OK, I have to respond to this because I’m a white man. I did grow up poor, and am what many would consider successful measured by material wealth. But despite experiencing poverty—spending food stamps my dad gave me to buy milk, getting five pound blocks of cheese from the government food truck—I confess I don’t think “hard work” contributed to that success. White privilege helped me at key moments in my life— get a good job, pay raise, travel, mortgage, avoid routine traffic stops from turning violent, and the like as you point out.
I know I’ve benefited from this system. There were very few black kids in my white collar high school in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York, while the inner city Buffalo had few white kids, the reverse. My school was well funded, considered second best in the state of New York for public schools. I coasted through it though I did learn since Ii have a love of learning more than a love of studying. The one black kid who lived in our district I graduated with who I considered a friend went on to Harvard after acing the SATs. His father, who was black American, made him study and take advantage of this school (his mother was white and I’m sure she cared too). It was clear from his example that when given the chance at a good school and with parents behind you, the best is possible and ‘color’ or race doesn’t play into it at all.
His success at school wasn’t because he was an elite or abnormal example, but because of the chance his family gave him and the deliberate choice to live in a white and white collar district. As we lived in the North, with a small graduating class size of less than 300, and it was white collar, “everyone” seemed to like him, and I was picked on more than him. Had I stayed in my white blue collar town and not moved, I would have been bullied and had he gone there he would have to despite his size (he was a big guy, on the football team and a heavyweight wrestler). He would have also had to endure a lot of N-word racial slurs as well.
That is the “legacy” of the white system—a vastly uneven playing field. This year, more than thirty years after I graduated, there was a shooting in Buffalo just a couple blocks away in a grocery store where my older brother taught. This is the school the shooter was planning to go to next and is almost completely black. Those children at the that school already stand little chance of succeeding as well as this ‘average’ white guy here, and then to be targeted for murder by a white supremacist on top of all their systemic deprivation is unfathomable. I barely had to pull my bootstraps to get up, while they aren’t even given bootstraps to pull.
Thanks much. I think if a white man, even me, talks about being a “victim” or experiencing “reverse” racism, they should promptly be told publicly in front of everyone, “You know nothing about being a victim of American repression, so shut your damn mouth.” At least I will, because I know it’s true.
