The Privilege is Mine

Me at 5, a little prince

A man in that white supremacist rally in Charlottesville last fall told NPR's reporter that Christian white males are "the most endangered species in America today."  I agree that men of European descent are now under scrutiny for our privileges, and that people of other backgrounds are standing up to insist that their lives, too, matter.

But those developments, long overdue, hardly matter when I walk into any public place.  I'm a medium-small white guy with glasses, age 58.  Whether I wear khakis and a tie, or jeans and a tee, I'm protected, connected, respected: in a word, privileged.

For example, when I entered different car-repair establishments one week last fall, better-dressed black men behind the counters straightened and smiled. In each place, those same men were wary of a casually-dressed black man who passed through the same doors moments after me. 

With my privilege comes confidence. I gulped when they told me the cost of repairs, one-third of my savings, but I recovered quickly. My assets include mutual funds, a retirement fund, and my house. Should all that go away, I still can expect a share of Dad's estate.

Now, I have worked hard for what I've got, but I'm aware that others also worked hard for what I've got.  Mom and Dad both had full time jobs to pay my tuition to a prestigious school, where well-connected teachers got me a scholarship to Duke with their recommendations.  The school network kept giving: for each teaching position I've held, a phone call from a well-connected friend moved my file to the top of a pile of applications.  I humbly acknowledge that I deserved those good recommendations, but I'm aware that others whose applications no one ever saw must have worked just as hard.

[Photo: Graduation, with Mom and Dad, May 1981, at the door of my first apartment. I'd already signed the contract for my first teaching position.]

The network I was born into helped me to build my net worth.  A lawyer friend of my parents helped me, while I recovered from an accident, to get a settlement that I invested in mutual funds.  My retirement fund comes from my generous employers.  My current home is worth more than my previous two homes, combined; but I got it with help from some crazy loans before the sub-prime lending bubble burst; house number two was bought cheap, one of Mom's investment properties; and I couldn't have qualified for my starter home without Dad's guarantee, sale of my uncle's stocks, and going in 50-50 with my brother.

The network isn't just wide; it's deep, reaching back decades.  Mom and Dad got their starter house in 1963 with loans from my uncle; the same uncle helped Dad buy the little business that Dad worked so hard to build up.  One hot summer night, when Dad and I were carrying hundreds of pounds of iron castings in buckets of hot acid across a slippery concrete floor, Dad quipped around midnight, "I got my PhD so I wouldn't have to work this hard."  My uncle, in turn, built his business from a small restaurant started by his father-in-law during the 1920s.

That young man in Charlottesville would probably say how this just proves that it's not privilege, but a strong work ethic, that earned me such advantages: True!  But I'm also aware that, during the same decades that my relatives built up all that value, discrimination against people of color was official federal government policy and unofficial social practice. Up to the Fair Housing Act of the mid-1960s, Black families faced higher hurdles to get loans, and were officially "red-lined" to be segregated near garbage dumps and factory fumes;  existing neighborhoods were intentionally bisected by the new interstate highways.  Their starter houses were dead ends. Add more than a century of official and unofficial racial discrimination for hiring, schools, and incarceration: I've started way ahead of others whose families worked just as hard.

I'm also aware of the black men who got a different treatment at those service desks where I was treated like a prince.  I used to be puzzled that an imposing black man, father of a boy in my class, always wore a suit, even to a middle school basketball game, even on a Saturday night.  I learned why, when another black man on NPR explained that he'd wear dress shoes and a suit to town on Saturday, because even other black people presume, if he wears running shoes, that he's dressed for purse-snatching.

We don't have to be "racist" to place a burden on our friends of color.  An earnestly well-intentioned student, discussing black poet Langston Hughes' "Theme for English B,"  said that Hughes wanted us to understand that a black man was "just like a normal person."  

My privilege is something I wear that opens doors to me, a protective aura, a network that guarantees my net worth.  As others are finding ways to build the same networks, demanding to be presumed innocent, credible, friendly and intelligent until proven otherwise, I don't feel endangered.

[I reflect on these same realities from essays collected and edited by black Episcopalian Catherine Meeks, Living Into God's Dream (12/2018). I remember the men who worked at Dad's company in Prep Kid a Factory: What My First Multi-Cultural Experience Gave Me (09/2022).]

[See my poems that relate to aspects of this essay, Behind Prejudice and On Track. They're on my poetry blog First Verse.]