White Privilege

1. The life successes of people of color (and to a lesser degree some women) are always questionable and suspect when viewed through the gaze of Whiteness (and sexism).
2. The natural order of things equates being White and male with having natural authority and ability.
3. Whiteness equals authority.
4. Whiteness is a get-out-of-jail-free card. Whiteness is also the freedom to be utterly unreflective regarding the foolishness and madness of one's deeds and statements as long as the target of such madness is the Other.
5. White privilege is freedom from accountability.
6. The Obama birth certificate debacle has exposed how to be truly American a person must be White. Whiteness still imagines African Americans and other people of color as semi-permanent outsiders.
7. White privilege is the ability to be "normal" and "invisible." Whiteness is never interrogated.
8. Whiteness is the default position for viewing the world. It is a cognitive map and means of processing reality.
9. Whiteness is the ability and power to reframe reality. Despite whatever documents or evidence that President Obama may offer to silence the growly, rabid hostility of the Birthers and the White Conservative Soul, the terrain for debate will be continually shifted.
10. Despite our protests and the evidence that black and brown folks may bring to the table, racism does not exist until good White folks say that it does.

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This is a summary of this blogpost: Birthers and White Privilege. Please visit the blog and read the full post.

For me, White privilege is when the cashier asks me, a black man, for ID, but does not ask my white wife. We had decided to buy the same things and use the same means of payment at the same till (All on purpose, to prove a point. She asked to see the manager and had it out with him).

White privilege is when I get repeatedly asked in a supermarket where the potatoes (or the onions) are, but probably never any white folks.

White privilege is when I get singled out for a pat-down in the Paris underground, but rarely any white folks.

White privilege is when Marine LePen's party is a serious contender in France, despite the number of âneries it says, when any black canditate has never been a serious contender whatever they say.  On the other side of the pond, Donald Trump and Sarah Palin fill that slot.

White privilege is your building's land-lady never accusing you of damaging the lift the day you move in, and realising afterwards that the damage was old, not new.

White privilege is never being asked where you are from (followed by, No, I mean originally).

White privilege is never having ladies switch their handbag to the other side of where you're going to pass them,

or getting door-locks slammed down at the pedestrian crossing when you cross,

or getting asked what tribe you belong to when you say you're from Africa,

or getting asked for your English name when you reply Rethabile (which is as bad asking for someone's Christian name. What the hell is that?).

White privilege is being free to say someone is playing the race card without knowing the details of their experience.

White privilege is having a god you're grown up worshipping cast in your own colour, despite historical and biblical leanings to the contrary. Which is why I started wondering about religious proclamations in general (if they can lie about what is so evidently untrue, what else have they been lying about?)

White privilege is what white people benefit from in societies across the globe, even in places where they're the numerical minority (which is due to the legacy of colonialism and the system of slavery and Jim Crow laws).