Showing posts with label privilege. Show all posts
Showing posts with label privilege. Show all posts

Thursday, October 09, 2008

White privilege

My wife sent me an e-mail forward a few weeks ago and I meant to post about it, but before I did, I wanted to track down the original. You know how all those e-mails fly around claiming to be written by Carlin, or Ebert, or some other semi-plausible author. Well, yeah, I didn't want to just blindly cut and paste. Of course, work went nuts again, so I left it there in the inbox until time presented itself.

Anyway, here's the source.

A couple representative snippets:

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a “fuckin’ redneck,” like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll “kick their fuckin' ass,” and talk about how you like to “shoot shit” for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is being able to say that you support the words “under God” in the pledge of allegiance because “if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me,” and not be immediately disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the “under God” part wasn’t added until the 1950s--while if you're black and believe in reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), you're a dangerous and mushy liberal who isn't fit to safeguard American institutions.


White privilege is being able to go to a prestigious prep school, then to Yale and Harvard Business School (George W. Bush), and still be seen as an "average guy," while being black, going to a prestigious prep school, then Occidental College, then Columbia, and then Harvard Law, makes you "uppity" and a snob who probably looks down on regular folks.



Tons more at the link. Read it.

Friday, August 22, 2008

It's easy to be straight

A great post from PizzaDiavola.

I'm not even going to try to blockquote. Read it.