Sometimes fate helps me write Wise Madness. I had today’s entry planned out for days without any tie in to my personal life. Yesterday, right on time, the topic affected me. I’ll let the story unfold.
Jane is back in City Island trying to get her apartment in order and I went over to help her. It’s never easy to get to City Island but I’m back to going my original way, the D train, to the BX 12 SELECT, to the BX 29. The story unfolds in the middle leg. It’s a long trip and the timing of the transfers is everything. The BX 12 SELECT pulled into the stop as I was approaching it. You don’t pay for Select buses when you get on as you do for others. You pay at a machine at the bus stop that issues you a paper receipt and then you just walk on the bus. That allows the bus to spend less time at each stop. They are faster than other buses. The problem is I was afraid that if I got a receipt I would not have time to board the bus before it left. You pay by inserting your MetroCard, I have an unlimited so I wasn’t trying to get a free ride. I just didn’t want to have to wait for the next bus. They hardly ever check if you have a receipt, so there wasn’t much risk. I’ve done this before, but not usually on such a long trip. About two-thirds of the way receipt inspectors boarded the bus at a stop and asked to see everyone’s receipt. I didn’t have on. If I had my usual jacket on I’d probably have one in pocket, but not the jacket I was wearing. When the inspector came to me he just nodded and said, “thank you.” I didn’t show him a receipt. There was a young man and adult woman near me who didn’t have a receipt and he pulled them off the bus. Can you guess what the difference was between me and them? I was white and they were black. I am against the use of the term white privilege; it usually refers to whites being treated the way everyone should be treated, so it’s not a matter of white privilege but minority discrimination. The term fuels racial resentment as the Archie Bunkers of the world don’t feel privileged. But, in this case, white privilege was the best way of putting it, and I was the beneficiary. I did the same wrong thing the others did, they were punished, and I wasn’t. I doubt anyone else saw what happened but that doesn’t make it any less wrong. One more salient fact, the inspector was black. This wasn’t done out of racial animus, but a deference to whites. I live in the Bronx, I was one of the few whites on the bus.
The topic I planned on writing about was not white privilege but how some people in the name of being color blind become prejudice blind. Though they might not have any racial animus, while they might even treat minorities with respect, fail to see how pervasive prejudice is and that we need to actively combat it.
Think of Clarence Thomas, he’s black yet he has an abysmal record on civil rights. It’s easy to say that he’s a self-hating black but there’s really no evidence of that. What there is evidence of is his being blinded by ideology. It’s the same blindness I encounter with people I know personally. It’s one I associate with Ayn Rand and libertarians but it is not confined to them. They are convinced that everyone’s fate is in their own hands and refuse to listen to evidence to the contrary. Often these are very accomplished people. It’s a common attitude in among the giants of the tech world. They think that if they can do it so can others. There is a lot of ego involved this worldview.
They refuse to see that just because they or others could overcome handicaps that doesn’t mean that others always can. They can’t see that if their lives were rerun things might have come out totally differently. Just because there is skill involved doesn’t mean that there’s no luck, and luck is often the residue of white privilege. There are millions of people of color that were arrested and imprisoned for smoking marijuana, something that whites do just as frequently, but get punished for far less often. Blacks, Hispanics, and women have far fewer chances to get mentored than white men. Studies have consistently shown that that minorities and women with equal qualifications are judged more harshly and given less opportunities than white men. When judging resumes if you give the applicant an African American or woman’s name, they are evaluated more harshly.
To deny these things is just as much a denial of reality as climate deniers. It’s the same mind set, when the facts disagree with your world view you don’t accept the facts. When you point out the facts they work very hard to find excuses to explain how there are other explanations than prejudice. They come up with a ad hoc solution for each instance instead of accepting the underlying reality.
Is this racism? It has the same effect but if you call these people racists they will look at themselves and say, “I’m not a bigot.” In their personal lives they might very well not be. I’m afraid that calling them racists is counter-productive. As they can honestly say that they don’t dislike the discriminated group, they then feel obligated to protest the use of the term to others, no matter how deserved it is. So they defend people who support confederate monuments, they defend keeping refugees that aren’t white or Christian out of the country and say it has nothing to do with bigotry. They see how areas with minority populations are not treated as well as those that are not primarily white and don’t even entertain the idea that it might be prejudice. The see nothing bigoted in Puerto Rico being dealt with more than an of magnitude less generously than Texas after devastating storms and search for reasons other than bigotry to explain it.
The more you call them on it the more adamant they become. While educated liberals are more likely to change their views in response to facts than uneducated ones, the opposite is true of conservatives. They use their education and their skills to come up with excuses rather and accept that they are wrong. How do we combat that? I wish I knew.
Wise Madness 