Realities of White Privilege

White Supremacy, part 3

The tacit assumptions of White Supremacy show up in many subtle ways. When we make hiring decisions based on which applicant is a "better fit," how much of the perceived fit has to do with fitting in with the white culture of that workplace and its assumptions that whiteness and white culture is better? Do we even recognize whiteness as a culture – or do we think that culture describes nonwhite ways, while whites are merely exhibiting culture-less common sense and universal rationality?

Pretending to be colorblind, to not see color, merely enables oppression based on color to go unchallenged. Formal equality can fail to address the realities of inequality – an insight Anatole France expressed when he said,

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

That kind of formal equality is merely a tool of adding harassment to the disadvantaged.

The tacit assumptions of white supremacy show up in numbers. Let us remember: Blacks are less than 13% of the populations, yet, as best we can tell since many police departments do not report, blacks are 31% of all fatal police shooting victims, and 39% of those killed by police when not attacking. Yes, it's worth remembering that 61% of the "killed by police when not attacking" category are not blacks. Still, the number that are is disproportionate.

Young black males, ages 15-19, are 21 times more likely to be to be shot and killed by the police than young white males. Between 2005 and 2008, 80% of NYPD stop-and-frisks were of blacks and Latinos. Only 10% of stops were of whites. 85% of those frisked were black; only 8% were white. Only 2.6% of all stops (1.6 million stops over 3.5 years) resulted in the discovery of contraband or a weapon. Whites were more likely to be found with contraband or a weapon.

Blacks – again, 13% of the U.S. population – are 14% of regular drug users, but are 37% of those arrested for drug offenses, and 56% of those in state prisons for drug offenses.

One in every 15 black men (and 1 in every 36 Latino men) are currently incarcerated, while for white men the statistic is 1 in 106. Prison sentences of black men were nearly 20% longer than those of white men for similar crimes in recent years.

Whites are 78% more likely to be accepted to the same university as equally qualified people of color. A black college student has the same chances of getting a job as a white high school dropout.

For every dollar a white man makes, white women make 78¢, black men make 72¢, black women make 64¢, Latina women make 53¢.

Voter ID laws do not prevent voter fraud, but do disenfranchise millions of young people, minorities, and elderly, who disproportionately lack the necessary government IDs.

African American children comprise 33.2% of missing children cases, but only 19.5% of cases reported in the media.

In 2009, bailed-out banks such as Wells Fargo and others were found to have pushed minority borrowers who qualified for prime loans into subprime loans, which can add as more than $100,000 in interest payments to a mortgage over the life of the loan. Among high-income borrowers in 2006, African Americans were three times as likely as whites to pay higher prices for mortgages: 32.1% compared to 10.5%. When looking for a home, black clients looking to buy are shown 17.7% fewer houses for sale, and black renters learn about 11 percent fewer rental units. Black car buyers are charged $700 more on average than white car buyers of the same car.

In one study thousands of identical resumes were mailed to prospective employers: Identical except only for the name. A black sounding name – say, Daunte Williams instead of David Williams – was 50% less likely to be called back. Fifty percent.

Doctors did not inform black patients as often as white ones about the option of an important heart catheterization procedure. White legislators – in both political parties -- did not respond as frequently to constituents with black sounding names.

(For more of the numbers see, "The Ultimate White Privilege Statistics and Data Post")

But in recent years we have been seeing a new resolve to change numbers like these. The Black Lives Matter movement, William Barber’s Moral Mondays coalition building, the various resistance movements that have sprung up since the election, the UUA’s unprecedented call for congregations to hold teach-ins about white supremacy indicate a new willingness to confront the reality and change it. NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practice has been ruled unconstitutional.

While the most recent news from Tulsa is that yet another officer was acquitted this week for yet another shooting of an unarmed black man, we are also seeing officers summarily fired for unwarranted violence, which we didn’t used to see so much.

I know our baby steps are too small, need to come faster and step longer, but the fact that small steps are happening shows that larger steps are possible.

Michael Eric Dyson’s book Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America urges whites to take action. Make what reparations we can. Educate ourselves – and Dyson provides some great books to start with. Talk to other white people and teach them what’s going on. Show up to protests, rallies, and local community meetings to be a voice for ending the injustice – but don’t dominate and take over. Make more black acquaintances: visit black folk in schools, jails, and churches. Bring active empathy to what you hear. Beyond acquaintanceship, seek to cultivate new friendships with black people. When we have cried together and shared the pain of the wounding of racism, we become also able to share the joy of being alive together. We become able to the laugh together. Of this is the substance of freedom and equality made.

