By Josaphine Khamasi
Derrick Bell, civil rights lawyer, activist and professor for decades in his lecture on Thursday, February 21, 2002 mainly spoke about his views on the process of school desegregation as it functioned to only symbolically improve education in this country. He also touched on another topic that I feel deserves equal or greater attention – that is the whole concept of whiteness as “property”, and its partner-in-crime, white skin privilege.
Whiteness as property, how I understood him to define it, and how I’ve experienced it in my life, means that even if you have no material possessions, if you’ve got white skin this system which advantages whites at the expense of “others,” you still have access to more resources than a person of color in the same economic situation (white supremacists might disagree, though). White skin privilege manifests itself in several ways: for example, one can actually see, rent, or purchase housing anywhere one can afford and be able to assume that the neighbors will be pleasant or at least neutral. One can criticize our government and talk about how much one fears its policies and behavior without being asked to turn in ones citizenship at the door. It means that one can choose public accommodations (hotels, restaurants etc) without fearing that people of your race cannot get in or will be mistreated (wwwlspokanehumanrights.org/ccrr/packet/article.html). It also means that my almost five-year-old nephew, the only black child in his class has to be more aware of how he interacts with those little white girls because his skin prejudices some parents about his intentions. I can take none of these very simple things for granted. In fact, there are still some roads in many parts of this country, on which I cannot safely drive at night.
Many people are willing to agree that “other” groups have been systematically disadvantaged. A few will even be able to understand that it continues today (just because a wolf is wearing a sheep costume doesn’t mean that its essential nature has changed). Very few are able to understand that when one part of a society is disadvantaged, another is advantaged. The Native Americans weren’t just massacred and swindled; many Americans (generally white) did this precisely for the purpose of getting financial and other gains. Workers in this country aren’t just getting low wages and being restructured ‘just because’; there is a system that disadvantages the poor for the sake of profiting the rich (if you disagree, check the difference between corporate welfare, and people welfare). These are not independent variables; there is a direct and controlled relationship between the level of exploitation of some and the level of achievement of others. So what does that mean, really? It means that not everything that white people have in this country has been earned through their bootstraps. Some things, like the benefit of doubt, have been institutionally bestowed on white people in this country. But it also means more than that.
Power relations, even in this country, are not solely matters of black and white. The overarching purpose of the “Founders” of this country was to protect property – the property of those who already had it, from those who were seeking to get some. Remember, when they were talking that “all men are created equal,..yadda, yadda, yadda,” (yadda – another great product of a multicultural society) even those with the property of whiteness were being disenfranchised on some level. So, if you have white skin and are poor (that includes the middle class because our so-called wealth is really only debt), you are being privileged in one way, and yet, just like with me, the social contract wasn’t written for/with you either. Despite the whole bootstraps ideology, many of us are only supposed to go so far.
This country has been built and continues to be built by the blood, sweat and tears of those at the bottom of the system. Often it has been black folks, but it is also immigrants and the poor (in this country and others). Some of us are screwing each other within this system (racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, whatever) and we are all screwing the rest of the world. We benefiting from the misery our corporations, supported by our good ol’boys and gals in the army, inflict upon the world. Still we are all simultaneously getting screwed by those above us in the pecking order. The quicker we realize that being white, or being American, or being middle class is perhaps not enough compensation, the better. It’s increasingly not enough for me.
