One of the many functions of white skin privilege is that we raise our children with permissive and indulgent child-rearing methods. If we fail to correct our own white child's misbehavior we can always trust that they will not get put on the hot seat if they act out outside of our home settings, and a white advocate will be nearby for our child and can be called upon to say on his/her behalf that he/she "didn't really mean it" if need be. Our white children will always get the benefit of the doubt. As teachers, we are mystified when black children and especially black boys fail to "respect our authority" even as we actively shirk exercising authority in our classrooms. We can introduce policemen at our children's school as people who "want to help us" and are deserving of our trust. Whiteness = being able to brand spanking as the Great Evil of Our Time. It's like we can think of no better cause to attend to.
Sometimes with racism 101 roundtables I'm concerned that too much time is spent engaging in & obsessing with our newly discovered white privilege, so maybe I'm a fool for giving it more floor time by posting about this. Our monologues and reflections about what white privilege is like tend to only tell people what they already knew and take away floor time from people who have something more valuable to add to the discussion (mostly people of color). A certain trope gets passed on that our privilege has hurt us personally and deeply and we feel, like, really bad about it-- when in reality our white privilege has afforded us every luxury under the sun and, as Louis CK so astutely pointed out, and it's not too "hard" receiving this, that and the other without doing anything to earn it. (To my mind racism is deleterious to white people in that being racists robs us of our empathy, humanity and ability to experience the kind of deep, radical love for others that Dr. Cornel West talks about. But anyone claiming that enjoying their white privilege is "really hard" for them is probably full of bullshit.)
So anyway, if I'm going to speak about white privilege, I'd like to try to say something useful in doing so.
The reason I wanted to write this is because I saw a video link that showed a black man responding to his nephew who had posted something dumb on Facebook about wanting to be a gangbanger. The video may well have not been meant for whiteness' eyes, which do not have sufficient vision to be trusted to be able to make sense of sensible things, and which are more likely to take delight in watching a black kid being punished than anything else. (Call me out if I'm out of line and need to take down part or all of this post.) The thing that got me about this video is 1. the act of love and protection the black man showed toward his nephew in the style of his discipline. 2. trying to imagine the reaction of the white people I know if they ever saw this. Whiteness' understanding is limited such that, if whiteness got its hands on this video, Whiteness' responses would range from "he needs to be nicer!" (ie, be less effective) to "let's call DCYF and report him!" (ie, let's see if we can get him thrown in jail -- for teaching his nephew how not to be thrown in jail as a black youth who is held to an entirely different set of standards he needs to know about).
Black parenting is about survival skills and teaching kids resiliency to withstand whatever will be hurled at them in this racist culture of ours. White parenting is about the latest new age dilly dalliances and amusing our children, who don't need survival skills because what is there that they will ever need to survive?
[Credit is due to: writer Lisa Delpit, who edited The Skin We Speak and wrote Other People's Children, for getting me to think critically about these issues.]
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