Nearly five years after reading an essay by then 31-year old Brian Crooks, I still think about it frequently.
Brian grew up in a suburb very similar to and not far from the town where we raised our three sons. Brian is smart. He plays a musical instrument. He likes sports. He went to a large university, and remains a big fan of his alma mater. All of that sounds just like my boys. But my sons’ youth was different in many ways from Brian’s. Brian is Black. Brian shared examples of overt racism, meanness, ignorance, and the general obliviousness of many white people to the experiences of black people. And yet, in his lengthy essay, Brian never used the term white privilege.
In the four-plus years since I read his essay, the term white privilege has blown into conversations of every topic like the ubiquitous white fluff of a cottonwood tree in May—fluff that drifts into piles, clogs drainage pipes, and obscures window screens. It’s everywhere.
Initially I interpreted white privilege as an accusation of original sin. Whites should feel guilty. Hmm. To what end? It didn’t seem like a very helpful ideology, unless there was some means of redemption. Pondering, I considered how original sin is mitigated in the Christian doctrine. Perhaps there was a parallel. But I could not identify any redemptive savior.
It seemed that whites were supposed to atone for their white privilege without the help of an intercessor. Fortunately, there were plenty of prophets in the wilderness of our fraught racial dysfunction. “Repent,” they cried, “and become an anti-racist.” Many sinners in sackcloth and ashes were already wailing in the public square, confessing their whiteness. So, I studied the scriptures of anti-racism and found them to have the fervor and perplexity of St. Paul without the message of grace. Not only was a message of grace lacking from the anti-racism tract, but the tract also lacked any hope. There was no end point, only endless introspection in an often self-contradicting and ever-tightening spiral of navel gazing. How would I hear the Brian Crooks of the world if I was so self-absorbed?
Clearly, I wasn’t getting it. I needed to go back to the beginning. A 1989 essay by Peggy McIntosh is often considered the genesis of the idea of white privilege. My charitable interpretation of her thesis was that whites are so used to white culture that they don’t notice it anymore—like fish don’t realize they’re wet. She could have saved herself 2000 words, and I might have agreed with her. (Although the question, “What, exactly, is white culture?” nagged at me. Who considers themselves white? Are whites in Appalachia the same culturally as whites in Berkley or Cheyenne? What, exactly, is the white stereotype?)
No time to get sidetracked; I focused again on the McIntosh essay. She had included three ideas in those additional 2000 words that gave me pause. First, she described white privilege as invisible, weightless, and elusive. My reaction was that anything so malleable is ripe for misunderstanding. Second, she considered whether in some cases those with privilege should relinquish privilege, as opposed to extending privilege to others. Relinquishing privilege seemed to me to be a political non-starter. I couldn’t help but think that the Americans with Disabilities Act might not have passed if its champions had advocated, for example, immobilizing the mobile. Third, she acknowledged that there are other privileges besides race, including but not limited to social class, economic class, sex, and religion—they ebb and flow depending on circumstance. Well, yes. Humanity is complicated.
To be fair, I had intentionally gone back to the beginning—and the beginning of white privilege was an academic concept whose originator was just formulating her ideas. So, I kept searching.
Thomas Sowell writes about cosmic injustice, particularly as contrasted with social injustice. Cosmic injustice can be thought of as accidents of history. For example, I exist because my great-grandfather didn’t die of cholera in his youth. Or, I ended up in North America because my great-great-great grandmother scurried onto the first boat to America after she eloped. How much of my life experience can be attributed to those factors, as much as to my whiteness? In many of his writings, Sowell also makes the distinction between racial prejudice and discrimination. The first is an internal belief; the second is an external action. In a free and just society, governed by laws, we can only prosecute actions, not thoughts or beliefs. Yet the white privilege ideology is about beliefs—about the assumptions whites make, not about the actions they take.
Which segues into a point John McWhorter makes. He questions the value of expending all the energy on changing human nature at the expense of working to tangibly improve the Black experience in America. That is, are we going to deal with real, actual discrimination—or are we going to wait until the white race has undergone a complete psychological metamorphosis? He also criticizes the anti-racist scriptures (specifically Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility) as a “…pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people.” Perhaps all the introspection is only narcissism dressed up as social justice.
The more I attempted to untangle the snarl of white privilege, the less it seemed to be a snarl and the more it resembled the cottonwood fluff. At its core is the seed of truth: the predominant culture doesn’t notice its own culture. The rest is just drifting, clogging, obscuring fluff.
I look forward to the day when the fluff is blown away by the four winds. The false prophets will grow bored and move on. The sinners will grow weary of their performative wailing and wander home. Then the public square will be swept clean, and it will be quiet enough to hear Brian Crooks:
“This is what it means to be Black in America. …I’m not seeking your sorrow. I’m seeking your understanding. I just want you to understand that this is real. We’re not exaggerating it, and we’re not making it up.”
And we, instead of peering endlessly inward, can look up and see Brian.
