Monthly Archive for September, 2008

Jill over at Writes Like She Talks recommends that bloggers “spread Tim Wise’s article, ‘This is Your Nation on White Privilege,’ far and wide.”

I’m happy to help the cause.

This election season has demonstrated the profound double standards in our country in regards to gendered personality traits, qualifications, character, and experience.  Obama’s March speech on race is just the tip of the ice berg in terms of conversations that need to be had about how our race defines us and what privileges and challenges our genetic makeup hands us.

Whether or not you plan to vote for Barack Obama in November, we need to acknowledge that all Americans aren’t equal, yet.  The repeated and prolonged attacks on Barack Obama throughout the primary and general election periods are not just about politics.  Every challenge made of Sarah Palin’s qualifications can’t simply be written off as sexism and sour grapes over a personable Phyllis Schlafly 2.0.

There’s this false notion that nearly 150 years after slavery was outlawed in America, that race is no longer an issue.  Throughout the country ballot wars are raged against the continuation of affirmative action in employment and education systems.  People insist that the sins of their fathers, are not their own.    Sadly, the civil rights movement of the 1960s shifted our culture some, but not enough.

Here are a few of  Tim Wise’s observations on white privilege:

For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

…

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re “untested.”

…White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was “Alaska first,” and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you’re black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she’s being disrespectful.

Click through for the full piece. Your thoughts?  Pass it on.