The Cost of Privilege
Dr. Mary Lamb Shelden
“I believe that every thought and every act of racism is harmful; if it is my thought or act, it is harmful to me as well as others.” ~The Birmingham Pledge (http://www.thebirminghampledge.org/)
In one of my earliest memories – I must have been only about age 3 or 4 – my family stands around me. I am seated in a blue tweed easy chair in the living room. There are many faces encircling me. In my memory, I see the scene alternately from my seated vantage point and as someone standing just outside the circle. I am being asked to say “negro.” Someone special is coming to visit – a new friend – and I’m being coached to see whether I can say the word clearly. If I can it will be fine. If not, I will hurt our new friend’s feelings. It will be very, very bad if I say the word unclearly. Which, of course, is what I do. It’s agreed, then, that if I have any cause to comment on the appearance of our new friend, I should use the word “black.”
To this day, I cannot tell this story aloud without weeping.
This is my earliest memory of racial difference. Later that day, our new friend did come to visit us, and he is a cherished friend to this day. But the tension of that moment before his arrival has also always remained with me; like a sore in the mouth that the tongue seeks out again and again, I have returned to this memory – first as a moment of shame, that I could not get it right, and then later with curiosity as a fraught moment of my development, and then later still as a personal interlude representative of a larger cultural moment. For decades, I thought of it as the moment I learned about blackness. It is only more recently that I have begun to understand it as the moment I learned about whiteness – about my own race, and about my unsought, unwished-for power to harm. I remember with clarity the sense of dread and frustration and grief I felt at the possibility that I might accidentally hurt another person’s feelings enough to do lasting injury.
I have been awake to the need for racial justice my whole life. At first, my conception of it was interpersonal: if white folks could just learn to treat people of color equitably, it would be better. I came later to understand it more historically; Alex Haley’s Roots, in my teens, and in my twenties the PBS documentary, Eyes on the Prize, were the first key textbooks of my remedial education in racial history, but curiosity and a hunger to understand took me further. I am grateful to my professors in Women’s Studies and the African-American authors they taught me for helping me to understand race as a social construct, and racism as systemic – as largely institutional and unconscious socialization. I’m grateful to friends and colleagues in Richmond, Virginia, for helping me to discern racism as structural—as built not only into our institutions and policies, but into things as solid and enduring as our roadways and county lines and transportation systems. My understanding of racism has evolved considerably over the decades since that first remembered moment –but even so, that moment contains the kernel of understanding I’ve drawn on most recently.
I understand my privilege as a white person – in socio-economic status, certainly, and in access to resources like education. I would never deny this privilege. While other aspects of my identity may put me at a disadvantage, most assuredly my race advantages me in ways I have done nothing to merit. When I first began to learn about the untold histories of peoples of color, I felt a guilt I thought was unearned, as a person who never supported, for example, slavery or Jim Crow; then I began to realize that there were things I did or didn’t do, and ideas I unconsciously held, that I could still do something about; and eventually I began to understand that I could actually use some of the privilege I have to mitigate some of the systemic damage from institutional and structural racism. I have come to understand, over time, that when I take these steps, it is freeing to my own soul. I feel some relief from the earned and unearned guilt, and I tread a bit more lightly on the earth.
Indeed, it is only within the last couple of years that I’ve begun to understand what I felt in my heart in that first recognition of race as a youngster – an idea that I think our use of the word “privilege” may obscure for many: that racism – indeed, oppression of all kinds – doesn’t just hurt those oppressed. This is, I think, a thing understood by many people of color, but too seldom by people of whiteness. While the benefits of privilege are undeniable, it exacts a cost on the spirit of the oppressor. It is not ultimately a positive to me that mainstream history is centered on my race; that our economic system is set up to disadvantage people “not like me”; that our neighborhoods and townships and counties are set up to exclude people “not like me”; that it’s hard to form friendships across racial lines. While the financial benefits and relative ease of access to resources is undeniable – indeed, I have no wish to deny them – I cannot see it as ultimately of benefit to me that others are disadvantaged by my race. Indeed, I feel the wrong, the loss, the pain acutely.
In many ways, I am still that four-year-old, still wishing with all my might that I could change things so that I had no power to harm my friend.