white privilege

“ When well-meaning white people who have never thought about privileged systems or whiteness, or race, start out, the teaching is very necessary to get them past blame, shame, and guilt. They were born into circumstances they didn’t invent. They were born into history they didn’t invent. Rather than have them do the solipsistic thing of getting all self-involved in this, it’s just very important to hold them, while they get into a rational frame of mind, that the big systems exist that they didn’t know about, they were born into them. We were not taught history, but this is history they are learning. The American myth of meritocracy doesn’t apply. Meritocracy means whatever you ended up with must be what you wanted and worked for, and what you earned and deserved individually. They’ve been taught that. It’s true, huge systems that one is born into will bear on what one can do with one’s life, and how won’t see. And that’s the part that has been missing from that education. So these white women breaking up over their first experience of hearing about racism, they are basket-cases partly because of their bad, bad, education, and their inability to see systemically, and it’s not their fault. But they need to be hustled past it as quickly as possible with some remedial words which I think I’ve just spoken here. You did not invent the systems you were born into. They are there, and you were taught not to see them and you’re a very student of what you’ve been taught.”-Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequalty (Movie)