These sorts of debates always catch my attention. As usual, emotions run high.
Just wanted to bring in another angle--if there's anything I've taken from the thread here (from most of the posters, of any racial group), it is the near-invisibility of white privilege.
When white privilege gets rendered invisible, much of what everyone has said here makes complete sense--especially Dragon of Grief.
But how, exactly, are whites "privileged"? Glad you asked. Some statistics:
--The average white person in America will live 6 years longer than the average black person, a combination of better access to health care and crime rates, among other issues.
--For every dollar an average white person makes, a black person makes 70 cents (or to put this another way, for every dollar a black person makes, a white person gets $1.30--this highlights the white privilege aspect.)
--The average white family has about $40,000 dollars in "net worth" (assets minus debts--assets are like stocks and bonds--but the single biggest factor is home ownership.) Blacks average $4,000. So whites have 10X the wealth of blacks, on average.
There are plenty more stats like these; but in my view, the most important stat by far is the one showing differences in net worth. We get a sense of that in Lil Loco's post a bit earlier. My grandparents (I'm white, as is my whole family, by implication) moved to an area in the 1950s in which only white people could live; blacks and other racialized minorities were consigned to the kinds of areas Lil Loco's family was raised (I'm also from LA, so I'm very familiar with the areas he listed.) The property value of my grandparents house skyrocketed--this was not the case for the areas where Lil Loco's family is from. My grandparents used part of the equity on their house to help my parents get their first home.
Case in point: many whites are the current benefactors of an enormous windfall of wealth and inheritance money. Many whites are living in areas (and their children are attending better schools) that they would never be able to live in or afford if not for the wealth being passed down to them. I am part of that legacy, as my parents would have never been able to afford to buy a house in the nice suburban area (with nice schools) had it not been for my grandparents helping them out. But again, my grandparents lived in an area that was, at the time they bought their home, a whites-only area. 30-40 years down the line, my parents and I reap the benefits.
In contrast, blacks are 4 times more likely to be helping their families out. While my parents were helping me out by helping pay my college tuition, my Latino friends were living at home and paying rent to help their families. This is part of the rationale (a somewhat faulty one, to be sure) behind having scholarships and such specifically earmarked for racialized minorities. For whites who don't see the statistics I mentioned above and the role of centuries of white racism in creating those imbalances, of course scholarships-for-minorities will be deemed "racist." And that makes perfect sense.
Sometimes we have to get past attitudes and look at the crude and, yes, boring statistics which do affect our lives and the lives of those around us.
Thus, I don't really want to address the whole debate over "white pride/black pride" when, to me, the bigger issue is "white wealth/black wealth" because it shapes so much of the debate. (White Wealth/Black Wealth is a book title that discusses these very issues, by the way.)
So it's not about good white people or "racist" white people (whatever that is) or good/racist/etc people of color, but about the vastly different life chances the different races receive (on average) in American society. We often lose sight of that in the emotion-laden debates we have about pride or whatever. And remember, these are averages--there are plenty of whites with no wealth and plenty of people of color who are rich and are benefiting from inheritances. The conclusion?--in all our racial thinking, we can lose sight that the bigger issue may not be race, but capitalism!
Just wanted to give another opinion! Thanks for reading!!! :happy:
