(this selection was authored by Bear for a collaborative project between the Houston Public Library and the Center for the Healing of Racism, Houston, TX)
Where Do I Go to Check In My White Male Privilege?
I want to thank you for choosing to read me. I hope you find me educational, provocative, and challenging.
I grew up in the fifties in Chicago, IL. My father was a religious, but I could never meet his standards of perfection. This was probably a good thing, because I became a nonconformist, and began to question a lot of things early in life. I’ve always been very intuitive and sensitive to the emotional process of the environments with which I was interacting. But like every other white male in society, I also absorbed and was conditioned to think and act a certain way.
For example, I remember in our old home movies, that my mother was mainly seen as retreating into the kitchen. I guess she had adapted to the White Male System (WMS), not to mention moving from Kentucky to Illinois. Mom was a very bright and creative person. She graduated from Barnard College in NYC, and went on to work in a very specialized job in DC for the War Dept.
Dad was highly intelligent as well, but came from a very different background. He was raised in Illinois farm country; he graduated H.S. at 16 and went to the University of Illinois. After graduation from Officer’s Candidate school he served in the military in WWII as a Leutenant in the Navy. Both of them were products of their backgrounds and their generation.
My grandparents lived in Kentucky and were people of wealth. Our family would visit them about twice a year. They lived more affluently than we did back in Chicago. Hoppy and Grammy employed Katherine and Mary Ann as maids in their home. I came to love them, and they loved me unconditionally; it seemed they understood the problems of a young white boy’s role in the family and of my life. Sometimes I would ride with my grandmother to take them back to their homes. The sight of old-school millhouses, run down and dilapidated, didn’t make sense to my little boy’s mind. I started asking myself why I lived so differently from them, and I did this because I really loved them. I asked myself why there was such a gap in the money people had to live.
I returned to my Chicago, suburban home, and began to notice how each morning African American maids and domestics would get off the buses about two blocks from my home, each one of them wearing a certain kind of uniform, some white, some brown and white, some with other colors. Their dialect was so different from mine, the way they carried themselves, the way they acted, the words they used, the songs they sang to themselves/all of this was a new awareness/leaving me with the question of why they did the housework, and we hired them to do it.
Gradually, in my conditioning as a white male, I began to equate what I observed in African American’s behavior as being a sign of less intelligence. I was being set up by the WMS to see them as so foreign to my existence that they didn’t really seem to be real at all; this was all supported by stereotypes of AAs I saw in movies, art, books, magazine articles, comic books, what friends told me, and certain non-verbal messages I picked up from my white family. For example, in Disney movies the music was so often sung and played by people with African American accents. The charactures of these minstrels created a fantasmigorical image of blacks being cartoon characters, not humans.
One example I remember from grade school: one early morning at school, one of the janitors who happened to be white, called me aside and told me, “I want you to see what I found next to the railroad this morning.” Of course, I was all ears at this mysterious statement. He opened a small, white box that looked to me like a box a ring or jewelry would be placed in when it was bought. He slowly opened it, and he said, “I found this n_______’s finger,” after which he proceeded to laugh, probably at the look of incredulity on my face. His overall intent, as I thought about it years later, was that this was so funny because, after all, they aren’t worth much at all, so what’s the problem with finding just a finger.
As I’ve learned more and more about my own unconscious unaware racism and white male privilege, I realized that the janitor could play this ignorant trick using any other targeted group. For instance, he could have put a lock of blonde hair in the box with a woman’s finger targeting “dumb blondes.” It really wouldn’t have mattered because I was safe. I was a member of the group that was on top endlessly striving to keep all the others on the bottom. The purpose of the WMS is to continually enrich ourselves at the expense of all the rest.
The WMS has co-opted all other groups in society. People of color get sucked into it through assimilation: this is how to reach success and enter the “American Dream” in our nation; white women get seduced into it, because this is how to get status, power, and identity; children get duped in our educational system by only getting a flawed picture of history, not the authentic history from the “others’” perspective of colonization and oppression.
