Can someone who isn’t white have white privilege?
On the surface that seems like an absurd question. But I think for Multiracial people who have roots in white culture it is possible, even probable that they have some access to white privilege. The exception, a rather specifically American one, is Black-white admixtures. Usually Americans with Black ancestry identify as Black and for centuries white people have maintained that even one drop of Black blood means you are Black. Other something and white admixtures identify most commonly as white.
I am Multiracial. I was born to Multiracial parents. But my parents identified as white. I was the last of their many children and the only one they encouraged to explore their Indigenous roots. And believe me I was still strongly discouraged from exploring my Black ancestry. I belong to the rarest of the recognized multiracial groups. I am Indigenous, Black and White.
My skin is orange-pink. Well to be exact it is Peach Nectar in the Pantone system (so says my Dermatologist though he is a specialist in skin cancer — I just asked him to do the Pantone test as a favor). This color is not exactly associated with any particular “race” or ethnicity. But it sure isn’t white. Standing next to my white as snow neighbors I look like I am wearing a bad pink spray tan. Standing next to my yellow, black, and brown daughters I look under baked.
My face is a mishmash of races. My nose, inherited from my Black grandmother is wide and short. It came from her to my Dad to me skipping my siblings though most of my nieces and nephews got the “Black” nose. My lips are Native American (apparently an inheritance from our Denisovan ancestors). You get the idea. My appearance hints at multiracial ancestry. Trained eyes quickly confirm my mixed blood. But average people just can’t be sure.
My Dad’s mom who cooked professionally from the time she was 14 into her 80s taught me to think of cultures and ethnicities in turns of food. And over the years that rubbed off on me. Granny Mar traveled all over Africa and Asia exploring food cultures. Then she taught the recipes to me. I was the only one of her 7 children and 29 grandchildren that got her passion for food. So even in terms of diet I span a large part of the globe.
I happily and freely move between cultures, languages and foods.
But my parents gave me a firm grounding in how to be white. I have a dear friend born in Canada to Malaysian and Chinese parents. She describes her North American upbringing as an undergraduate degree in Whitish. I have a PhD in Whitish and am now doing postdoctoral studies. I have been training my daughters in whitish since the day they were born.
I think I have benefited enormously from white privilege without being white. This means I have been doubly blessed. I get all the privilege that accrues to Multiracial people and the ability to free boot white privilege. I genuinely feel guilty.
My daughters, all of whom are darker than me tell me they feel the same way. While they experience racism fairly commonly their whitish ancestry and acculturation have given them access to white privilege. Plus there is a growing body of research which appears to shows that even once you allow for skin color Multiracial Americans with white as an admixture and access to white culture experience slightly less systemic racism and are far less likely to be the victims of racial violence than the racial group(s) that gives their skin its non-white hue.
For example, Nippy points out that neither she nor her sisters were ever discriminated against in school the way other Black and Indigenous children were. They weren’t even treated as harshly as average white or Asian students. I certainly wasn’t. I blew a hole in the roof of the science wing doing over ten thousand dollars in damage and staged a totally unexpected nude review of Hair in which we passed out sugar cubes the audience thought were the delivery vehicle for LSD and I still graduated. I got two suspensions. I think it was less than a month combined.
Being seen as a better behaved and more “academically successful” is a common experience for Multiracial students in general. Which means the ease with which my daughters and I moved through levels of the education game is partly a result of our birth in to Multiracial families. Which is privilege in action.
As it happens, of all identified racial identity groups Multiracial students have the highest levels of educational attainment in America. They are narrowly ahead of Asian Americans in second and white Americans in third. That is privilege plain and simple, though it isn’t clear how it works. (My next diary in this series on my weird ancestry and how it shaped my life — Being Multiracial in America provides a huge number of resources and includes the sources for the claims made in this diary.)
I can’t help identifying as white in my head whenever I interact with white political structures. I become a highly educated successful white man. It is automatic. It just oozes out of my pores. But I am far more at home in my indigenous community and family. And it is just as automatic.
It is the way white people react to me that always surprises me. They start off wary, trying to categorize me. But once they understand I am Multiracial and proud of all branches of my genetic tree they rapidly forget I am not white. Then they start coming to me for help and advice.
As I played with my very Ktunaxa looking great granddaughter today I was wondering if knowing she was multiracial and growing up partly in her white ancestors culture and society would make her whitish enough to have white privilege?
There are obviously other things that drive the apportionment of privilege in America today. I was born into a poor family. But my parents weren’t working poor. My Dad was a civil servant and my Mom had her own successful business. They also had a ranch. And my Dad has side gigs where he worked for himself.
My parents were university grads. My Dad had a Masters degree and my Mom got hers the year before I got my first undergrad degree. They thought all their children should go off and get educated. Those of my siblings that rebelled just delayed the inevitable and ended up “educated” anyway.
