If you look at me on paper, it would be easy to assume that I’m some sort of villain. I’m a middle class, middle aged, white, cis gender, heterosexual male. From the time I was eleven years old, I was raised in an affluent, master planned neighborhood in South Orange County, California that was filled with houses and perfectly manicured lawns that all looked the same. One of my high school teachers casually referred to it as a “golden ghetto” because it was so self-contained and sheltered. This was not an environment that enabled young men like me to acknowledge, or even realize, the privilege we really had. In fact, that sort of thinking was actively discouraged. At the time, with no other frame of reference, it was easy to think of myself and my peers as basically good people without ill will toward anyone. In hindsight, there was an air of “soft” white supremacy that permeated every moment and situation in the community. But I wasn’t able to see it until I left for Texas and had my world rocked.
This ignorance of our own advantages was no accident. One of the core concepts of Critical Race Theory is that in order for the machinery of white privilege to be effective, it must remain at least hidden enough for the privileged class to maintain plausible deniability of their advantages. “Thus, the dominant position of whites in the socioeconomic hierarchy and the advantages that are implicit in this dominant position are taken for granted and hidden from most whites.”(Tranby) While it may seem obvious to those observing from outside the enclave of privilege, white privilege stays actively hidden from the privileged, although they are usually willing participants in their own hoodwinking. “The status of whiteness is maintained by never acknowledging its privileges but rather by assuming white privilege is the norm, or the ‘way things are.’” ( Hurtado) The illusion is much easier to maintain than one might think, given that those enjoying the advantages of privilege are not terribly motivated to reflect on or discover how they are being fooled.
“An additional complexity to mention about the issue of privilege is the tendency for White people to deny their White privilege based on marginalized status they hold in other dimensions of their identities”(Forrest-Bank). While my family may have been considered well off compared to society at large, we were near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in our own community. We lived in one of the few single story homes in our housing tract, and while our friends left for ski vacations during winter break, my brother and I helped out with our parents’ “side hustle” of labeling and boxing VHS Christmas Cards that they shot and duplicated for our neighbors. These were not terrible hardships by any stretch, but when everyone else in the neighborhood seems to be doing so much better, it’s not hard to convince yourself that you’re not so well off.
Also, my parents were divorced a couple of months before I turned three. Before my mother remarried and we moved to the nice neighborhood, my brother and I were “latchkey kids” who let ourselves into our little apartment after school and spent the afternoons unsupervised while we waited for our working single mother to get home from work. It was the 1970s, and daycare wasn’t nearly as available or affordable as it is now; it certainly wasn’t provided by employers. During this time, we also moved around a lot. From Kindergarten to sixth grade, I attended six different elementary schools. Even after we settled into the home we would stay in through high school, I struggled to form long term friendships. I was good at making friends but hadn’t developed the skills required for maintaining relationships, and instead I spent my teenage years shifting from one social group to another. This economic and social instability provided a ready back story for me to point to in support of my denial of being part of a privileged class.
These illusions I’d built up started to crumble shortly after I turned twenty, when I moved to Texas to live with my biological father. He lived, with my step mother and half sister, in a double wide mobile home on his in-laws’ ranch. Here, my role was flipped; whereas before I had been the poorest among the “rich kids,” now I lived in far lower socioeconomic conditions but was a member of one of the most affluent families in a poverty-stricken rural town. And here, no one tried to hide their racial bias and prejudice. I was shocked at the way the n-word rolled as easily off our neighbors’ tongues as “hello” did off mine. There was no question who were the privileged class and who were the second class citizens, and yet these obviously privileged white people would still bristle at the suggestion that their race had given them any sort of a leg up on their brown skinned neighbors. “Another way to naturalize white privilege is to claim that the special treatment is unrelated to whiteness; rather, it is claimed, the treatment meets a special need that would be accorded to anyone, regardless of race.”(Hurtado) Despite all evidence to the contrary, the white people of Palmer, TX had themselves convinced that their privileged status resulted not from accident of birth, but from differences in values and work ethic.
