On Martin Luther King Day... January 16, 2012
I am a white male. I may not have a college education, but I’ve certainly been privileged enough to soak up a tremendous amount of information that helped me. I grew up in a city where the white population accounted for between 97.3 % and 94.2%, and in 1989, only 3.2% of the residents fell below the poverty level. I grew up in a household and school system where I had access to computers, and that curiosity about them gave me enough grounding to pursue a successful (if not overwhelming) career in IT. I may have had things and events happen in my childhood that left negative marks upon me while growing up, but it still happened within a bubble of extreme privilege.
And it’s really quite telling about that bubble that I knew almost no one who was black.
As a high school student, I was one of the heavy metal kids in the back parking lot. The kids from Marin City and us, we had a bit of an understanding that essentially translated out to occasionally getting high together, and that was about it. Other than that, our cross pollination was pretty much non-existent. I had no real reason to confront my own inner turmoil over prejudice, because there was no personal face on it. I knew, somewhere deep down, that my mental equation wasn’t really correct – which was that If Urban = Bad, and Black People = Urban, then Black People = Maybe Bad. This was not a conscious thought pattern – nowhere near the top of my day to day burbling thoughts as a resident of Marin County, but it was there. Moving to the Lower Haight in San Francisco did little to alter this perception, mostly because when you’re in your early 20’s, you’re not really thinking about anyone other than yourself. I didn’t exactly carry myself with dignity or respect towards others while I lived there, and because I’d seen enough bad shit happen around that neighborhood, no one got the benefit of the doubt.
It took moving to Chicago, where I could live and work in neighboords and places that had a more balanced ethnic makeup that started to reflect the people that actually lived in the city, to finally come to a place where I broke that equation. I can’t tell you when or where it exactly happened, but one day, it wasn’t Carl the black guy who wrote the query scripts, it was just Carl who wrote the query scripts. It just happened, just like that. And it lead to me finding a way to give people, in general, the benefit of the doubt, because we’re all just exactly that: people.
So why am I relaying this tale of embarrassing awkwardness? And let’s not make any mistakes here – I really didn’t handle myself that well at all around anyone who wasn’t white for awhile, but especially black people. I’m sharing this because I can go to just about any large community website on the internet (and quite a few small ones), and find sneering commentary about how the black experience is wasting MLK’s legacy. It’s galling, and it’s horrifying, because the root of these comments are designed to protect someone’s sense of entitlement to privilege. And while there are so many other resources out there that rightly point out the amazing number of roadblocks to even basic success a black person must overcome versus their white counterparts, what I really want to point out is that when you make these comparisons, you’re not just tearing down black people, you’re tearing down people, period. Because almost all of us are just folks. We succeed and fail not just on the strength of our character or the persistence of will – but according to what we’re born into. Institutionalized racism still exists today, in mighty slabs that are curiously invisible to so many people who aren’t on the ground to see its terrifying might.
Having privilege, and admitting to it, well there’s nothing wrong with that. Understand that you were given chances that others weren’t, and try to be a better person for it. But to pretend that it doesn’t exist, and that it hasn’t shaped how you interact with others, that’s a terrifying lie that you’re selling to yourself. And a fiction that you keep at the expense of others. And on today, when you likely have the day off, maybe you should use the time for some fearless and selfless self-examination, and ask yourself what kind of a person you want to be, with everything that you’ve been given.