“American ‘whites’ were racist in the past, but they are not right now”, He Says

Who’s gonna tell him?

A white woman calls the police on a Black man for babysitting two white children. The story is seven years old, but it’s a perfect example of the fear and suspicion that are enable and perpetuate white privilege. (Indy100)

The only doctor’s office in town had separate entrances for ‘Whites’ and ‘Coloreds’. Sure, the signs were covered with Kelly green paint, but paint doesn’t hide inch-deep letters chiseled in marble so well. That was forty years ago in Shaw, MS, but twenty years after the Civil Rights Act made it illegal. Thing is, the signs were obeyed, and we whites didn’t think it was a big deal. It had always been that way.

It’s always been this way. That’s what lay at the base of the MAGA movement’s Days of Rage against DEI. Trump’s White House statement declares DEI to be illegal (in all caps, of course) and proclaims the administration wants to make the workplace “colorblind”. What most liberals realize is that his real goal is to preserve what’s really “always been this way”: white privilege.

We all know that the longer one experiences something, the more normal it is. This principle also applies to white privilege. We whites have had privilege all our lives — we hardly ever recognize it when it’s happening in front of our faces. It is our normal. Which means, of course, that when the degree of our white privilege lessens even just a little bit, we sure as hell do notice it. A few of us objectively recognize the moment and accept the loss of…