At first, I looked down my nose at these small town folks; judging them harshly as a bunch of hicks for their overt racism. But after a year of living among them, I noticed that their actual treatment of their minority neighbors, in spite of their overtly racist language, was not very different from how we did things back home. “Perhaps the central overarching theme in scholarship on whiteness is the argument that white identity is decisively shaped by the exercise of power and the expectation of advantages in acquiring property”(Roediger, David R. “Critical Studies of Whiteness, USA: Origins and Arguments.” (Roediger). These were not people who put on white robes and hoods and rode around burning crosses on black families’ lawns. They were just a bunch of regular people who found themselves in a position of privilege and convinced themselves that they had earned that spot through their own ingenuity and industry, rather than by being given a head start by systemic racial privilege. Seeing these similarities made it much more difficult for me to cling to my own illusions about my privilege and racial bias. As this made me very uncomfortable, I decided I needed to move to the city and get away from it.
But Dallas was no more forgiving; the genie was out of the bottle. But it was a metropolitan city, with all the racial and cultural diversity that provides. For the first time in my life, most of the people with whom I came in contact were nothing like me, but stood on equal footing as my peers. Black, Latino, Asian, Queer, etc. were no longer just abstract stereotypes, but real people who shared the world with me. While it’s a bit embarrassing to look back on it know and remember what a shock that was at the time, this was really a life changing time for me. While this realization was sort of the last nail in the coffin of my illusions about white privilege, it also showed me that the class structure I had known up until then was not the only one possible. One of the most devastating realizations I had living in my father’s small town was that I was just as much trapped by this system as anyone else, even though it seemed to work to my benefit. Seeing the possibility of breaking out of that system was both liberating and terrifying; I didn’t handle it well early on.
Being shown the possibility of a different system energized me to try to help build it. I began to see myself as coming to the rescue to make the world a better place. Now that I could see it, I was going to fix racism. Unfortunately, my idea of how to do that at the time mostly consisted of t-shirts, music and food choices, arguing with my parents, and bumper stickers. While my intentions may have been good, I was still buying into the idea that I was somehow more capable and able to affect change by virtue of my skin color. But over time, as I was given the opportunity to work with and befriend members of these traditionally disadvantaged classes, they were kind and patient enough to gently educate me in how to shut up and listen in order to take my ego out of the mix while I fought the good fight. With their guidance, I eventually figured out that I could be most helpful to them, not by riding in to the rescue on a white steed, but by just not being a jerk and encouraging my fellow white men not to be either. This isn’t always easy.
Most white men are still very much unaware of their privilege; pointing it out to them will usually make them defensive and hostile. But while we did not ask for this privilege, and can be excused for not working against it while we are still ignorant of it, we have an obligation to acknowledge and challenge this disparity once we are made aware of it. That doesn’t mean we should all go to BLM rallies or dance on floats in gay pride parades; in fact that would be counter productive in most cases. But we do need to recognize that we have been granted some advantages in life and listen to those who have been abused by the system that granted us that privilege. This can be difficult. Being confronted by the pain and abuse heaped on those who are marginalized for the purpose of maintaining a system that privileges us can be devastating. But in the long run, it can help us to be better people. Not heroes or saviors, just better people. As Maya Angelou said, “When we know better, we do better.” And if we just try every day to be that better person, we really can help to change the system into one that is more equitable. Even though on many days we’ll get it all wrong, if enough of us are trying to be better, we will be better.
Works Cited
Tranby, Eric and Hartmann, Douglas. “Critical Whiteness Theories and the Evangelical ‘Race Problem’: Extending Emerson and Smith’s ‘Divided by Faith.’” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 47, no. 3, Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 341–59
Hurtado, Aída. “Critical Race Theory and Questioning Whiteness: Young Feminists Speak Out Against Race and Class Privilege.” Frontiers (Boulder), vol. 40, no. 3, University of Nebraska Press, 2019, pp. 90–116
Roediger, David R. “Critical Studies of Whiteness, USA: Origins and Arguments.” Theoria (Pietermaritzburg), vol. 48, no. 98, Berghahn Journals, 2001, pp. 72–98
Forrest-Bank, Shandra. “Understanding and Confronting Racial Microaggression.” Critical Social Work, vol. 17, no. 1, University of Windsor, 2019
Generation Extreme 