Prayer

Dear Source of Healing and Wholeness we call by many names,

We attend our places of worship, heartsick for beloved community, torn inside by the stresses of negotiating a world that demonstratively holds that some lives matter more than others. We are seeking inner peace, for there is no peace for our spirits when millions of our neighbors are singled out for mistreatment, and have been for generations. A faith institution concerned with healing spirits that does not turn its energies to address the social causes that wound both white and black spirits is not doing its job.

We gather in the hopes of being strengthened in our capacity to be agents of healing and meaning and hope. The peace of living lives committed to building that community for future generations is available to us. Let us continue to find in our worship and in our lives the inspiration that shakes us from complacency, for inspiration that doesn’t shake us to renewed compassionate action is a sham. We pray for the inspiration that is genuine. Amen.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "White Supremacy"
See also
Part 1: Truth With Your Own Tribe
Part 2: Believing In Privilege

Believing In Privilege

White Supremacy, part 2

The Long and Continuing Ideology of White Supremacy

After the Civil War, slavery continued under different names. One of those names was "sharecropping."

Another name was "incarceration." The 13th amendment ended slavery or involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime,” so the white power structure started fabricating crimes to convict blacks of to continue slavery.

We have seen the photographs from the 1930s of smiling, celebrating white faces, where in the background we see what is hanging from a tree and realize that they are partying because murdering a black person makes them feel good. The Jim Crow era of separate water fountains and bathrooms – of restaurants and hotels that barred blacks was not just an inconvenience. It was a constant reminder that if you were black, you were despised.

Imagine housing policy that systematically corrals you into segregated neighborhoods, and then enforces poverty in those neighborhoods by denying home loans or business loans to any attempt at development. White people who advance up the economic ladder are generally committed and hard-working – and, somewhere along the line they got personal and business loans, they got insurance that lowered their risk, they got various financial services that have been systematically denied to blacks.

And if the people in your neighborhood can’t pull themselves up by building business that serve you, then you go unserved: African American neighborhoods have often been limited in their access to banking, healthcare, retail merchandise and even groceries. Deliberate policies preventing development also lead to abandoned buildings – which facilitate drug dealing and other illegal activity.

If a referee is unconsciously swayed by a little booing, what’s it like to be subject to continuous booing your entire life no matter what you do – and knowing the booing can turn into beating or killing at any moment?

And it’s not like that’s all in the past. We saw eight years of unprecedented disrespect to a president – including doubts about his citizenship – because he was black. And we followed that by electing a man whose company the Justice Department sued ― twice ― for not renting to black people. In 1992, his Hotel and Casino company in New Jersey was fined $200,000 because managers would remove African-American card dealers at the request of a certain big-spending gambler. During the campaign, he was supported by white supremacists – that is, the explicit kind – whom he refused to condemn. His rhetoric is consistent in treating racial groups as monoliths. He encouraged the mob anger that resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of the Central Park Five. At a campaign rally he condoned the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester. And we elected him anyway. He drew only 8 percent of black voters, and only 46 percent of all voters, but he got 58 percent of white voters. For a 58 percent majority of white voters, the candidate’s racism was not a deal breaker. Then he “picked top advisers and cabinet officials whose careers are checkered by accusations of racially biased behavior.” The ideology of white supremacy continues.

Privilege Generates the Belief It is Deserved

Another bit of human psychology that isn’t itself about race, but then manifests racially is revealed by observations of subjects playing the monopoly board game. Two people play, but with different rules. One randomly selected player started the game with $2,000 of monopoly money, got $200 for passing Go each time, and threw two dice for every move – which, you may recall, is the normal way monopoly is played. Let’s call this player Bob. The other player, let’s call him Bill, started with $1,000, got $100 for passing Go each time, and threw one die for every move.

“The students play for 15 minutes under the watchful eye of two video cameras, while down the hall researchers huddle around a computer screen, later recording the subjects’ every facial twitch and hand gesture.” (New York Magazine, 2012)

What happens? Initially "Bob"

"reacted to the inequality between him and his opponent with a series of smirks, an acknowledgment, perhaps of the inherent awkwardness of the situation. 'Hey,' his expression seemed to say, 'This is weird and unfair, but whatever.' Soon, though, as he whizzes around the board, purchasing properties and collecting rent, whatever discomfort he feels seems to dissipate....He balloons in size, spreading his limbs toward the far ends of the table. He smacks his playing piece as makes the circuit – smack, smack, smack – ending his turns with a board-shuddering bang!...As the game nears its finish, [Bob] moves his [piece] faster....He’s all efficiency. He refuses to meet [Bill’s] gaze. His expression is stone cold as he takes the loser’s cash."

