Check Out This Fucking Brilliant Post

by judgesnineteen

I didn’t know that even in black families with the same income as my family (which were probably rare because they probably had less chance of getting the education my dad got), black people had less wealth than my family had, and that the difference in wealth was due to the accumulation of racist government policies and white privileges. I didn’t know that the kind of cocaine more commonly used by black people was punished 100 times more harshly than the kind more commonly used by white people. I didn’t know that black women try to change their appearance to look more like white women because they’ve gotten the message that black is ugly. I didn’t know that the reason other races have their own special clubs and magazines and TV shows and so on was because they didn’t feel welcome in ours, and I was completely unaware that my clubs and magazines and TV shows and so on weren’t just general, they were white. I didn’t realize that if I was able to see white as general it was because of racism - because I saw white as the Norm, because I had no trouble momentarily forgetting about the existence of people of color, because I saw people of color as the Special Case, the people that would only be on a TV show if it was expressly trying to prove it wasn’t racist, and that PC stuff is so annoying, isn’t it?
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But what makes privilege so dangerous is that it includes the luxury to ignore. As Kate Harding said: That’s what privilege is. It’s the option to ignore nasty shit that doesn’t directly affect my own life, my career, my relationships, my bank account, my social standing, my housing situation, etc. I can ignore people of color; they can’t ignore white people. I can ignore racism; they can’t. And when I ignore them and I ignore racism, I make the institution of racism stronger, because I cover for it. I can swear up and down that it’s not there because I don’t see it, then sit on the pile of advantage I have and yell down at black people that they must not be working hard enough. There aren’t a whole lot of people in the US anymore who are willing to openly say they hate people with a certain color of skin, but there are plenty of people who are willing to ignore what happens to people with a certain color of skin, and if there’s no listening to what people of color are saying, no awareness of the long history of institutionalized racism, no acknowledgment that it was more than “hard work” that got white people where they are today, and not even much concern for what it’s like to be a person of color because they’re not your friends or really on your radar, can you really be so surprised that racism is still around?