How I Woke Up to My White Privilege | Black Lives Matter
I don’t know how to start this article.
Do I start by telling you I’m a white woman who grew up privileged?
Is that a white thing to do?
Do I tell you I work to educate myself so I can appropriately be an ally to minority populations?
Is it guilt that makes me want to tell you I aim to be an ally so I can hope to not be seen as the enemy even though my skin color represents so much more?
Do I tell you that I moved to New Zealand to start my life over after falling out of love with the U.S.?
Do I tell you that this blog was founded on the injustices of animal lives, but today I’ll write about the injustices of my fellow humans?
Do I tell you that I should’ve written this 1, 2, 50+ more minority deaths ago?
Should I be writing this at all?
Do I tell you that I sometimes wish I wasn’t white?
Do I want to tell you that I wish I wasn’t white, not to run from the history that my skin color represents, but because I’m engulfed in the shame my ancestors and current-day, same-skinned, planet-dwellers have inflicted on the world?
Should I steer clear, because this conversation is not about me?
But it’s also very much about me, a white woman in today’s society.
My part in today’s society.
However, this conversation is not about how I feel.
Should I tell you that every word I write might be the wrong one, but I would rather try to learn to speak and spread the truth, even if I mess up along the way, than stay quiet and side with oppressors?
Staying neutral.
Staying out of it.
That is siding with the oppressors.
White people.
People of privilege.
We need to educate ourselves more and more and more.
We need to listen more and more and more.
Instead of continuing to ask all of these questions of how to go about this the right way, I’ll explain to you how I woke up to my white privilege in hopes it makes you take a look at your own, too.
I owe this white privilege awakening to four humans:
A Hispanic man
A Black man
A Māori man
A white woman
Two of my best friends from college are some of the kindest, most patient, intelligent, empathetic, adventurous, fun-loving, open-minded people I know.
One is a Hispanic man.
One is a Black man.
These two men grew up in Queens and Harlem, respectively, and have grown into people I admire, love, and respect from the inside out.
They both visited me in New Zealand in 2016 and we drove around the South Island on an adventure together.
This was the beginning of my privilege awakening experience.
During this great New Zealand road trip, I was introduced to podcasts, which would instigate a true auditory obsession.
We started by listening to a NPR podcast about an all-Black debate team who went to the finals in a debate competition.
Instead of talking about the subject they were asked to debate, which was about the U.S.’s “constructive engagement with Iran, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and Afghanistan,” they instead decided to discuss how the debate community reflects racial inequalities that are also seen in today’s society.
This completely veered off the trajectory of the debate that nearly everyone was anticipating.
They argued that if the debate community can’t effectively address racial inequalities first, then how would they effectively discuss other topics such as the one “assigned” to them?
After listening to the episode, I didn’t get it.
I didn’t understand why talking about racial inequalities in a debate team competition was relevant when that had nothing to do with the assigned topic at hand.
I felt annoyed that the rules were broken.
I felt like it wasn’t the time or place to be discussing the topic.
I acknowledged that the topic was important.
Of course I knew racial inequalities were important -- so I said -- but I didn’t understand why it was okay or even acceptable to interrupt the debate team playbook to talk about something that had nothing to do with the topic they were expected to argue.
My friends so kindly and so patiently tried to explain to me that people of color don’t always get to talk about the racial inequalities they experience, and now that a group of Black students had the stage, they were going to use the spotlight to address the issue.
I believe I said something like, “I get that, but there’s a structure and topic of the debate chosen for a reason, why can’t it be organized another time to explicitly talk about race and racial inequalities? It’s not fair to the competitors to have this whole competition overthrown to talk about something they weren’t prepared to talk about. They prepared for months for this competition.”
I even recall saying, in defense that I was definitely not racist, “I don’t see you guys for your skin color, I see you guys for who you are” as if to imply we’re all equal regardless of skin color.
My friends even explained that by claiming I was “color blind” was to not acknowledge their skin color.
It was to not acknowledge their culture.
Their history.
