Why I wince when I hear the words ‘white privilege’
Asking President Donald Trump howhe feels about “white privilege” is sort of like asking a young fish howit feels aboutwater.
As the late authorDavid Foster Wallace tells the fable in an unusually famous commencement address, the young fish doesn’t knowwhatwater is. He’sway too close to the subject.
That’s howPresident Trump sounded when renowned journalist BobWoodward, son of an Illinois lawyer and judge, asked him this question in a June interview, one of 18 Woodward conducted with Trump for “Rage,” the author’s latest book to probe the Trump presidency.
“Do you have any sense that that privilege has isolated and put you in a cave to a certain extent,” Woodward asked, “as it put me and I think lots of white privileged people in a cave and thatwe have towork ourway out of it to understand the anger and the pain, particularly, Black people feel in this country?”
“No,” Trump responded, slightly taken aback by the question. “You really drank theKool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”
Too bad. If he did, he might be doing better in the polls. AMarist poll in June found two-thirds of Americans thought Trump hasmade racial tensionsworse since the death of George Floyd under a police officer’s knee touched off a nationwide racial reckoning. Yet since then his reelection strategy appears to be more interested in rewinning voters who already have supported him than in broadening his outreach. Youmight say that he’s taking advantage of his privileged position.
But still, I wince when I hear the words “white privilege.” I don’t deny its existence. But, as I try to encourage the cross-racial dialogue thatwe so desperately need in our increasingly diverse country, I find the term often proves to be more trouble than it’s worth.
For one thing, when I say it to mean its original academic meaning— systems that benefit white people over nonwhite people in some societies— I hear fromwhite people who accuse me of accusing them of racism, and go on to tell me about howhard they and their ancestorsworked to make it on their own in this country. I get it.
In fact, I mean nothing personal. I am only using it in theway the fabled fish is intended to hear aboutwater. It’s all around us and for the common goodwe need to understand it and deal with it— or it surely will deal with us in the most damagingways.
Unfortunately, President Trump, despite his frequent attacks against “political correctness” and “cancel culture,” recently has responded with cancellation, particularly of racial sensitivity training in federal agencies. He’s gunning for any training that addresses such topics as “white privilege” and related “critical race theory,” which he calls “divisive, anti-American propaganda.”
Citing “press reports” of training sessions at which employeeswere allegedly told “virtually all white people contribute to racism,” Russell Vought, director of the Office ofManagement and Budget, ordered the review and possible cancellations in a Sept. 4 letter to federal agencies.
Besides the memo, Trumpwent typically Trumpian with a series of tweets the next day, retweeting about 20 fromconservative media and others praising his new blowagainst the PC elite.
Well, as with “white privilege,” I, too, have objected to some of the excesses of “PC,” ”cancel culture” and “critical race theory” that I have encountered on campus and elsewhere. Butwe talked out the disputes. Efforts to resolve and learn fromcultural differences should be discussed and debated, not muzzled.
But this is an election year, isn’t it? Not surprisingly Trump’s retweets express delight over the approval his supposed clampdown has received from conservative media as Election Day approaches. To a tweet that called “critical race theory the greatest threat towestern civilization,” for example, Trump responded “Not any more.” All hail our hero.
Media guruMarshallMcLuhan declared back in the 1960s, “Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.” Government should try to bring various groups together, not drive more wedges— andwedge issues— to tear us further apart.
You can’t have open educational dialogue if only one side gets to do all the talking. That’s theworst kind of privilege, regardless of color.