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A large problem that society faces is that nobody wants to feel like their accomplishments were easier to achieve or that they had a head start over the competition. This feeling is exemplified in the Caucasian political right’s outright denial of “White Privilege.” To an extent, I understand where they are coming from and even used to have similar ideas. This is because a lot of white people do struggle throughout their lives to be able to succeed, so telling them that they have white privilege can be offensive when the definition is not fully understood.
Before I really get started I want to make it clear that just being white does not mean that you are racist but ignoring or denying the privilege that white people are born with does contribute to the oppression of minorities. For a white person, the first step to helping this problem is admitting that there is a problem.
The term “white privilege” does not actually mean that every white person in America is living a privileged life while every minority is consistently suffering. Peggy Mcintosh, the author of White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsackdescribes white privilege as “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.”All that having white privilege means is that you were born with white skin and most likely into a white family, so you will not face the oppression that all minorities inherently face. If you are a part of a group of people that is free from oppression, then you are by definition “privileged.”
A common response to these claims is that “minorities are not oppressed in America because slavery has been over for over a century and civil right legislation happened in the 1960s” or some opponents to the idea of white privilege will ask you to point out a law that is racist. These arguments are flawed because a group of people can be oppressed without the oppression being backed by racist legislation.
Throughout American history, white people have gotten unearned privilege over minorities because of racist laws or a lack of laws ensuring equality, but white privilege has hung around because of the consequences of these laws and new ways that people and organizations have found to oppress groups of people. An example of a racist law that still impacts the America that we know is the legislation that allowed redlining. Redlining is a systemic way to deny services and opportunity to a group of people which legally happened a lot throughout the 20th century up until the 1960s. What would happen is that the maps of cities would be colored in by the quality of the area and the red areas were where organizations such as banks, insurance, and healthcare would be deny to the residents. The redlined areas were also the only areas that banks would give out mortgage loans to minorities to buy property. While giving out loans to minorities only in redline areas was bad enough, these banks would also only give sub-prime loans to minorities making it very difficult to ever own property. This disparity in property ownership between whites and other minority groups is one of the main causes of the racial wealth gap today. Since minorities were never able to own property in nice neighborhoods, they never had the same opportunity as whites to build wealth.
This is only one of the lasting impacts that racist laws have caused minorities to suffer through for generations, but oppression even happens outside of racist legislation. An example of this is the impact of the War on Drugs in our current society. From the outside the War on Drugs does not seem racist at all! Its goal was to cut down on drug crimes and drugs trafficking, but what did it actually do? There could be and have been entire books written about the negative impact of the War on Drugs, so I do not want to go into intense detail about this war for the sake of both of our time. I will first start out by saying that the War on Drugs has caused our inmate population to rise over 600% since its origins in the 1970s, but wasn’t that the point? To get drug offenders caught and locked up? The only problem is that when the War on Drugs started the number of Americas using drugs was actually decreasing and there are no accepted studies that show that the War on Drugs impacted the number of citizens using drugs even to this day. So, the result of the War on Drugs was that it had no definite impact on drug use, but a 600% increase in prison population. As you are probably thinking, “How does that oppress minorities?” and I think I can answer that question for you. About 80% of federal and 60% of state prison inmates are black or Latino even though this group only makes up about 30% of the population. This could just be that black and Latino people use drugs at a much higher rate than white people, but this isn’t the case. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), almost all races use drugs at about the same rate. This means that the amount of black or Latino inmates is not just an accounted for disparity, but discrimination.
The War on Drugs and redlining are only two examples out of many that can point to the oppression of minorities that white people do not face. Overall, the term white privilege and how it impacts our society is nothing that white people should deny, but something they should fight against so that one day there will actually be no such thing as white privilege.
Citations
Lynsen, Ann. “Racial and Ethnic Minority Populations.” SAMHSA - Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 24 Sept. 2014, www.samhsa.gov/specific-populations/racial-ethnic-minority.
“Race and the Drug War.” Drug Policy Alliance, www.drugpolicy.org/issues/race-and-drug-war.