Peggy Macintosh, a professor out east, some years ago wrote a seminal article on white privilege. She suggested that white folks in this nation receive benefits, privileges, enrichments, and advantages simply because we were born white. White men, being at the top of the heap, are privileged because they are men, and they have European lineage. These are the unearned privileges—most of us take these for granted—due to fake conditioning and the rewards we get from this privilege that are inherent because we have been blessed not to be a person of color.
When you think about this rationally, stepping back from ‘an emotional commitment to ignorance’ no one can decide what kind of skin they’ll be born in, where they will be born, or whether they will be born into wealth or poverty. White male privilege, then, is a crapshoot, a probability, that have no set of determined possibilities, but is arbitrary and non-scientific in its basis for existence.
Is this a fair way of viewing others who are given the same advantage of skin to cover bones, muscles, tissue, organs, all based on the capricious fact of some being born white, others black, others brown, others red, etc.? A children’s book illustratively shows that when skin is removed most bones look the same.
The term White Male System was used and elaborated on by Ann Schaef, a well-known writer and therapist. She delineates that the WMS is built on five myths:
Myth #1: The White Male System (WMS) is the only thing that exists.
The beliefs and perceptions of other systems—especially the female system—are seen as sick, bad, crazy, stupid, ugly and incompetent.
Myth #2: The WMS is innately superior.
“Superiority can be a killing gift.”
According to the WMS, both superiority and inferiority are birthrights of privilege or the nature of disadvantage.
Myth #3: The WMS knows & understands everything.
Since the WMS thinks this myth is true of its system, in order to perpetuate the myth, the WMS uses stereotypes to keep up the illusion of its reality. This damages those in the WMS because it takes both energy and ignorance to ignore the facts. It most notably hurts women and children.
Myth #4: The WMS believes that it’s possible for humans to possess the complete/comprehensive attributes of logic, rationality, and objectivity, minus emotionality. Thus we get notions such as ‘boys don’t cry,’ ‘don’t cry you pussy;’ this hurts men because it cuts them off from their inner feelings; it hurts women because they also feel they need to stuff their own feelings so as not to be denigrated by men; can we see that the WMS indeed keeps people from living as genuine, whole, and authentic beings?
Myth #5: It’s possible to be a Higher Power.
“Being a deity is not easy though. In fact it can be lethal for WMS persons to deny their own humanity and fallibility. The human mind and body are not designed to stand up under such stress and strain. White men who finally achieve such high stature in their own minds suffer from heart attacks, strokes, ulcers, and high blood pressure. In the end, godhood can kill.”
* Anne Wilson Schaef. (1992).Women’s Reality pp.7-27. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Earlier I mentioned the WMS. This system has been in place, in our nation, from its inception. The Constitution and Declaration of Independence were written basically by and for wealthy, land-owning, white men. Wealth is passed down trans-migrationally through generations. * (There’s an excellent DVD documentary called Traces of the Trade documenting the DeWolf family history around slavery. This family from Rhode Island became the largest/wealthiest slave-trading family in the country). These white males amassed their wealth on the backs of black slaves. Later, white indentured servants were labeled white because these leaders of the WMS knew one way to control their power base was to use the “divide and conquer” strategy, something they learned from Willie Lynch whom they consulted on their slave/economic/class system.
Why did they do this? To ensure that their power and dominance would go on, at least to the next generation, perhaps never realizing that it would go on for hundreds of years until our present day.
Although there have been changes in our laws around Civil Rights, de jure change is perhaps easier to accomplish than changing social systems. The encoding of white male privilege and institutionalized racism is deeply embedded in our unconsciousness. The path of real change for European Americans requires a life long commitment to healing, and healing is always a messy process. For white racial identity—of the unhealthy kind—to change means more than academically learning some new facts and theories. It means change in the deep structures of who we are—in order to do this it means we have to examine our psycho-emotional-scientific-historical-social heritage: the only way to do this is to know where we came from, where we are now, and what our future is.
