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White privilege and this election
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Anonymous
I would normally agree with you, but just try to imagine Palin as a Black woman or even a White man. THERE IS NO WAY that the republicans would have even taken her. Also, imagine if she were ugly. This woman has had a free ride, let's face it. |
Anonymous
I don't deny for a second that she was chosen because she's a woman. And it definitely doesn't hurt that she's attractive (though I have no idea whether that played a role in her selection--I'd tend to think they valued her age more than her appearance, to appeal to younger voters) I'm not even defending HER. If you replace every "White privilege" clause with "Sarah Palin given a pass", then maybe there would be a point. But the point of the original post is to highlight "white privilege." I just don't see it in the examples listed. Half of them compare apples to oranges. And none of them have any kind of obvious racial connection. I want to see people of all races succeed, and I want them to succeed on their own merits. Barack Obama is doing that. He HAS done that already, regardless of whether he ultimately wins the election. How many freshman senators (of ANY race) have made it to a presidential election? I think posts like this drive a wedge that doesn't need to be there. |
Anonymous
| Back to the OP's post. Imagine a charming woman who went to 4 colleges in 5 years and finally graduated. Her husband didn't go to college and works as a seasonal plumber, roofer, carpenter (all admirable of course). Insert the adjective "black" in front of the woman and man, do you think they'd be so popular on the scale that the Palins are on the Republican VP ticket? |
Anonymous
And stick'em in a row house in a working class black neighborhood in DC and half of the white people from west of the park will be afraid of them! (Don't flame me, I only said "half"!) |
Anonymous
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LOL PP, you are right. I cannot tell you how many times I have been asked by middle aged white women : "Is this a safe area, are you feeling safe here?!" with a sheepish look in their eyes. As if my answer was the only one that could be trusted. because I am a white woman ... oh and I am blond with blue eyes on top of that... so I must know, right? They look at my neighbors with a mixture of mistrust and prejudice, simply because they are black and working class. I find it somewhat disgusting. They never ask my husband that, well that is, unless he is dressed for work. If he wears jeans and a t-shirt, he must be "one of them".
Racism exists. But the one thing that keeps me calm is that there are more people who are truly colorblind, you just have to make sure who you choose to aurround yourself with. |
Anonymous
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OK, but I have a question. How much of that has to do with race, and how much has to do with income level? I get nervous walking alone through lower income neighborhoods; but I'm just as nervous when a white guy looks crosswise at me as I would if the guy were black. On the flip side, I live in a middle/upper middle class neighborhood and black families live in two of the three houses that border mine. I've never seen anyone look nervous walking down my street alone...
So, to address a prior post, take the example of a black woman who went to 4 colleges in five years. If she went on to do what Palin did (rise from PTA to city council to mayor to governor), then YES, I think she would be held up as a success story, just like Palin is. Like the original post said, Obama touts the fact that he has faced racism and was able to overcome it to get where he is today. If Palin were black, I actually think the interest in her would be EVEN higher, because everyone would assume (perhaps rightly) that she had one more huge barrier to surmount to get where she did. I am automatically more interested in people who had to work their way up the hard way or a less direct way. I'm not saying that in reference to anyone in particular-- it's just that I don't get the warm fuzzies for Joe Smith who grew up in the country club set, got into Yale because daddy was a donor, went on to Stanford Law, and then into politics. I think people who started off "normal," figured out who they were once they hit adulthood, and then shot for the stars (be it Sarah Palin or Oprah) are more interesting. |
Anonymous
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Thanks for posting this, OP.
