We live surrounded by white images, and white in this world is synonymous with the good, light, beauty, success, so that, despite ourselves sometimes, we run after that whiteness and deny our darkness, which has been made into the symbol of all that is evil and inferior.
As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.
I don't care if I tell that story and John Roderick gets up afterward and yells, 'I hope you enjoyed the white privilege, mortality comedy of John Hodgman!' That's me!" I'm going to play a sad Handsome Family song at the end and I guarantee you everyone is going to love it because, sometimes, you need a grown man or woman to tell you what you like.
There is no birthright in the white skin that it shall say that wherever it goes, to any nation, amongst any people, there the people of the country shall give way before it, and those to whom the land belongs shall bow down and become its servants.
Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.
one question for me and others like me is whether. . . we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance and, if so, what we will do to lessen them.
White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.
Trying to convince someone that they are a racist or they have White Privilege - if it's in the air they breathe and the culture supports them, sometimes they never have to think about it at all.
White privilege is the other side of racism.
Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
If your white privilege and class privilege protects you, then you have an obligation to use that privilege to take stands that work to end the injustice that grants that privilege in the first place.
There is a consciousness as an agent of one's own destiny as a person in America, there are things that can be done, there are advantages and benefits which exist that are directly related to - and even rest upon - white privilege.
If white privilege is a thing, why are people working so hard to be black? All of the award shows and cultural events favor black culture.
The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can't go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who's sniffing cocaine.
It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.
Yes, racism looks like hate, but hate is just one manifestation. Privilege is another. Access is another. Ignorance is another. Apathy is another, and so on.
Why must we always talk about race anyway? Can't we just be human beings? And Professor Hunk replied - that is exactly what white privilege is, that you can say that. Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
White privilege is the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements benefits and choices bestowed on people solely because they are white. Generally white people who experience such privilege do so without being conscious of it.
I want you to admit that there is such a thing as white privilege.
We should self-examine and talk about things like our own white privilege and these phony senses of being an artist.