I’m “white”. Well, white is not really “white”. My house is white. Compared to my house, I’m actually quite brown. But compared to some other folks who have much darker skin, somehow I’m classified as “white”. These days being “white” is a bad thing. Somehow it seems I’m responsible for most of the world’s problems. I have what is called “white privilege”, which I understand has somehow given me an undeserved and unearned “leg up” on others who do not share my approximate skin color. I am told I have had unfair advantages as compared to others whose levels of melanin in their stratified squamous epithelium of their epidermis is higher.
Funny, I don’t remember ever having that unearned special privilege that my skin color has supposedly given me. As a child, when my parents weren’t sure where the food was coming from for the rest of the week, I guess they didn’t know about the white privilege they had. When the car had no gas and we had to walk everywhere, my white parents should have cashed in some of that white privilege to put food on the table and gas in the tank. When the TV broke and it took three years to save up to buy another one, we absentmindedly forgot about our white privilege. But for the boxes of food which would occasionally show up anonymously on the porch, our white privilege would have been stretched pretty thin.
When I got married to my spouse (who is also white), I sold my car to buy the rings for the engagement and wedding and walked, rode a bicycle, or rode the bus (if I could afford the busfare). Going on a date was walking down to the bakery to buy a bagel (yes A bagel), one bagel and split it because we couldn’t afford two bagels. Guess we had misplaced our white privilege.
Working my way through college, doing whatever job my white privilege could get me, I cleaned test tubes, fed and cleaned up rat and mouse cages in research laboratories, and worked the pizza oven at a take out place. Some of my “white privilege” friends in college sold their blood plasma for food (and occasionally beer) money. I was glad to get into my particular program, since they had quotas which selected a designated quantity of a limited number of slots for people who were other than “white”.
By the time our first child came along, the student loan payments were greater than the rent. Paying for diapers sucked a chunk of change out of the already strapped budget. Too bad the diaper store didn’t recognize that we had white privilege. We’ve both experienced being pulled over by the police in a traffic stop. Too bad the police officers didn’t get the memo that they weren’t supposed to pull over “white” people.
Somehow I’m a bad guy because of the color of my skin which has somehow entitled me to advantages which I am hard strapped to ever find or remember. No, I really don’t think I’m ever going to apologize to anybody or feel badly about being “white”. Especially not to people regardless of the shade of melanin in their skin, who have managed to live off of government handouts or find some other way to survive without working hard, and blame their lack of success or prosperity on being “disadvantaged”. Especially not to elected governmental officials who somehow feel guilty about their white privilege of raking in millions in donations. Especially not to people who make a living selling a racial discrimination mantra and also creating an industry around fighting “White privilege”.
Fortunately that first black president, Abraham Lincoln organized a great huge army of black soldiers to form the Union army, under the command of that great black general Ulysses S. Grant to fight and die in the Civil War to free the slaves. Oh wait, maybe some of those people were white? Can’t be that white people could possibly fight and die in the Civil war to free the slaves. History must be wrong. Those white people are inherently racist, so they couldn’t have possibly fought and died to free the slaves….
I can hardly wait to begin paying reparations out of my tax dollars, especially since none of my actual ancestors ever had any slaves or were involved at all in slavery. As a matter of fact, nobody in my family was even in this country before the end of the civil war in the US. But they had a tremendous amount of white privilege as they worked in a factory, had to live in company housing and shop at the company store. Kids didn’t go to school, they went to work in the factory. That was all included at no extra charge in their white privilege.
I think anybody who is born in the USA regardless of the amount of color in your skin, has won the lottery, compared to most other countries in the world. So if you live in the US, stop complaining about how bad you have it because of ___________________ whatever. If you live somewhere else, especially in a “third world” country, maybe you have something to complain about. But if you are reading this, on a computer or phone, maybe you don’t have it so bad either.
Lost in the Fog 