Views about privilege may depend on vantage point
Kathryn Smith sighs when people dismiss “white privilege,” when they cite how hard they worked or say, “They must have been out of white privilege when I was born because I didn’t get any.”
She does her best to explain it.
You may have worked hard to overcome obstacles, but skin color was not one of them.
You were poor but not poor and
Black.
Your history books and TV shows portrayed people who looked like you.
You put yourself through college, but you attended the one you chose, unlike many Black students, who could not attend state universities until the 1960s.
You shop without being followed by security guards.
Kathryn and I have been friends for 20 years, so I know her stories.
She grew up in a small town in Kansas, where there were two pools, one for whites and one — smaller, poorly maintained and sporadically open — for Black people.
Her Army veteran dad worked in a steel foundry. Her parents made sure their five kids got what they needed.
Kathryn was accepted to the U.S. Air Force Academy and attended because it was free. She served for four years before enrolling in law school.
“You get the benefit of the doubt if you’re white, and you walk into a courtroom. They think you’re the lawyer,” she said. “If I walk into a courtroom, they think, at best, I’m the paralegal and, at worse, the defendant.”
Once, 30 years ago, as Kathryn left her Redondo Beach condo in her red sports car, she was surrounded by four police cars, the officers pointing their guns at her.
She’d later learn a neighbor had reported a Black woman in the condo’s parking garage.
That was all it took.
If you’re white, it’s sometimes hard to see white privilege because these things don’t happen to you.
“These are the everyday indignities we suffer,” Kathryn explains.
“You get used to it,” she says. “It doesn’t make it right.”