A couple walks into a bank to ask about a new construction loan. The loan officer welcomes them back and discusses the options. The loan officer asks a few questions, such as the equity in their current home, their household income, and their credit. They give answers and are taken at their word to get things started. They leave with an estimate and a few forms to fill out, but are assured that the bank will find a way to help them out.
This, to me, is the way life should work. It is essentially my story from spring 2019. People are taken at their word until proven otherwise. For example, the bank did not issue the loan until running credit checks, seeing my W-2, doing appraisals, etc. However, the basic presumption was that whatever I said was essentially true.
As you read the story, what did you picture? If you’re like me, you pictured the loan officer as an older white man, the couple as a white man and woman.
The term “white privilege” is thrown around a lot lately, with predictable backlash. Mostly, from white people whose lives don’t feel so privileged, whether due to their level of education, their socioeconomic status (especially in their youth), or their geographic location. I recognize that I have a lot of unearned privilege, beyond whiteness: cisgender, heterosexual, well-educated in both a top-tier public school system and a private university. So perhaps acknowledging my white privilege is easier than for individuals who didn’t have such an easy start to life.
I think perhaps the better way to see it is that “privilege” is “normal.” That is, for people like me, systems work the way they are supposed to work. In fact, the educational, legal, banking, and other systems in America were designed for people like me. Now, I still had to work to get where I am and make the most of the opportunities, but I was afforded those opportunities as a matter of course.
For people who are not like me—whether due to race, ethnicity, language, gender, or sexual orientation—the systems do not function properly. Individuals within the system sometimes act from their personal biases, such as a police officer seeing a Black person as inherently more untrustworthy and prone to criminal behavior than a white person. Sometimes, individuals just get into certain habits due to their experiences and environment, such as a homeowner in a white neighborhood being surprised and fearful when they see a Black person unexpectedly walking down their sidewalk, but who might not be so surprised or fearful if they encounter a Black person in a store.
More often, the systems themselves are set up with implicit assumptions that do not accommodate changing demographics or other differences. For example, often, forms only have two options for gender—male and female—implicitly excluding someone who is nonbinary. Some forms ask for information about a child’s father and mother, implicitly excluding gay parents. Colleges assume that a student can expect financial support from their parents; in some economically depressed areas, the expected family contribution really ought to be negative because students are supporting their parents.
In other cases, causality is not so easy to determine. There are clear racial disparities in basically every societal measure—economic, educational, criminal. COVID-19 death rates are higher among Blacks than among whites. Is their higher death rate due to economic disparities, differential treatment by medical professionals, underlying chronic health conditions, or biological factors? My guess is that we can exclude biological factors, and the other three are all culpable in ways that cannot be easily disentangled. Differential treatment by medical professionals stems from training, experience, and implicit bias, but also from economic and geographic differences that lead Black patients to different hospitals than white ones.
“Privilege” doesn’t mean “an easy life.” It means that the rules of life are designed to work for you. It means that your inherent, immutable characteristics do not automatically exclude you from certain opportunities. Or when they do, and you rightly take offense, it is so unusual that people rally behind you, rather than simply acknowledging the exclusion as the way things are. Privilege isn’t something that should be abandoned by those that have it; it’s something that EVERYONE should have.