What White Privilege Can and Cannot Do: A Clarification

Yesterday’s post on White privilege produced some thoughtful exchanges with readers and a key criticism emerged, accusing me of not knowing or understanding what “White privilege” is.

I think it is a bit wrongheaded to talk about the concept of White privilege as a thing or an object, since it is really nothing more than an idea distilled from a short essay by Peggy McIntosh in the late 1980’s. How that essay ever became dogmatic is a mystery to me, but I can see how and why it is an important tool for doing a very particular sort of social analysis. This is why, to me, the question of White privilege should be functional: What can this concept do? And also: What can this concept not do?

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The idea that is often conveyed on the Left is that the concept of White privilege (and others types of privilege, too) has an inexhaustible functional ability and that any challenge to it is somehow a complete denial of its insights. This reaction is of course an overreaction to an overreaction by those who would like to ignore McIntosh’s essay altogether. But that is not the case for me.

To be clear: I see many uses for the idea of White privilege but I also see limits and even abuses.

This need not be academic. After all, I am not White, and can clearly see White privilege from the marginal view that McIntosh argues is so hard to see from a White perspective. I’ve experienced the pain of racism and I realize that it cannot be simply reversed away. In this sense I can confidently say that White privilege maps onto many realities that I know and have experienced personally.

But there are limits to this concept. For one, it makes a number of assumptions that serve it well in the context of large scale sociological claims, but distort and even occlude things at a smaller scale. (Saying “But it is structural!” ignores the fact that there are bigger and smaller structures.) The first assumption is, of course, the very idea of Whiteness. We may take it for granted that Whiteness has no nuance or qualification to it, but my claim is precisely that this assumption is false and harmful.

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Those who hold to a limitless understanding of the function of White privilege claim that even the poorest and most miserable White folks can dress up in a suit and go out into civil society and enjoy all the privileges of Whiteness in a way a non-White person cannot. This is patently and painfully false. This is a claim that is purely theoretical with no sense whatsoever of the body and voice marked by a Whiteness that denies its very Whiteness.

As a poor Mexican-American I understood that the poor Whites who were treated and acted like mongrels, snarling and swearing and spitting, stinking like piss on their leather-like skin, with black sweat on their t-shirt collar, were not anything like the rest of us, the Whites, Mexicans, and Blacks of our school and small town society. The truth of this claim goes far deeper than anything a White makeover might do in theory. I refuse and reject the simplicity of this analogy and its toxically essential notion of Whiteness.

This is not the nostalgia of modern Nashville country music. This is not the stupid pastiche of Redneck Americana from a Jeff Foxworthy routine. This is total and absolute wretched poverty that exists on a scale that is not exceptional except in its Whiteness.

My claim then is to try and show that the uses of White privilege are not infinite and that the any eternal sense of its function not only fail to give a faithful account of reality, they more dangerously support a notion of Whiteness that supplies it with a nefariously false metaphysical existence. White privilege, when left unchecked and unaccountable to reality, converts an ideology into a creature like Frankenstein’s damned invention.

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One last thing: Almost every person who thinks they are White who is reading this post doesn’t qualify as the sort of person I am discussing when I write about White poverty. Even the poor ones. Poverty in this context is deeper than finances and having internet and being able to read my prose probably disqualifies one from it.