Their people’s history.
Their experiences in life.
It was to not see them as they are.
It was to not acknowledge our differences because we are not equal in today’s society even if my perception was that we were.
My very white perception that we are.
We continued to discuss the debate team episode and its contents for hours.
We even boarded a boat in Doubtful Sound, part of New Zealand’s Fiordlands, still analyzing it and eventually decided to agree to disagree so we could move on and enjoy the trip.
-- WOOOOOOOOOW, I HAVE SOME AMAZING FRIENDS. --
I look back now and think, how did they not just throw me in the water and leave me there?
If you don’t understand why I was 100% totally and utterly wrong in that situation, keep reading.
If you do, I acknowledge my ignorance.
My friends left New Zealand and our friendships have continued.
Thank goodness.
I’m not sure I deserve the friendship they’ve continued to share with me after that, but I’m grateful for it every single day.
A year after that road trip, another friend of mine that I have grown close with in New Zealand came over to hang out at my house on a Saturday afternoon.
This friend has the biggest heart of anyone I know.
He’s hilarious, compassionate, smart, kind, strong, fun, energetic, brave, tall, dark, and handsome.
He’s also gay, a badass drag queen, and Māori.
During our hangout, this friend was venting to me about the many inequalities he experiences on a daily basis being “a gay, Brown man,” especially within the work place.
For whatever reason, he asked me to play a YouTube video that covered an experiment done by a woman named Jane Elliot, a white American teacher, who made it her mission to teach people about racism.
The video -- and experiment -- is called, “How Racist Are You?”
I highly recommend you watch it.
Photo credit: NBC
In this experiment, conducted in locations over the world, Jane separated the participants by their eye color, not their skin color.
They knew the experiment was about race, but Jane would show them another way to learn about it.
The participants were split into two groups.
One group was blue-eyed.
One group was brown-eyed.
Throughout the experiment, the blue-eyed group was blatantly bullied by Jane and even told they had the “wrong” colored eyes.
She would tell them to shut up, sit down, and stop acting cute.
The brown-eyed group was treated as the privileged group.
She told the brown-eyed people, “Thank God you have the right eye color.”
All of this was captured on camera.
The blue-eyed participants were sent to a small room or holding cell with only a few uncomfortable chairs; not enough for everyone.
The brown-eyed participants were sent to a nice area with plenty of comfortable seating for them all.
Psychologists watched the experiment from a surveillance room to see how the participants would react.
The blue-eyed group quickly expressed that they were annoyed with the treatment they received from Jane, more specifically, how she spoke to them.
JANE’S GOAL: Get the brown-eyed people, the privileged ones, to turn against the blue-eyed people, the less privileged ones.
“You think you know how it would feel to be judged by the color of your skin?” Jane said to some of her students, “No, I don’t think you would know how that felt unless you had been through it, would you?”
In order to help people understand what it was like to be discriminated against, Jane chose something as arbitrary as eye color as a tool to demonstrate her point.
She had done this experiment with children and quickly realized that the same concept could be applied to adults.
Jane called herself “The Resident Bitch” during the experiment (at least to the adults), because she believes that doing the experiment nicely won’t make people listen.
Being abrasive might make people pay attention.
“If you want to see a decrease in the level of racism in your society, first thing you have to do is let white people find out how it feels to be on the receiving side of it.”
As Jane explained to the brown-eyed group that they were going to treat the blue-eyed group like they were worthless, one white man said that he was not comfortable with being the “oppressors” in the situation.
That he would rather choose to be on the blue-eyed side than stay in the brown-eyed group.
Jane does not entertain his discomfort.
A Black woman spoke up and said to him, “It’s an exercise for them to understand this is what comes to you because of how you look. It’s a learning process.”
The white man clearly got upset; he interrupted her saying, “It’s an exercise that removes choice and freedom and autonomy.”
The Black woman stated firmly, “But you don’t have a choice. I don’t have a choice to be a Black woman. It was assigned to me when I came into this world.”
After some conversation, Jane asked the security guard to escort the white man out.
