White privilege got underneath white people’s skin so fast, it made heads spin. What made that terminology so powerful? Why did privilege stick like super-glue to white skin?
It stuck because it’s a stereotype. It got underneath white people’s skin because they’d never been stereotyped before. Suddenly, white people were under the microscope, examined, recorded and dissected. No, no, no cried white people, no one can stereotype us, only white people get to stereotype. Despite their demands and pleas, the stereotype stuck.
Today, Americans of every color, ethnicity, and background, including white people, see white skin and think “privilege” and “fragility”. It’s automatic, unconscious, and uncontrollable – one of those things that “everybody knows”.
Like it or not, stereotyping white people is working. It is doing exactly what it was meant to do. People tried – they really, really tried – to get through to white people, to help them understand that stereotyping was wrong, cruel, unfair, immoral and destructive. But white people could not understand an experience that had never happened to them.
White people are listening now.
It’s easy to see that white privilege is haunting this man. He looks at his children and hears white privilege in his head. He knows his children hear it too. An essay on Medium will not make white privilege go away.
White people created stereotyping and now they have to figure a way out of “theirs”. Until then, white people will remain privileged and fragile stereotypes (shallow caricatures, even parodies of their former selves).
Does white privilege and fragility bother me? No, it does not, and I am not alone. A lot of people are immune to stereotyping, their mental defenses keep stereotyping out of their minds.
The only people susceptible to stereotyping, are people already infected by stereotyping.
Only in hindsight, do I see how my family immunized me from the stereotyping infection. Hindsight also returns memories of stereotyping being injected into my peers – against their will and without their knowledge.
As they say, actions speak louder than words.
Experience changes minds, not words. Time for this white father of black children, to expand his own, and his family’s, experience to include a lot of black, brown and other people. Civic work is the remedy I recommend.
