What we mean when we talk about confronting privilege

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written by Tami, originally posted on What Tami Said 

Why is it so difficult to acknowledge our privilege?

When I posted links on this blog and social networking sites to Susan Raffo's article "White Noise: White Adults Raising White Children to Resist White Supremacy," which had been newly-posted to New Demographic's Anti-Racist Parent blog, some of the reaction was disheartening, but not surprising. Raffo had written this:

...But there's this other self; sometimes called the political self or the activist self or the stand back and pay attention self. It knows that my child — white and raised by white parents in a family where the adults have the gift of education, have choice about their work, and own their own home — is a privileged child. Every gain my mama-self wants to support my child in making will be on the backs of other children, children with mother's whose mama-selves are just as fierce as mine but who have to fight against real monsters like hunger or violence.

And this is the contradiction that crept into my belly standing there, at the Mall of America. I felt sad, and a different flavor of fierce. Luca's creativity, her curiosity and her passion have the time and space to be priorities when we think about raising her. We don't have to protect her daily from violence or spend most of our time finding food. All children should have the same kind of space. Standing there in the Mall of America, my fierceness shifted and grew larger. It became less about my child and more about the community of children. In other words, my question was not "what is the best for my daughter" and more, "what is the best for all children?" How does this question affect how I parent? How do my partner and I – and all of our friends and families – raise our children in a way that honors the lives and struggles of all children?

 

Whiteness

Here is what we noticed right away: both the race of our daughter and the economic privilege of our family. We have enough – not a lot, but enough. And we are white women raising a white daughter. Here is the question that followed that: how do we, from the very beginning, start raising Luca to be a different kind of white? What does it MEAN to be a different kind of white? This feels about way more than having a commitment to anti-racism. It feels like being a different kind of person entirely.

As a quick aside, my partner and I have a belief system about race, racism and white privilege that assumes that the legacies of slavery, the attempted genocide of Native Americans, European colonialism and its affect here in the Americas and elsewhere in the world has created a present day moment of inequity based on skin color, language, culture of origin and so on. Within that belief system, the fact that my partner and I have light skin and ethnicities with the majority of ancestors being European gives us a kind of privilege...

This assessment of racial hierarchy to me seemed very astute, compassionate. Our dominant culture values certain qualities--certain ways of being. We deem these qualities supreme--a baseline for normality. We value maleness. We value Christianity. We value heterosexuality. We value wealth. We value youth. We value the cisgendered. And, yes, we value whiteness. Those who possess these qualities have privilege. Those who do not are marginalized. But privilege is a fluid concept. For instance, I am both black and female, thus subject to marginalization for my race and gender. However, I am also middle class and educated, meaning I have class and educational privilege. (How well do you recognize your own privilege?) It is possible and common to be marginalized in one area, but privileged in another. (See Jewel Woods' "The Black Male Privilege Checklist.") That said, in this culture, some privileges count for more than others. I would argue that in America, race and gender play large roles in how one will move in the world, how one will be viewed and what opportunities one will have.