Leveraging Privilege

What is whiteness? Is being white even a thing? Why do I feel more white today than I ever have? Is it good to feel white? Should I feel bad if I'm white?

There is no biological difference between white persons and persons of other races save a slight melanin change. So just as you have blue eyes and I do not, she has more melanin and I have less melanin.

If there's not biological difference between us, then what is race?

 Race is a social construct created to establish power.

It's not our skin color that has separated us but our investment in our skin color that has separated us.

As George Lipsitz writes in Bill Moore's Body, whiteness: "has a cash value: it accounts for advantages that come to individuals through profits made from housing secured in discriminatory markets, through the unequal educations allocated to children of different races, through insider networks that channel employment opportunities to the relatives and friends of those who have profited most from present and past racial discrimination, and especially through intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations."

Race might be just a social construct, but it is one that weighs heavily on all of life.
From the hospital you're born in to the doctor who treats you for your first ear infection;
from the preschool you attend (or don't) to the elementary teacher's disciplinary actions toward you;
from your high school involvement to your college application process;
from the adults involved in your life to the careers you're encouraged to pursue;
from investment opportunities afforded to you to your neighborhood and your kid's neighborhood.

Race weighs heavily on it all.

Let's back up for a second. You might be asking me, what does this mean? This "social construct" idea? What even is that?

Social constructs, according to Foucault, Bakhtin, Vygotsky and a bunch of other old white guys, are how we create reality.

The theory of constructionism is in opposition to the theory of essentialism, which basically says that things are how they are because that's how they are.

For instance, many people would argue that boys are born with an innate set of personality traits. Boys are strong. Boys are non-emotional. Boys are natural leaders.
Some would argue that these are essential traits - they are biological - they are predetermined.
A constructionist would argue, however, that these traits are not innately "male," they are instead taught. They are constructed. The idea of the boy is a social construct. Over time we have created the reality of boy-ness, requiring these characteristics and teaching, albeit not directly, that effeminate qualities are inappropriate in boys. This is especially problematic when a boy feels that he does not exhibit these "masculine" qualities naturally as some would expect.

This discussion of sex v. gender is extremely oversimplified, but I provide it only as an attempt to explain what a social construct is.

We construct our reality in an attempt to organize our world. Through billions of years we've developed as a species, building our societies on what we have deemed best practice overtime.
Why do we do this? Why must we organize our world and create our reality?

It always comes back to power. Everything is about power. Everything.

We organize our world  - we create our reality - so that we can establish systems of power.

To go back to the gender example, if there are constructed male qualities that over time are deemed better than constructed female qualities, we will invest in the male qualities instead of the female. And the more we invest, the more power is held.

So race. How is race a social construct? And what does this construct have to do with power? And what does this construct have to do with me?

Over time we have invested in whiteness. This was not an individual's decision. No future KKK member came out to a group of white folks and said, let's demonize the black person so that we can hold power over them. This idea of whiteness has evolved.

As human beings we naturally work in our best interest and our best interest is to hold the power. Therefore we have overtime created a series of beliefs about humans whose bodies produce more melanin so that we can hold the power over them. On the plantation, in the field, in the career path, in the classroom, on the road, in the justice system, we hold the power because of our socially constructed whiteness.

And the most disturbing part of this idea of whiteness is that we have been told it does not exist.

We are told that the black race exists and the hispanic race and the asian race and the middle eastern race, but not the white race.

That is privilege in its finest. The privilege of never having to be labeled. Of always being the unmarked category.

The more we ignore the existence of whiteness as a social construct in which we invest in our daily decisions, the more we can ignore the disadvantages faced by those of the marked categories, the "races."

We must begin the process leveraging our whiteness for justice, and this begins with a recognition that whiteness is real (albeit constructed, but what isn't), whiteness exists, whiteness is powerful.

Only then can we dismantle the power whiteness holds in our own lives and use that power for justice.