I'm white but hold your fire!
I have something to offer for consideration. I was recently speaking to my brother about all the people from our childhood that didn't escape addiction, prison, or death and reflected how lucky we were to have dodged all those pitfalls and he pointed something out that I had forgotten, or more likely, never fully grasped the scale of until it came up the other day.
We were troubled kids, but of the spoiled white kid variety... which was particularly troublesome for us since my youth was spent in steady financial decline. I was born middle class, but live in relative poverty, by this point, and never felt like I caught a break anywhere along the way, until a few years ago when the phrase white privilege started getting thrown around.
I was born and raised in/all over middle and eastern TN. I spent a few years in the Army, but other than those few years in TX, I'm a down home Tennessean who grew up in enough small towns to know something was off.
In the discussion with Brad it came out. We were the kind of troubled kids who wore leather and chains and listened to the wrong music but we never did much that was criminal other than some juvenile vandalism, but it turns out we may have been under serious threat of getting eaten by corruption. I'm still talking to family to hash out the details but so far I believe it can be summed up as such:
My mother, while working as a delivery driver for a pizza place ended up in a bad situation with a guy that had very dishonorable intentions. She managed to persuade the guy she'd catch up with him later. When she filed a police report of the attempted assault at some point a judge informed her that this guy's dad had serious connections in the area and pursuing the matter would likely end up with my brother or I getting busted with drugs, whether they were ours or not, and that would be that.
This is where my personal white privilege surfaces. I didn't know it at the time, probably because I just never really listened to mom, but as the story goes, she and her brother went to high school with a guy who ended up with a little weight in the TBI. Mom didn't do very well in life but the rest of her family did so when her affluent brother, deacon of his church, pillar of his community, called his old buddy in Nashville, corruption in the area had bigger problems to deal with than screwing with a couple of stupid kids who never even really had a clue how much trouble could have come down on us.
We didn't end up on a county farm being abused by sadistic guards, or truly disturbed people. We never even worried that was a thing that could happen to us. We lived in a world where innocence matters, or so we thought. For many years now I've been hearing from others that the experience I described isn't the experience they had. I hear stories of being 14 years old the first time a cop drew a gun on them, or getting "the talk" from a parent about how not to get killed just for existing and I don't think any of us should be ok with that. We can do better. We've been reflexively spewing bullshit about how awesome we are for centuries but we rarely come together and prove it.
So if you're a white American and you don't think you're privileged I ask you to consider this... Just because we don't get free stuff with a wink everywhere we go doesn't mean there isn't a degree of privilege we receive just by virtue of being so inherently ingrained with white culture. It's often behind the scenes.