We were poor simply because there were a lot of mouths to feed and my parents were helping launch their children, helping their nieces and nephews out financially and looking after their parents and aunts and uncles. And they were growing their businesses which ate money (I know the feeling).
My 17 years of Graduate, Professional, and post Doctoral education (mostly paid for by the military — several of my older siblings went this route very successfully) show. I stand out here in rural Alberta and even more so when I am living in rural Montana and rural Washington. And with that comes a kind of privilege. But if I appeared Indigenous or Black would my education provide the same benefit? I don’t know the answer.
My daughters are almost as horribly over educated as I am but a lot darker and like me they waltzed through school with almost no negative interactions with the educational system. I have been with them when they got pulled over for driving while being Black or Brown. I have seen police officers entire body language change when my daughters started to speak. It is impossible to miss the education, the eliteness, the whiteness in both their spoken language and their body language.
I and Gabby, and my exes are all what George Packer calls Smart America (whatever the color of our skin we are elite and have all had times we were in the top ten percent of incomes in the United States) with a small hint of Just America. My daughters, and the younger ones especially are Just America (they have grown up with Critical Theory shaping their education). And it shows in a myriad of ways.
My grandchildren oddly are more Real America (most have been educated in rural schools and done either Tribal Schools or State Schools or both for their early post secondary education) but they still radiate high class status and privilege and as they get more educated elite markers are appearing. And they have all grown up in predominantly white communities with Real America (or the Canadian equivalent) cultures but in Indigenous families. They are multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-lingual and Multiracial. This gives them privilege but part of that privilege comes from having whitish great grandparents, a whitish grandfather, whitish grandmothers, and whitish mothers.
One of the things that we don’t acknowledge enough when we talk about white privilege is that a big part of that privilege is about controlling economic opportunities. Part of my own privilege is that I spent as much time in my future in-laws house and business as I did in my parents. They were immigrants, Sou-Sou, my first wife, was the first member of her family born in Canada. Through them I started doing business deals in Iran (Sou-Sous’ mother Mia) and China (her dad Dan) in my late teens and early twenties and eventually learned to do these deals on my own. Sometimes I even made money though usually less than minimal wage for the time it took but they always enriched my life.
I can do the Canadian or American ends of these deals because I am whitish and the foreign end because I am not white. I think most Americans still don’t understand what a huge advantage being Multiracial is in the world they created by globalizing the economy. In Africa I am a Black man who has fooled the white man into thinking he is white and they love that. In America and Canada I am often introduced by my Black partners, friends, and colleagues as the Blackest white man they have ever met. I have been doing research with Chinese and Iranian scientists for decades and share intellectual property with them that I am helping commercialize in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
As luck would have it I ranch surrounded by Czech Canadian farms and ranches and over the thirty years I have built a large network of friends in their community and Gabby serves on the board of several Czech Canadian cultural organization and institutions. This is easy for me because I grew up in a community where Czech immigrants were the majority of the farmers and I went to school and played with their kids and helped out on those farms.
White people don’t get to be Chinese and Iranian, Indigenous and Black, Czech and Ukraine, Senegalese and Tibetan. They are stuck being white. Someday they will realize how much their white supremacy idiocy has damaged them and impoverished them culturally and economically. But trust me on this, my acceptance in these foreign cultures isn’t just based on my language and cultural skills but also my whitishness. My pink skin and high level white education make me both a curiosity and an asset, the perfect person to help represent them in a system dominated by white, Western European, English speaking culture.
So even in Senegal, wrestling with Lutters, I have white privilege. I wrestled in university taught by a white coach and have wrestled both Greco-Roman and Free Style and I played football coached by white men. They were astonished that an old white guy could give them serious competition but truthfully their technical skills were quite rudimentary and more football than wrestling (all speed and explosion). And there being Multiracial gave me an edge.
There are two styles of wrestling in Senegal. The international version which is where the money is to be found is called Lutte Traditionnelle sans Frappe. Lutte (without hitting) and Lutte Tradtionnelle avec Frappe (with hitting) which is only practiced in Senegal. When they couldn’t beat me in the International form they wanted to wrestle avec Frappe. I started serious Martial Arts training when I was eleven and learned from Asian Sensei. My first teacher was Dan, who would become my Father-in-law. He taught me Choy Li Fut with a lot of help from his father who was a true Master. These young men in rural Senegal had never seen anything like it.
These days I am helping some of those young men build a major grocery warehouse. I am consulting with European engineers and suppliers and introducing them to African American entrepreneurs who want to bring that produce to America and the money people who can make it happen. That includes European and Canadian foreign aid and English, German, and North American merchant banks. One of the young men is my son-in-law.
None of that happens without my white privilege, the privilege that allowed me to learn the language and cultural of foreign aid and investment banking. But it also doesn’t happen if I am white.
Returning to my original point, I am certainly privileged, incredibly privileged. I am not sure it is entirely white privilege but it is a critical part of my privilege. But I am not white. This implies white privilege is a social and cultural construct that is more flexible than it appears.