Johnson: Privilege, Power and Difference

 Johnson: Privilege, Power and Difference

“The African American novelist James Baldwin once wrote an essay in which he offered the provocative idea that there is no such idea as whiteness or, for that matter, blackness or, more generally, race. ‘No one is white before he/she came to America,’ he wrote. ‘It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.’ What did Baldwin mean? In the simplest sense, he was pointing to a basic aspect of social reality: Most of what we experience as ‘real’ is a cultural creation. In other words, it’s made up, even though we don’t experience it that way.” 

 

    This excerpt opens the section of Johnson’s chapter which describes the social construction of difference. Baldwin’s quote is provocative, and I have heard commentary both in support of the sentiment and angrily opposed. I agree that it’s important to acknowledge the “made up” nature of cultural creations in order to empower ourselves to effect collective change. At the same time, its understandable why such a statement might be met with angry pushback depending on the context that it is summoned: should a white person remind us that race is a “social construct,” perhaps in response to a heated exchange calling out systemic racism, it’s natural that a progressive perspective might rightfully interpret it as an appeal to the mainstream thinking that wishes we would all just stop making everything about race all the time. The quote also reminds me of an anecdote in Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, in which she describes a similar sentiment expressed by an academic colleague who is from an African country: they didn’t become “black,” until they were subject to the white supremacy of the US. This “black-white” paradigm of racial difference is a construction of the US which inherited old world categories of racial difference, but needed its racism to evolve in order to accommodate the variety of immigration occurring across US history. As folks often point out, the example of Irish people’s oppression in Europe sheds light on the shifting nature of racial categories: whiteness as a literal expression of physical difference wasn’t the dominant category until a few hundred years into the British colonization of North America. Categories like “Christian vs heathen” predated the category of “white vs black” but captured the line demarking racialized differences of privilege and power. 

 

“Privilege has become one of those loaded words we need to reclaim so that we can use it to name and illuminate the truth. Denying that privilege exists is a serious barrier to change…” 

 

    It strikes me that here, Johnson is speaking to us from a quarter century in the past, but his words remain highly relevant. This was before the concept of “checking ones privilege” had entered the public consciousness (most often as a dig against mansplainers and colorblind “not-racists”) and so it’s hard to imagine how loaded the word had already become by the early 2000’s. In this section, Johnson calls upon the seminal work of McIntosh and her article conjuring “the invisible knapsack” which has become a foundational work describing the function of privilege in our systems of racialized power inequity in the United States. Through McIntosh, Johnson describes the concepts of unearned entitlements, unearned advantage, and conferred dominance. Unearned entitlements are things everyone should have by nature of being part of the community, they become unearned advantages when they are restricted to certain groups.Conferred dominance is the added privilege of one group possessing inherent power over other groups. The intersectional advantage of these three aspects of privilege coalesces in the identity of white maleness: white males have a distinct advantages and power over others within a cultural, political, and legal system which is white supremacist and patriarchal. Johnson unpacks how certain forms of unearned advantages are easiest to change, conferring greater entitlements to members of other groups without “harming” the dominant group – but when the competitive edge that white males enjoy is threatened, the response is typically defensive and hostile. 

 

 

“Race privilege is more about white people then it is about white people… Several important consequences flow from this paradox of privilege. First, privilege is rooted in societies and organizations as much as its rooted in people’s personalities and how they perceive and react to one and other. This means that doing something about the problem of privilege takes more than challenging individuals.” 

 

    I heard some commentary on social media recently that comes to mind when I read this passage. The influencer pundit was describing the loss of white privilege and “proximity to whiteness” that a progressive person undergoes when they decide to stand up to the enforcers of the system of racial privilege in solidarity with non-white people. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are the examples they used to articulate this point: in standing up to white supremacy, they lost the privileges that proximity to whiteness afforded them, and were suddenly subject to the same brutal enforcement of the status quo that has been inflicted on black and brown people all along. The “paradox of privilege” that Johnson describes, reflects this understanding with regard to affecting change: in order to change this system, we cannot focus on changing individuals but need to remake the system itself. In so doing, white people will ultimately lose the forms of unearned advantage and conferred dominance they have enjoyed. This is a necessary part of the process. But as the killings of two white people by ICE in the last few months has demonstrated, white people are under-prepared to fully accept the reality that this means they may be subject to harsh treatment, or threats to their lives and safety. When we get caught focusing too much on the perceived “reality” of racial identity, we forget that it’s a moving target and the privileges it conveys are part of a system that insulates the truly powerful from accountability. While it means that solidarity comes with risks that need to be acknowledged and accepted, it also pulls back the curtain on how tenuous the average mainstream (white) person’s station truly is. Here I recall the famous quote by Martin Niemöller, which ends with the line “then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.” We are all made unsafe by the systems of oppression that divide, conquer, and rule us. The sooner that lack of safety hits home for enough of us in the mainstream, the sooner we may be able to take action to affect positive change for us all.  

Reflection: What are ways that using one's white privilege can contribute to "dismantling the system"? 

This privilege walk was a very popular video I remember from a decade ago. This link takes you to a quiz that helps unpack types of privilege, and the Buzzfeed video is linked in the document