As he left, he shouted back to the other participants that they have a choice to not be oppressed by Jane.
Jane then primed the brown-eyed group to treat the blue-eyed group like scum and told the brown-eyed participants to “act white.”
When it was time to bring the two groups into the same room, she stuck with the plan.
The brown-eyed group remained mostly silent.
After completing some basic exercises with the combined groups, and within just 45 minutes, Jane was able to really wear down the blue-eyed participants to the point that they expressed feeling “worthless” and “insignificant.”
Jane said, “If I can convince you that you’re worthless in 45 minutes, what can I do if I did this with you for 30 years?”
“You could take away my self-being and who I am” admitted one of the blue-eyed participants.
-- This is when the penny dropped for me. --
The penny didn’t drop for a lot of participants and they argued with Jane about the way she was going about the experiment -- enthusiastically expressing that they weren’t racist.
At this point, some participants, including myself - even if only a video viewer - started to recognize the magnitude of Jane’s experiment.
If white people can’t handle being uncomfortable for five minutes when people of color have to deal with discomfort of their own lives, what is that saying?
I believe that it’s saying that society tailors itself to making white people comfortable and everyone else just has to deal with it.
When the white person’s comfort is threatened, we get defensive.
Too many white people don’t even know they live comfortable lives.
They don’t even know how the other half lives.
I didn’t know how the other half lives.
Too many white people don’t even know what discomfort really is.
I didn’t know what discomfort really is.
I still don’t fully understand it, but I’m trying.
When I had been uncomfortable with the all-Black debate team interrupting the status quo to discuss racial inequalities, it showed that I wasn’t aware of the comfort I had experienced my entire life as a white person, so...I got defensive.
When my white expectations were challenged...I got defensive.
I tried to look for a reason to be right and justify my comfort instead of really listening to my friends explaining their daily, ongoing discomfort.
I wasn’t yet aware of my white privilege until Jane’s experiment finally changed that.
When Jane ultimately explained to the participants that she wanted the blue-eyed people “to see how it felt to be on the receiving end of that which we allow to be handed out to whole groups of people every day,” the participants started to get riled up.
“You don’t live with what she lives with,” Jane said, acknowledging a Black participant of the experiment.
The Black participant added, “And you can’t argue with someone’s experience. If you don’t see the other person’s reality...and you don’t face that, you’re almost part of the problem because you don’t see any reason for changing.”
What happened next?
A white woman argued with that Black woman’s experience.
The white woman even said, ”What are you going to do about it?” as if to insinuate the Black woman was making up statistics to make herself and her family seem special for the treatment they’ve received from police officers.
As if to insinuate it was the Black woman’s responsibility to do something.
And, as if it was a one-off experience that has nothing to do with the color of her and her family’s skin.
As if it was coincidence just to make her side of the argument.
One of the observing psychologists of the experiment, a Black woman, said, “This is a lot of what happens in society, where people are in so much denial they think it’s your problem when it’s actually all of our problem.”
Let’s repeat that for the people in the back…
IT’S ACTUALLY ALL OF OUR PROBLEM.
By the time the YouTube video and experiment finished, I was in tears.
I finally realized...I’ve been a part of the problem.
I’ve been living with white privilege and vehemently insisting I’m not racist.
Us white people think racism is just saying offensive things to people of color.
If we don’t say them, we’re not racist.
But the truth is, if we’re not actively fighting against racism, which goes far beyond offensive words, we are inherently part of the racist system that runs today’s society.
White people have lived with privilege and power for centuries.
We have written the narrative that is taught to our children in schools and perpetuated over generations.
Racism is in the most subtle of things that we, white people, often overlook, but are jarringly obvious to people of color.
We, white people, have been comfortable for too long.
We have written the narrative for too long.
We have been a part of the problem for too long.
So, what do we do now?
What do we do to check our white privilege?
We listen to the experiences of people of color.
We learn how they are different from ours.
We practice WILD AND COPIOUS amounts of empathy.
