let everything happen to you
White Privilege/ Guilt (?)
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Have you seen the documentary called "White People"? (It's free on YouTube, but don't look at the comments unless you want to wish you were never born in a country where people are so blatantly idiotic :)
White privilege... never thought about prior to this year. Perhaps that's one of the great ironies of white privilege--you don't even have to know you have it!
Sarcasm aside, this is a serious topic. To know and understand our own privileges is imperative to sparking awareness and comprehending how racial oppression runs deep. And I mean deep like the rivers flowing through the veins of this country.
"Among the 'childish things' we need to put aside, white people, is the idea that America’s tormented racial legacy belongs to the past. You know exactly the attitude I mean: We have twice elected a biracial president and LeBron James and Jay Z are zillionaires, so no more talk of racism, please. In the more paranoid formulation prevalent in the Fox News demographic (but not limited to it), this becomes the idea that the federal government has spent the last 50 years giving away money, housing, education and other 'free stuff' to black people who don’t work or pay taxes, while vigorously grinding down the white man. So either the vision of healing and reconciliation conjured up so eloquently by Martin Luther King, Jr. more than 50 years ago has now been fulfilled (and black people need to stop complaining)". -Andrew O'Hehir
What Andrew's sarcasm is really saying is that we need to stop pretending it does not exist. Just stop. Wake up, acknowledge what is happening. And here's the kicker, white people--don't let guilt be the emotion proceeding ignorance. More below:
(Graphic narrative from here.)
White privilege... never thought about prior to this year. Perhaps that's one of the great ironies of white privilege--you don't even have to know you have it!
Sarcasm aside, this is a serious topic. To know and understand our own privileges is imperative to sparking awareness and comprehending how racial oppression runs deep. And I mean deep like the rivers flowing through the veins of this country.
"Among the 'childish things' we need to put aside, white people, is the idea that America’s tormented racial legacy belongs to the past. You know exactly the attitude I mean: We have twice elected a biracial president and LeBron James and Jay Z are zillionaires, so no more talk of racism, please. In the more paranoid formulation prevalent in the Fox News demographic (but not limited to it), this becomes the idea that the federal government has spent the last 50 years giving away money, housing, education and other 'free stuff' to black people who don’t work or pay taxes, while vigorously grinding down the white man. So either the vision of healing and reconciliation conjured up so eloquently by Martin Luther King, Jr. more than 50 years ago has now been fulfilled (and black people need to stop complaining)". -Andrew O'Hehir
What Andrew's sarcasm is really saying is that we need to stop pretending it does not exist. Just stop. Wake up, acknowledge what is happening. And here's the kicker, white people--don't let guilt be the emotion proceeding ignorance. More below:
(Graphic narrative from here.)
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The following is from an article by Andrew O'Hehir, where he had a reader email him in response to his White Privilege article;
"I got an email this week from an African-American teacher who works in a predominantly white suburban school district that spoke to this issue eloquently. She wrote about her students with evident affection, but said she couldn’t help noticing that when they get into trouble – for drugs or drinking or minor property crimes – the issue is handled much differently than it would be in a black urban context, where it might mean incarceration and the end of the student’s academic career. 'These suburban neighborhood kids are not perceived as criminals, just adolescents doing stupid stuff,' she writes. 'No one blames ‘white culture’ or family pathology."
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Amnesia, anesthesia, indifference, and denial (AAID) cut us off from having strong feelings about racial injustice. White guilt at least wakes us up to the feeling that something isn't right in out society." -The Anatomy of White Guilt
In order to make changes we need to feel white guilt, in a healthy way, which gnaws at our awareness and wakes us up to social injustice.
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