If you want to test the hypothesis, try talking about it.
“I see talk of privilege as creating the problem of tribalism,” my friend wrote a friend of his in an argument about white privilege. “How do we teach tolerance when teaching one person that another’s life is easier by virtue of nothing they’ve done, even if true to some extent?”
My friend, a gentle and irenic man concerned about how divided Americans are, got it backwards.
How We Learn Tolerance
We teach (and learn) what he called “tolerance” by helping people — by helping ourselves — see why they’re unconsciously intolerant. We participate in all sorts of things that make life easier for us and often harder for others. We tend to presume we understand other people’s lives when we don’t. When in fact we (again, unconsciously) impose on their lives the story we prefer.
Sin divides, using whatever differences it can. America particularly divides along racial lines.
Maturity comes in part from the continual experience of finding out how clueless you are, because you’re you, not merely a mind but a person formed by your life, genetics, family, friends, education, language, health, class, sex, race, etc. Most of these are interrelated. An advantage in one usually comes with advantages in others. You don’t see all that much because you can’t see all that much.
Like — speaking to other white people — how much your race gives you. That you have advantages because you’re white. (I’ve described this in more detail here, among other places.) Recognition of white privilege isn’t primarily a political statement or a moral judgment. It just recognizes what Nick Carroway’s father tells him at the beginning of The Great Gatsby: “Just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
Racial privilege is not, of course, uncomplicated. Class complicates it, for one thing. The affluent WASP has advantages over the working class son of immigrants, who may in many ways suffer in relation to the affluent black man. But all things being equal, the white person will generally have the advantage over his black peer.
Christians should be alert to the subtle ways in which fallen human beings dominate and marginalize others, and to the ways in which the world has grown into a system of domination. And not just in racial ways, because sin divides, using whatever differences it can. But America particularly divides along racial lines.
Testing the Hypothesis
If you want to test the hypothesis, talk about white privilege. Some with whom you raise the subject will react with high-sounding appeals to the color-blind ideal and quotes from Martin Luther King, and if they’re more sophisticated, with academic discussions of the ambiguities of identity and the complexities of racial identity in particular. They problematize the matter, not to understand it more subtly but to deny the idea any value.
Some reject the idea because the left might use it against them, as if that were an argument. People will weaponize any truth. Denying it makes it an even better weapon. You can only take it out of your enemy’s arsenal by recognizing it and addressing it.
Christians should be alert to the subtle ways in which fallen human beings dominate and marginalize others.
Others flatly deny that they enjoyed any privileges or blessings. They often insist they’d succeeded entirely on their own. They don’t see something that should be obvious. A third group claims to be the real victims and black people and others to be the really privileged ones.
The language of white privilege reminds us that we don’t see everything, and points to one part of human life that white people often cannot see. An academic might say it induces epistemological humility. In the real world, it points us to the need to look harder and to listen to people who know realities we don’t, because they’re speaking of their own lives.
David Mills is Senior Editor (US) of The Catholic Herald.
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