I think what all whites need to know, and especially those who are ignorant of the WMS, is that for over 90% of our nation’s history, we have lived under the hierarchy and oppression of slavery and Jim Crow laws. This is a very long time; these customs also invaded the north, so this isn’t to blame one part of the country or another. It teaches us how ubiquitous the WMS actually is.
I admit that I have been a willing recipient of white male privilege. I also realize that privilege isn’t something I can just step away from, or step down from. I am it. I grew up and absorbed by some strange osmosis of social conditioning. I can’t change my skin’s hue. Yet, I can become more aware of how it has made me who I am, so that I may be motivated to emerge as a different kind of white man. I can better perceive how this dynamic is played out around me in society, in social systems, my collusion with them, and think of ways to educate others of European descent. And that’s why I’m the book that I am. At the very least, and most importantly, I can change myself. I may be able to impact others to a more educated understanding of the WMS.
Thinking back over my life, white male privilege has given me these benefits:
ü I lived my early life in a “good” white neighborhood where the homes kept appreciating in value and these assets could provide me other financial benefits
ü This neighborhood didn’t have a high crime rate so I felt a sense of security
ü I went to schools where many resources were found that wouldn’t have been found in other mostly non-white schools
ü I felt safety in my neighborhood because of my school mates and friends looked like me; in my grade school the students were all white with the exception of one Latino American
ü I had access to good healthcare most of my life
ü I had access to money to use when I needed it for most of my life
ü I applied and went to college using grants, scholarships, and other funding to achieve my educational goals without fear of rejection
ü Most of the jobs that I’ve really wanted I knew I had a very real possibility of getting
ü I was able to start working at a young age because many jobs were open to me as a white kid in an all white suburb of Chicago
ü European American adults were plentiful to help me get where I wanted to go, open doors for me, mentor me, and support me in my progression in the WMS.
ü I have been able to receive benefits such as credit cards, auto loans, mortgages on homes, to continue to amass wealth, resources, and other non-financial services, for the most part not feeling I would be denied these benefits
ü I have been able to give these same benefits to my children and family
ü I have received assistance from my family, in receiving what they had received such as education, therapeutic services, family furniture, money for loans, etc. because this wealth had been passed down through generations of living in the WMS
ü When communicating, in a conversation or in a more formal setting, I felt the high of being seen as a person of credibility and honesty; other whites would give me more eye contact if I was with a POC, and generally think I knew more about the given subject I was speaking about
ü As being a member of the WMS Club I have received a certain “Christian Privilege” conditioning me to think of myself as a chosen one, a special one in a special group, with a sense of certainty about my own life and future, while others lived in a state of religious ignorance or superstitition
ü This “Christian Privilege” created a mind set for me; because of my spiritual superiority, I would be happier, wealthier, and live a more comfortable life; I would reap good consequences
These are only a few of the benefits I have received as a white male. There are many others. In a social context, benefits are bestowed and are received by members of the group based on skin color or perhaps names. Privileges are unearned assets and advantages given by being in the group.
As a book, I now close with a poem that I wrote. It’s called White:
This one’s for you
Brothers and sisters of white hue,
The end of racism starts here,
Time to end it, cut off our fear.
Confess to the truth that we all got it
at mama’s breast,
Racism—all of us got it—deep in our chests;
Don’t matter what our intentions, good or bad or none,
Fact is, if we don’t think we have it
The root of our problem rolls on for
This is the source of our shit,
And we need to own it, this is it.
It’s found in our thoughts, deep inside our hearts,
Passed down from generations before us, from the start,
Why not admit it, come clean right now,
Break the cycle of shame,
Stop playin’ this game.
Make the choice to come out of our sleep,
That powers this illness, our crooked disease,
Ease the pain, lift the load, come to the light,
Be race aware, interrupt it, I say
At first sight.
The name of the game is transformation,
The vision of brave heart’s new nation—
To see it, name it, claim it,
Let it go, let it go, let it go,
Chop off the snake’s head whenever it hisses.
© Christopher Bear Beam, MA, 2007
© Christopher Bear Beam, MA
May, 2009
