A Different View on White Privilege

White Privilege is a set of words that creates dividing lines. It harbors tension and conjures defensiveness at even its mention. As the racially tense climate of the USA matches July’s scorching heat, this phrase came under heavy debate in my home.

My husband (born and raised in Croatia) looked at me intensely with his hazel eyes across our quaint living room asking “what is white privilege? I don’t experience that, and I don’t think it’s real.” My brown skin pulsated in a kind of confused anger. His pale skin glaring back at me in innocence and intrigue.

Our dialogue began to unravel historical racial tensions. I, clumsily trying to explain what I thought white privilege is and how it has affected my life. He, counter-arguing each point from the objective view of not having this slavery and segregation heat in his veins. No matter how long we debated back and forth, white privilege began to make less and less sense when suddenly these words came through my thick lips…

“What if white privilege is something you cannot know, because it’s all the things you don’t experience.”

My husband works as server at a chain restaurant. He spends hours on his feet being mistreated by consumers and coming home with not-so-full pockets. Back in Croatia, he was on the national swimming team and graduated with a master’s degree in Economics. His family is silently (and sometimes loudly) sharing their disappointment in his decisions and perhaps shame that their middle child has such a demeaning job.

He could help run an entire company there. Here, he takes people’s food orders and hopes for tips.

His parents built a successful accounting firm that still operates in Croatia today. His mother was trained as a chemical engineer but didn’t get to finish her doctoral degree when she became pregnant with their oldest child. His father (RIP), highly intelligent and a scrapper who had an idea for a business, pushed it to success against unsurmountable odds.

I’m a bi-racial Midwesterner whose mother was white (RIP mom) and father is black. I grew up in a town where my parents couldn’t find a place to live because their relationship was sinful. My father worked in a paper factory until it shut down and served meals at the exclusively white country club on the weekends to make extra money. My mom went back to school to become an RN when I was a child.

My father grew up in Jim Crow, which he would never talk about. My mother was disowned by her family because of her husband choice and she lost nursing friends on hospital floors when they found out she had little brown children instead of Irish ones.

My parents didn’t build anything of success together (unless you count my brother and I). They were hard-working and did their best with what life handed them.

In the open dialogue with my husband I realized, his privilege comes from the things he will never know or experience because his skin isn’t the same darkness as mine. That’s why he cannot feel its existence. He cannot touch it or say it’s true because white privilege has more to do with unknowns than knowns.

White privilege has more to do with things he’ll literally never encounter.

It’s not anyone’s fault that this occurs. And, for the record, I’m not broadly looking at white people angrily and feeling I’ve been dismissed in life. But I do understand that I’ve been pulled over in my car for no other reason than I’m brown. I do acknowledge I’ve been followed in higher end clothing stores because I might steal.

For my husband, it means he won’t get the police called on him for sitting in a coffee shop with a group of friends because they look “suspicious.” It means standing outside of a convenience store a little too long won’t get him questioned for “loitering.” It also means he won’t get depicted in movies and television very often as a thug, criminal, drug dealer or otherwise problematic society member.

This is what white privilege looks like in its simplest, purest and most innocent form — it’s all the unsavory happenings he (and other white people) don’t have to deal with.

Remember how I said it’s not anyone’s fault? It’s because privilege is a systematic problem and societal issue that arrived up and down the Americas from the time of the conquistadors to the pilgrims. It’s the remanence of an attempted caste system, a higher and lower, through the easiest visual medium there is — skin tone.

Author Jonathan Raymond once wrote “You can’t know what you don’t know. You can’t know about things you have yet to discover.” Even though I suspect he wasn’t the first person to say this, let me be the first person to say this idea applies to white privilege for those who don’t think it’s real.

White privilege is only unreal for you because it rests as a bias of experience outside your reality. And that’s not your fault.

By the way, the point of my words isn’t to make anyone feel bad. I speak on it in hopes for a bit of openness and tenderness toward the topic supported in a willingness to not turn away from its unpleasantry. I brought it up in hopes to reach those who are like my husband and perhaps help you consider white privilege as real but hidden in a blind spot of encounters you’ll never have to face.

And in the end, I wanted to introduce a different view on white privilege and build a bridge of conversation dismantling the default defensiveness of any skin tone on this topic; especially the ones so like my husband’s and mine.

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