Published this week online on his ZSpace page, the following timely essay This is Your Nation on White Privilege was written by Tim Wise, who is the author of White Like Me (Soft Skull, 2005, revised 2008) and Speaking Treason Fluently, which will be published later this month, also by Soft Skull.
Thanks  to Wise and his publishers for permission in reprinting this essay on white privilege in America today. For more information on the author visit timwise.org.

This Is Your Nation on White Privilege
by Tim Wise

For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

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 when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

This guy asks some really good questions so I thought I'd set aside five seconds to come up with some answers.

Why didn't the scientists call it a white hole?
They did. A white hole, in astrophysics, is an object which ejects matter from within its event horizon (as opposed to a black hole, which absorbs all visible light, and has a black appearance). They're theorized to serve as the exit points for wormholes. Their appearance would be white, like a white dwarf (which is also known as a degenerate dwarf). If Commissioner Mayfield had made the analogy to a white hole, it would seem to imply that central collections is spewing paperwork.

Tell me one thing when they say "white" and you get a negative connotation?
For starters, ketracel white, white coats, white collar crime, White Noise, White Sox fan, White House, White Castle hangover, The White Stripes, White Horse, Bill White, white flag, White Devil, whitehead, white guilt, White Men Can't Jump, White Man's Overbite, white out, white reggae, great white shark, white bread, white booty, white trash, "that's so white," white wash (as he used himself).

Warning! This trailer does NOT necessarily reflect my opinions or the opinions of Amoeba Music, although we do sell this DVD. It's arguably our generation's Birth of a Nation.

Even in a multicultural, polyglot city like L.A. (which has the largest population of Asian-Americans (1.4 million) in the country and where the percentage of the population which is Asian-American is roughly equal to that which is black) most discussions of race appear to still be framed in the outmoded, bipolar terms of  black and white.  For example, whereas a lot of people and many organizations honor Black History Month, Asian Pacific Islander American Heritage Month is almost completely unrecognized except by some Asian-Americans. The centuries-long struggle and strife of blacks in America is well-documented and worth honoring- but Asians have also been subjected to legal segregation, racist violence, widespread discrimination and harassment. So why is it that the Asian-American experience is so downplayed?

According to polls, 23% of Americans are uncomfortable voting for an Asian-American to be President of the United States. This is in contrast to 15% compared with an African-American candidate and 14% compared with a woman candidate. A lot of Asians are suspected and viewed of holding allegiances to Asia, and not the U.S. which plays into the "perpetual foreigner" syndrome. True, many Asians are more recent immigrants than the white or black population but even Asians born in America often speak, in my experience,  of "Americans" only in the third person. Last year, coming up with movies to showcase for APA Heritage Month resulted in the suggestion of Chinese Kung Fu movies the distinction between Asians in Asia and Asians in America remains a lot harder than distinguishing African-Americans from Africans or white people from Europeans partly because America loves Asian movies and Korean dramas seem to show at all hours of the day, but Hollywood almost never casts Asian-Americans in anything and, to date, there have only been three TV shows to focus on Asian-Americans.

 

1915

Birth of a Nation was released. It was the most profitable American film of all time until Disney's Snow White & the Seven Dwarves (1937). In this critical darling, director D.W. Griffith dramatically depicts a mid-19th century south plagued by mulattos and abolitionists who scheme to keep the white man down and raise up the black man in what is, to its intended audience, an obviously grotesque perversion of natural order. In government sessions, the reconstruction-empowered black politicians (played buffoonishly by white actors) take off their shoes and feast on fried chicken. Luckily, the chivalric Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue.

This version of history was angrily disputed (famously by W.E.B. Du Bois among others) but remained pretty much the accepted version of history until well after World War II. The NAACP, founded just five years earlier, organized nationwide protests. There were riots in Philadelphia and Boston. Cities in Illinois, Minnesota Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania refused to show the film. In Indiana, a white man murdered a black stranger and blamed it on having seen Birth of a Nation. However, the film received a special screening at the White House where president Woodrow Wilson supposedly remarked, "It [the film] is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." The quote was later argued to be from someone else but the film was still marketed as "Federally-endorsed."

It is still widely praised for decades for it's pioneering technical achievements which arguably, are exaggerated to excuse its bafflingly continuing popularity. Nearly all of these achievements have since been discovered in earlier films and yet even mainstream critic Roger Ebert considers it a great film, stating, "'The Birth of a Nation' is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s 'Triumph Of the Will,' it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil." This from a guy who doesn't like Blue Velvet or A Clockwork Orange because of the subject matter. I guess racism is OK when it's old. You know, they just didn't know any better back then.