There's something really attractive about undertaking a task you probably can't do very well. One thing is that if you admit it up front, then you start off with an excuse for the defects your efforts will have. And another is that you can ask for help from the beginning.
I'm not going to be the most knowledgeable person around on the topic of white privilege, because I am white and it's got for me the sort of invisibility that permanent features of one's life can have, as long as they don't directly cause you problems.
So it would be great if some kossacks feel like helping to construct a picture of what white privilege looks like.
I will assume that we agree that understanding white privilege is going to help with understanding the political structures in our country. For example, it is probably part of the story between the different reactions of our president to 9/11 and to Katrina.
I discovered some artcles by Robert Jensen on the web. He might be a help as a starting point, so I'll quote some passages from an article by him at http://www.dickshovel.com/...
1. One idea of his is that the advantages of being white end up being experienced as part of normal life; even when noticed, they aren't problems that need to be explained and/or excused.
Here's what white privilege sounds like: I'm sitting in my University of Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white student about affirmative action in college admissions, which he opposes and I support. The student says he wants a level playing field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he thinks that being white has advantages in the United States. Have either of us, I ask, ever benefited from being white in a world run mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is something real and tangible we could call white privilege.
So, if we live in a world of white privilege - unearned white privilege - how does that affect your notion of a level playing field? I asked. He paused for a moment and said, "That really doesn't matter." That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate white privilege: The privilege to acknowledge that you have unearned privilege but to ignore what it means.
2. A second thought, if I'm getting what he says, is that white people will 'naturally' fit in; they don't threaten to disrupt a group by being different.
But no matter how much I "fix" myself, one thing never changes - I walk through the world with white privilege.
What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission to a university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don't look threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me look like me they are white. They see in me a reflection of themselves - and in a racist world, that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of them. I am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am cut some slack. After all, I'm white
3. My favorite idea of his is that while we white folk may worry that 'admitting' or hiring people of color may LOWER THE STANDARDS, we miss out that there are lots and lots of mediocre white folk around inside.
My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am white. Some complain that affirmative action has meant the university is saddled with mediocre minority professors. I have no doubt there are minority faculty who are mediocre, though I don't know very many. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action policies were in place for the next hundred years, it's possible that at the end of that time the university could have as many mediocre minority professors as it has mediocre white professors. That isn't meant as an insult to anyone, but it's a simple observation that white privilege has meant that scores of second-rate white professors have slid through the system because their flaws were overlooked out of solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and ideology.
Ain't that the truth!!
Addition: There are some ways in which this diary follows on diaries by
[leftout http://leftout.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/12/29/121332/44]
and
[RationalMan http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/29/102921/67]
I couldn't understand the hostility they sometimes got (as it seemed to me) and I thought that if we didn't have some sense of white privilege here, then the site wouldn't have some of the perspectives we need for the upcoming struggles. Not that my own understanding is all that great.