People who are given unfair advantages start to act like they deserve it, must have earned it, must be better somehow. So Iowa Congressman Steve King last year wondered where

“are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people?...
Where did any other subgroup of people [other than whites] contribute more to civilization?” (NYTimes, 2016)

Western civilization, he said, is rooted in “Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of American and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world.”

The phenomenon of people born on third base believing they hit a triple is built into us – it’s in our nature -- which is to the detriment of the guy born on third but also to the detriment of the guy who is still at the plate trying to deal with the curve balls he’s being thrown. The guy at the plate is also likely to start believing the guy on third base must have hit a triple. It’s what he keeps insisting, and who has the energy to refute it when the next difficult pitch is about to come at you. That’s how white supremacy works.

I grew up with – and maybe you did too -- the mythic tales of the rise of Western Civilization, the kind of stories about ourselves that congressman Steve King so evidently believes in. Will and Ariel Durant’s “Story of Civilization” stretched to 11 volumes, the first published in 1935, with a new volume every few years until the last in 1975. It was hugely popular, sold over two million copies. The Durants “told human history (mostly Western history) as an accumulation of great ideas and innovations, from the Egyptians, through Athens, Magna Carta, the Age of Faith, the Renaissance and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.” (Brooks) While the Durants never said, "white people are genetically superior," or "are God's favorite," they also provided no other explanation for why these "great ideas and innovations" did not appear in the pre-Colombian Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, or East Asia. White readers were left to assume that there must be something special about white people.

I grew up inspired by that kind of story of my place in history. I came eventually to understand that the silences in that story -- silences about why the West's ideas and innovations occurred where and how they did -- created spaces within which racist assumptions could flourish. Twenty years ago, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel helped many us get a better understanding of the rise of European wealth and power as geographically determined. Temperate climates, suitable soil, and availability of domesticable animals created the initial conditions that freed a little time for technological development and the rise of population centers which fueled further sharing of ideas and innovations. Moreover, close proximity of humans to each other and their domesticated animals led to diseases and eventual immunities not found among other humans. The technological development (steel, guns) and the immunity (germs) were the key means by which Europeans came to dominate the globe. The Europeans aren't smarter or more virtuous by nature, they are just the beneficiaries of geographic good luck.

Humans and chimps have a deep history of conquering each other when they can, so any people that stumbled upon the means for vast conquest was liable to use it. With that domination also came the willful destruction and erasure of the advances and contributions of Nonwestern peoples – advances all the more remarkable because not supported by the powerful geographic advantages of the civilization that emerged and spread from the fertile crescent into similarly temperate climes.

It was a long march through the last 3,000 years to the rise of white supremacy. It will be a long march to dismantling its injustices.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "White Supremacy"
See also
Part 1: Truth With Your Own Tribe
Part 3: Realities of White Privilege

Truth With Your Own Tribe

White Supremacy, part 1

Charles Deas' The Trapper and his Family (1845) depicts
 a voyageur and his Native American wife and children

"Oh Shenandoah" (also called simply "Shenandoah" or "Across the Wide Missouri") is a traditional American folk song of uncertain origin, dating to the early 19th century. The song appears to have originated with Canadian and American voyageurs or fur traders traveling down the Missouri River in canoes, and has developed several different sets of lyrics. Some lyrics refer to the American Indian chief Shenandoah and a canoe-going trader who wants to marry his daughter. By the mid 1800s versions of the song had become a sea shanty heard or sung by sailors in various parts of the world. ("Oh Shenandoah," Wikipedia)

Our American Myth has depended on images from our early history like the hardy fur-trader, wresting a living from a challenging wilderness – yearning for home and for the native chief’s daughter. It seemed heroic and noble, and our hearts go out to the lonesome traders in their canoes on the Missouri.

Hearing the stories of early American history as a child in elementary school, there was no hint that this was anything problematic about:

• the purely instrumental and short-term view of nature – there to be despoiled of its resources, such as fur, without regard to welfare of other species and ecosystems;
• the treatment of the native peoples as equally there for the pillaging – or exterminating. 

White men didn’t mind taking Native brides, though they’d never stand for their daughters taking a Native husband. Patriarchal attitudes about women intersected with racial ideas about which men had access to any woman and which did not.