We step out of our perspectives and into those of the oppressed.
We recognize and acknowledge that as white people, we have an unfair advantage in today’s society.
We need to confront our own prejudices and our own privilege.
We need to COMMIT to calling people out when we see and hear acts of racism.
We need to have the courage to be vocal about calling out friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers no matter how scared we might be to stand up to them.
We need to educate ourselves.
We need to stop remaining silent and acting like we’re not part of the problem.
We need to support the change in narrative.
We need to do this work so we can be an example for our children.
We need to change.
Jane realized that racism is an irrational social construct that people are too quick to sign up to.
We need to stop being irrational.
We need to stop signing up to this social construct.
We need to celebrate our fellow human beings and their differences.
We need to stop being “color blind” and start seeing color.
We need to be antiracists.
BLACK LIVES MATTER.
P.S. STOP saying “All lives matter.” No one ever said your life didn’t matter. This isn’t about you.
HERE’S HOW I’M CONTINUING TO LEARN:
I’ve linked to Amazon for maximum accessibility, but if you’re able, please support local, black-owned bookshops by using Bookshop.org. Some links are affiliate links — 100% of commissions from this page will be donated directly to Campaign Zero.
BOOKS TO READ
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo, PhD
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Dr. Brittney Cooper
Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad
Raising Our Hands by Jenna Arnold
Redefining Realness by Janet Mock
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century by Grace Lee Boggs
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color by Cherrí Moraga
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson
ARTICLES TO READ
“The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying” by Adam Serwer | Atlantic (May 8, 2020)
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (Mentoring a New Generation of Activists)
“My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” by Jose Antonio Vargas | NYT Magazine (June 22, 2011)
The 1619 Project (all the articles) | The New York Times Magazine
“The Intersectionality Wars” by Jane Coaston | Vox (May 28, 2019)
Tips for Creating Effective White Caucus Groups developed by Craig Elliot PhD
“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Knapsack Peggy McIntosh
“Who Gets to Be Afraid in America?” by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi | Atlantic (May 12, 2020)
VIDEOS TO WATCH
Black Feminism & the Movement for Black Lives: Barbara Smith, Reina Gossett, Charlene Carruthers
“How Studying Privilege Systems Can Strengthen Compassion” | Peggy McIntosh at TEDxTimberlane Schools
PODCASTS TO SUBSCRIBE TO
Intersectionality Matters! Hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw
Pod for the Cause (from The Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights)
FILMS AND TV SERIES TO WATCH
Netflix
13th (Ava DuVernay)
American Son (Kenny Leon)
Dear White People (Justin Simien)
See You Yesterday (Stefon Bristol)
Selma (Ava DuVernay)
When They See Us (Ava DuVernay)
Hulu
Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada)
via CinemaxIf Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins)
The Hate U Give (George Tillman Jr.)
via Cinemax
HBO
King In The Wilderness
True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s FIght for Equality*
Rent
Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975
The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
Just Mercy (Destin Daniel Cretton)
Free in the U.S. in JuneI Am Not Your Negro (James Baldwin doc)
Also available on Kanopy via your libraryFruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler)
Clemency (Chinonye Chukwu)
ORGANIZATIONS TO FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA & DONATE TO
Antiracism Center: Twitter
Equal Justice Initiative (EJI): Twitter | Instagram | Facebook
The Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook
National Domestic Workers Alliance: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook
Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ): Twitter | Instagram | Facebook
MORE ANTIRACISM RESOURCES TO CHECK OUT
Resources for White People to Learn and Talk About Race and Racism
“Why is this happening?” — an introduction to police brutality from 100 Year Hoodie
RESOURCES FOR WHITE PARENTS TO RAISE ANTI-RACIST CHILDREN
Books:
Podcasts:
Articles:
Social Media:
To take immediate action to fight for Breonna Taylor, please visit FightForBreonna.org.
This list of resources was compiled by Sarah Sophie Flicker and Alyssa Klein in May 2020.
If you know of other resources or want to share your experience with race, please share them below.