only on their own experiences, so, too, I was unaware of what life looked like for African Americans because I had never looked outside of my own experiences and those of other whites.

When I was first introduced to the concept of racial stereotyping and profiling, I understood it immediately. After all, it was something I did. If I was walking home at dusk, I would walk faster (and clutch my bag closer) if the man walking ten yards behind me was black than if he was white (this isn’t to say that I wasn’t also wary of a white man walking ten yards behind me, but rather that I was more wary of a black man doing the same). This response wasn’t intentional—it was unconscious. Black people felt like a threat in a way white people didn’t. (I had similar, though less drastic, class-based reactions.) I’m not the only one with these sorts of prejudices—some studies have suggested that as many as 88% of white Americans have an implicit bias in favor of whites.

And so, finally, I began learning things—lots of things.

Did you know that people with black-sounding names are 50% less likely to be called back for an interview than people with identical resumes but white-sounding names? Or that while black youth are less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol than white youth, they are 10 times more likely to be sent to prison for drug offenses than are whites? Blacks receive  higher sentences than whites for the same crimes, and receive higher penalties when the victims are white than when the victims are other African Americans. In one year, 80% of those sentenced for crack cocaine offenses were black while less than 1/3 of crack cocaine users were black. One in three black men can expect to spend time in prison at some point in their lives. Whites are more likely to pull a trigger on a black assailant than a white one.

In white America, black people are seen as a threat. They are given higher sentences while whites are given the benefit of the doubt. When the militarization of our police force collides with this reality the results are often deadly. It doesn’t help that new “tough on crime” policies have quadrupled the U.S. prison population from around 500,000 in 1980 to over 2,000,000 today. The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but holds 25% of the world’s prisoners—the highest incarceration rate in the world. 40% of the American prison population is black, even as only 13% of the American population is black.

In her book on the subject, Linda Tucker discussed “the use of crime as a metaphor for race” and explained that fear of race has been replaced with fear of crime even as black men have been criminalized. These fears are not rational. But with the continued criminalization of black men and cases vigilante “justice” and extrajudicial police killings, it would seem that lynching is not as much a thing of the past as we would like to imagine.

And so I educated myself. The hardest thing about it was admitting to myself that even though intellectually I did not believe that any one race was superior to any other, my unconscious reactions were racist. But I admitted it. I would rather have racist reactions and be aware of them than have racist reactions and be unable to see them. We cannot fight what we do not know exists. Do I still have race-based and class-based reactions today? Yes, sometimes, but they are growing less and less, because I continually challenge them. If I see a black man and clutch my purse, I make an effort to relax and actively dismantle my prejudices. Changing one’s prejudices is a process.

Mike Brown’s death has unleased a storm of discussion—again. And that’s the problem. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Trayvon Martin, so many other names, lives, and situations—and still these things keep happening. Will we never move past discussion to action? I don’t have all the answer to this problem, by a long shot. I primarily blog about feminism, and the evangelical homeschool world of my youth, and parenting. I’ve taken some time to educate myself on race, but I also understand this as an ongoing process and know that I still have much to learn. I am no expert. But I do know this—at the very least it’s time to listen, to take in information, and to try to understand the issues at hand. We cannot ignore this problem.