I'd like to respectfully posit the following: I think there's a difference between racism and bigotry. Racism is pervasive and permeates our culture, and affects everyone, though it's not necessarily overt on my radar screen as a white woman all the time. It is power + privilege. One privilege I have as a white person is choosing when to acknowledge its presence. People of color do not have this luxury. Bigotry is active and pertains to individuals. You can be racist just by being a part of the dominant privileged group in our culture, and yet not be a bigot. Now this notion tends to get a lot of people upset. Nobody likes to be accused of being a racist, or biggoted, or biased. But, acknowledging to ourselves how we do or don't benefit from privilege and examining it in our own heads is not a bad thing. Peggy macIntosh wrote a great piece several years ago called "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." I encourage those curious to check it out. |
Anonymous
PP here -- true, income level is germane but my point with the "white people west of the park" is that some of us (myself included until a few years ago) are so cut off from normal black life that when we go into a low-income black neighborhood we can't tell the difference between, say, hospital lab managers, government workers, travel agents, security guards, drug dealers and thieves (all people who live in my neighborhood). Everyone looks scary unless they're dressed in a business suit and carrying a brief case. And that's certainly understandable, when you're an outsider in a neighborhood and you stand out because of the color of your skin. My point is that instead of saying to ourselves, gee, I just don't know enough to know whether this neighborhood is safe or not or who I can trust, we just mistrust the whole neighborhood, because we've been primed by the media to assume the whole place is dangerous. Again, not saying every white person is like this. But I do know that I was like this until I moved to my neighborhood and found to my surprise that there were all kinds of people here and that one of the scariest looking ones (pitbull, jeans, chains, do rag, bottle of beer) had worked for the city for decades and he and his pitbull were incredibly sweet. So I believe it's absolutely true -- if Sarah Palin's family were black (and she didn't have her meteoric political career) and you moved them into a neighborhood in DC, some white middle class people would look at their track record and fear them. White working class people have their own problems (as we've noted on DCUM, there's a lot of snobbery towards white working class folks being expressed everyday) but they don't have to confront this underlying level of fear that working class and middle class black people do. |
Anonymous
In your 1st paragraph, the ideal person(s) you described are Obama & his wife Michelle and to a certain extent Condoleeza Rice who grew up in the South during the 50s, during segregation. In your 2nd paragraph, you've described John McCain, III. He got into the Naval Academy based on the fact he was an offspring of an Admiral and his father got in bc his grandfather was an Admiral. Except McCain didn't go to law school. He finished in the bottom 10% of his class. Sarah Palin did not grow up poor. She was middle class so I don't see the adversity that she had to overcome. |
Anonymous
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If Sarah Palin had all the same attributes (attractive, right-wing conservative Republican, staunchly anti-abortion, Alaska governor, etc.) AND she was black instead of white, the Republican party would have just about died and gone to heaven! They would have loved her even more! But I agree that a Democratic black woman with the same baggage living in DC--or more realistically Baltimore or Richmond since citizens of these cities can vote/engage in national politics--would be treated very differently than Sarah Palin has been by the Republican party. |
Anonymous
I'm a professor who has routinely uses MacIntosh's knapsack piece in graduate classes on social justice in counseling and therapy. What I have learned to my great surprise is that, at least among graduate students in my field, many of my students feel strongly that perceived social class is now a larger determinant of the treatment they receive than is race. This view is shared across black, Latino, Asian, and white students. When we do empirical studies of bias in this age group (mid 20s to early 50s), we find more bias against "poor whites" or "white trash" (excuse the terms, I'm quoting here) than against professional blacks or Latinos, for example. Interestingly, many of the most vitriolic comments on DCUM about Sarah Palin and certain white voters are also class based. |
Anonymous
I'm not familiar with Macintosh & the knapsack piece, but have some questions on what you said. Is this in an urban setting? Would the results be different if you were to survey people living in rural or homogeneous areas? Or people who didn't go to college? I think people who pursue graduate studies self-select and are a subset of the population who may not represent the average person living in the fly-over states or remote areas. Just curious. |
Anonymous
ROFL. You nailed it. I remember all my conservative co-workers swooned over Condoleeza Rice. But, I think if you threw in the pregnant teenage daughter, comments from the boyfriend, controversy with the Church, and some of those other things - I still think the support would be there for Condi overall but some of the support would have been lost within the Party. I also was going to write about class being part of it but someone beat me to it. I think it was my husband that said just add the phrase "for the rich" to most of the platform items for the Republican party. Could you imagine if Sarah Palin had been a community organizer helping poor people? I think that would have been the one thing she wouldn't be able to overcome unless it was chalked up to a youthful mistake 
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Anonymous
| You know, I think that we could all answer these questions about our own feelings about race after taking the Implicit Association Test. Go for it. Then come back to this thread and let us know how you scored on the racial bias section. Racism is real folks, lets admit it. |
Anonymous
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good idea! I actually just took the demo test and my result is:
Your Result Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between European American and African American. which is what I thought. (I am married to an african american) Interestingly enough, I got a different result when I did the same test with asian americans... it showed a moderate association with european americans rather than with asian americans. It's probably because I literally have never had asian friends at all. (I am not from the US) the demo test can be found here: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/takeatest.html |