In his 1999 show Bigger
and Blacker, Chris Rock explained white privilege this way: “There ain’t a white man in this room that
would change places with me. None of
you. None of you would change places
with me, and I’m rich!
That’s how good it is to be white.”
There’s a line from the Bruce Hornsby song The Way It Is that describes perfectly
the interplay, internal if not verbal, between the privileged and the un- and
underprivileged. “Man in the silk suit
hurries by; as he catches the poor old lady’s eyes, just for fun he says, ‘Get
a job’.”
Privilege is Israeli Jews sitting on a hillside in lounge
chairs and couches to spectate over the bombing of Palestinian civilians in the
Gaza Ghetto and cheering each explosion.
Privilege is serving the greed of the few to the detriment
of the needs of the many.
Privilege is the white liberal who, in the words of Dr.
King, “…is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers the absence of
tension to the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in
the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who
paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom;
who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season’”.
Privilege is white liberals and older Afro-Americans who say
the same things to the Movement for Black Lives and their allies about their
civil disobedience in the response to massive and growing police brutality and
murders by police.
Privilege is Madelaine Albright telling us that there is a
special place in hell for women who don’t support each other in reference to
Hillary Clinton in 2016 when she herself supported Edmund Muskie in the 1972
Democratic primaries, the same in which Shirley Chisholm and Patsy Mink were
also running. Of course, those two
contenders were Afro-American and Japanese-American, respectively, so perhaps
for Albright they don’t count.
Privilege is Gloria Steinem and others like her campaigning
to shame sex workers in order to cover up the fact that their brand of feminism
is mostly for affluent white women.
Privilege is Noam Chomsky condemning the antifascist
movement known as antifa in language that validates their equation with Nazi
thugs by Trump, aka Agent Orange.
Privilege is when someone uses phrases like “look at the big
picture”, “be a team player”, and “accept things the way they are” to bully,
manipulate, and shame you into belaying or putting aside your own needs in
deference to their desires.
Privilege is when lesser mortals clear the streets of Windsor
and Maidenhead of their homeless to make everything pretty for a royal wedding.
Privilege is waxing eloquent about global overpopulation and
how people need to have fewer children shortly after the birth of your third
child in a country where the poor on benefits are penalized for the same thing.
Privilege is when an all-male panel pontificates on women’s
issues, whether they happen to be U.S. Congressmen or Scottish champagne
socialists.
Privilege is the often patronizing and paternalistic manner
with which the middle class treats the working and pauper classes.
In truth, what we today call the middle class is nothing
other than an upper working class that is desperate to distinguish itself from
the lower working class and to maintain that distinction by any means
necessary. Oblivious to the fact that
being a house slave makes them no more free and no less exploited than the
others in the fields, they carry out almost by instinct the will of their
masters of the 1% and their overseers of the 10%.
Privilege is when Yanks, Brits, Aussies, Kiwis, Canucks, and
other white westerners travel to or live in foreign countries belonging to
brown people and treat their hosts as lesser beings, committing social incest
in their golden ghettoes. Of course,
this same principle operates in their own countries between classes and even in
those afore-mentioned non-white majority countries.
When I with the Navy at Clark Air Base in the Philippines,
there was this lower enlisted guy in our unit who often had to do escort duty
with local, uncleared contractors, meeting them at the gate to the compound and
then sitting watching them work all day.
Often he would spend the time reading, pretty sure none of the workers
were equivalent to the Vietcong.
After about a week, the Air Force security police at the
gate began wanding the work crew for weapons.
At first, they began to refuse, until our enlisted guy told the guards
to do him first, to show it was okay. In
fact, he did so for the next few days until the guards got tired of or too
embarrassed about subjecting one of their own to the same treatment inflicted
on the locals.
In many ways, the middle class, the upper working class
rather, is the biggest obstacle to the general welfare of the working, or lower
working, and pauper classes. Mostly
because those in it go along to get along.
Its members don’t even think of being afraid of rocking the boat because
doing anything that might alter their fortunes is beyond conception. So they assuage their consciences with
thoughts of the rewards for their complacency and their complicity. And continue to do so even when that course
will bite themselves in their own arse.
Something antagonist Lindsey McDonald said to protagonist
Angel in the episode “Underneath” paints a good picture of this: “Every day you sit in your big chair behind
your big desk, and you sign your big checks, and you learn a little more how to
accept the world for the way it is.
Well, here’s the rub: good people don’t do that. Good people don’t accept the world the way it
is. They fight it.”
So stand up.
Fight. Be the change you wish to
see in the world. Live as if the world
is as it should be to show it how it can be, and remember that the smallest act
of kindness can be the greatest gift in the world.
Fight in ways against which there is no defense but which do
no harm. Be the darkness that
illuminates. Be the silence that
resonates. Be the stillness that
agitates.
I am a Terran, a citizen of
Earth; the whole world is my home and all its people, both human and nonhuman, whether
organic or synthetic, are my brothers, sisters, and cousins. Like our more distant cousins on other planets
across space and throughout time, we are all children of the Universe. None of us asked to be born and no one gets
out of here alive.
May the Aught be with you.
Our day will come, inshallah.
Keep the faith. Peace out.
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