Facing Up to White Privilege

It hurts to hear some stuff that’s said about me, and normally, when I hear it, whatever it is, two incongruous things happen in my brain at once. One is that I try to understand the person. My over-sized empathy gland kicks in and I try to see it from the other person’s point of view. This process can last for minutes, or days, or even decades, depending on the other thing that happens.

That other thing is my defensive filters. They want to explain why what they said is wrong. Usually, that’s only happening internally. Rarely, I might look for, often unwarranted, support from a friend. I always feel like this is a bad move on my part, because most of my friends, most of the time, will tell me they don’t see whatever the bad thing is. Worse, sometimes they also get defensive on my behalf, bolstering my defensive attitude. (The only thing worse, of course, is if they agree with the other person. That really sucks.)

Eventually, I come to a sort of inner peace, with empathy prevailing overall. I manage to face the truth of what was said, at least from the perspective of the person making the observation. Sometimes I manage to address my shortcomings. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I talk to the person again to express my agreement, and work mightily to try not to give any excuses.

White privilege was one of these things.

Before I’d heard the phrase, I was aware of the concept. People of color did not have the same opportunities as white people. My ancestors and those like them did terrible, unforgivable things for hundreds of years to other people’s ancestors. The effects of those actions reverberate for generations. I have carried in my heart the remorse and guilt that my predecessors should have felt. I wonder often about what can be done.

But the phrase “white privilege” reinvigorated this introspection in a whole new way. Instead of putting the problem on my ancestors, it put the onus directly on my shoulders, and the weight hangs heavy.

My defensive filters kicked into high gear. I struggled with the phrase because I didn’t feel privileged. My parents grew up poor. My dad worked his way from truck driver to executive in a world wide moving and storage business, until his alcoholism began chipping away at his success. By the time I was twelve, we had lost every material thing except an old car, had retreated to my parent’s hometown clear across the country, and moved in with my maternal grandmother, who was raising my cousin, living off her social security and what would now be called a reverse mortgage. On this meager income, I saw her repeatedly “lending” money that would never come back to a steady trickle of friends and relatives.

I was ostracized in junior high school and I worked from the time I was ten to buy what I needed. Our view from my grandmother’s house was of warehouses out the front window and trucks out the back. We burned scrap wood from a box factory for heat and cooking. There was little hot water in the summer because it was heated by the wood cook stove.

Eventually, my mother got a factory job and she scrambled up on her feet, pulling my dad and grandma and me along with her. I continued to work and go to school, which got better, and went on to college.

The idea that I was somehow privileged seemed counter to my experiences. It took a long time to sink in.

When I was thirteen, a friend stayed the night. We stayed up very late playing some board game … maybe Monopoly … and when the game was over, we decided to get a frozen pizza. There weren’t a lot of stores open at two in the morning in the sixties. 7-Eleven wasn’t just the store’s name, it was their hours. But there was an all-night gas station with a little store that my friend knew about, a couple of miles from the house. We bundled up and headed out, walking fast and talking and laughing our way to the store. We bought our pizza and a couple of cans of pop with a bunch of change and headed back. A policeman stopped us and quizzed us. What were we doing out so late? Did our parents know we were out? Did we know what time it was? And so on. He looked us over and sent us on our way.

In high school I encountered the police a few times. Once neighbors reported gunfire and the police showed up at the door asking questions. Another friend and I had been shooting off some fireworks under an overpass because it amplified the noise. The officer walked through the house to my room, undoubtedly saw the open box of fireworks on the dresser, asked my friend some questions, and went on his way. That was the end. Another time I was in possession of a gravestone with a date from the 1800s that someone else (no, really) had taken. I put it out in the yard at Halloween.  The police quizzed my grandmother who told the officer “some kids must have put it there.”

And at seventeen, fire cracker friend was driving as fast as his dad’s Olds 88 would go down a back road and was pulled over. He was let go with a warning.

In college, friends and I would often walk late at night to a pancake place half a mile away. The city police must have pulled us over a dozen times that year, shone lights in our eyes, gathered our identifications, quizzed us about where we were going, asked us the color of our clothes and so on, and then returned our IDs and turned us loose. It was, we thought, irritating but funny. After about the third time we started talking back to them, taunting them just a little. “Oh, come on. You’re kidding, right? What were we doing?”

“What color are your shoes?”

“Well, they’re grey. They used to be black but I didn’t want them to look new so I bleached them? I kind of used too much bleach so they’re kind of almost white in spots – light grey I guess really. What color are yours?”

Then one day, my friend Mitch and I walked over to my brother’s house – my brother was a professor at the college we went to. We were supposed to meet my mom there and all have dinner together. He wasn’t home yet but I knew where the key was and we let ourselves in. We were listening to music and talking, Mitch looked out through the gap in the curtains and said, “Wall, there are cops everywhere.”

I went to the front door and opened it to look out at what was going on, and a policeman with a shotgun swung around from beside the door and leveled the gun at my face. (Note: I am pretty proud of this next moment.) I stared at the gun, and I said, “Ca-ca-can I help you?”

He asked if I knew who lived here, and he asked for ID. I’m not sure exactly what was going to come next, but then, unexpectedly, one of the police stood up from behind one of the many cars surrounding the house and said, “They’re okay. I know them.” He was one of the officers that regularly quizzed us on our way to drink late night coffee.

It was these stories that brought me to begin to understand the idea of white privilege, to where I am right now in this journey I’m on, coming to terms with the idea. Many of these encounters made me nervous, but, except for the gun in my face, I never feared for my safety. I was never handcuffed, never rode in the back of the police car, never taken to the police station, never held in custody. My future was never jeopardized. My opportunities were never taken from me. I grew up to be a law-abiding teacher, counselor, and eventually a child support professional and an advocate for children and families.

I know none of these incidents made me some kind of thug or villain. They make me a kid who did some stuff he shouldn’t have. And the police knew it too.

As I reflected on these stories over the years, I thought I’d just led a kind of charmed life. I thought I was lucky, to be sure. But it wasn’t luck. It was something much more insidious, much more pervasive. It was undeniably privilege.

I have to ask myself, how might this story have ended – and how early might this story have ended – if I had been born with different skin?

 If you’ve made it this far through this post, you might be wondering what this has to do with child support or public service or management, since those are my usual focal points. I write more specifically about that in a few days. For now, though, consider this: if you grow up in a world in which you are not among the privileged, if the government and the courts and the decision makers have a history of deciding unequally about the fate you those like you, then why would you go to court when served? Why would you expect fairness during a contempt action? Why would you voluntarily seek out services from an agency? And if many of our customers and potential customers see us in that sort of light, and worse, if we deserve some of that perception, then what do we need to do as a community to earn trust and change perceptions?