One-hundred-fifty to two hundred years later, Woody Guthrie taught us to sing this land is your land.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the red wood forest to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

How does that make you feel? It feels warm and fuzzy and inclusive. If we know about Woody Guthrie, we know he was saying this land doesn’t belong just to the corporations and the bosses, but to all of us. When my third-grade class sang that song at a class recital for our parents, I’m pretty sure it didn’t occur to anyone in the room to wonder how Native Americans would feel about this warm, fuzzy, inclusiveness we were having about our land. We took our supremacy so for granted that it was invisible to us. More of us can see it now, though we still have a ways to go.

Our Unitarian Universalist Association is examining the ways that our tacit assumptions that whiteness and white culture are better. So the call went out for Unitarian Universalist congregations to hold teach-ins on white supremacy. Many voices in the African American community have told us, “you white folks have to do your own work.” And the African American writer Michael Eric Dyson addressing white people says,

“You see, my friends, there is only so much I can say to white folk, only so much they can hear from me or anyone who isn’t white. You must be an ambassador to truth with your own tribes.”

Yes, we certainly need to attend to black voices, and defer to their authority to describe their experience, but white people also need to speak up as part of processing what we are learning.

There are differing ideas about what racism is. Racism

“signals the power not only to hate, but to make that hate into law, and into convention, habit, and a moral duty.” (Dyson 152)

– so if a black were to have a bigoted, discriminatory prejudice against whites, that wouldn’t be racism because he doesn’t command the institutional power to make his prejudice into the law and custom of the land. But the word racism isn’t always understood that way. White supremacy cuts through all that. “Reverse white supremacy” is still white supremacy, whereas it isn’t clear what, if anything, “reverse racism” is.

It’s in all of us – white or black or Asian or Hispanic or whatever. We all carry this tacit notion that whites are better. White supremacy is in black activist Cornel West, who said at the UU General Assembly in 2015:

“I've got a lot of vanilla brothers and sisters that walk with me and say, Brother West, Brother West, you know, I'm not a racist any longer. Grandma's got work to do, but I've transcended that. And I say to them, 'I'm a Jesus-loving, free, black man, and I've tried to be so for 55 years, and I'm 62 now, and when I look in the depths of my soul I see white supremacy because I grew up in America. And if there's white supremacy in me, my hunch is you've got some work to do too.'"

James Baldwin wrote about his father that

“he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.”

White superiority infects the souls of black folk somewhat differently from the way it infects the souls of white folk, but in this country, it infects all of us. Michael Eric Dyson writes about a time his father said something disparaging about him.

“He lived in a prison of disbelief in his own worth, therefore he doubted mine too.”

My students at Fisk University, the historically black university in Nashville where I taught in the 1990s, told me about walking down the sidewalk beside a car stopped at a red light and hearing the sound of the car’s doors locking. It occurred to me that I probably wouldn’t even notice the sound at all. But when that happens over and over, it breaks through to consciousness. When I’m in stores, employees don’t follow me around.

Look, human psychology without race in the picture shows us some things. A careful analysis of football games has shown that there is a slight home-field advantage, and that advantage consists entirely in this: in the final quarter of close games, referees are a tiny bit less likely to call a penalty against the home team. They are human beings, and they don’t like being booed. They’ve been trained to put that out of their minds and call what they see. They know that fans are just being fans and that they, the referees, are just doing their job, and in a few more minutes this game will all be over and they can just walk away and forget it. They know their colleagues and bosses will back them up all the way, and, not that it matters, but they also know there are just as many fans watching on TV cheering for the visiting team. They have every possible social and legal protection, but being reviled, however temporarily, still affects them.

Applying that human psychology to the racial situation, how much more profound must be the affects on the hearts and spirits of anyone recognized as black of 400 years of contempt and hatred?

When my students at Fisk would remind me that under the constitution slaves were counted as just 3/5ths of a person, I was at first a little puzzled by the outrage about that. After all, slaves are zero percent of a person. How could 3/5ths, which was just for purposes of counting a state’s population to determine its share of representation in Congress and the Electoral College, be worse than the zero that slavery already entails? Eventually I began to see the indignity added to the oppression: Not only do you get no vote at all, no rights, but your mere presence as an owned human being gives more voting power to your oppressor. In the strange mathematics of humiliation, 3/5ths times zero makes something even lower than zero.

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This is part 1 of 3 of "White Supremacy"
See also
Part 2: Believing In Privilege
Part 3: Realities of White Privilege