Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society

4 Interrogating Privilege, Transforming Whiteness

75 Blacks are made visible and invisible at the same time under the gaze. For example, when Black youth are seen it is often with a specific gaze that sees the “troublemaker,” “the school skipper,” or the “criminal.” Thus they are seen and constrained by a gaze that is intended to control physical and social movements. The purpose of the gaze is that it should subdue those who receive it and make them wish to be invisible. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks Whether or not we understand ourselves through lenses of identity, we still make ethical choices about how to live with those identities. It is the choices that require critique. Mari J. Matsuda, “I and Thou and We and the Way to Peace” Seeing and naming the whiteness of whiteness, then decentering whiteness from its position as the universal norm, is an undertaking with enormous potential for liberating our society. The necessary first step is acknowledging that there is indeed white privilege, or what I prefer to call white supremacy or white racial hierarchy. I endeavor here to considerthenatureandfunctionofthisprivilegeasithasbeenarticulatedin order to determine how we should think about it and how best to end it. This work presents some difficulties, the first of which is defining privilege and its relationship to otherness, at least rhetorically. This includes examining the ways that the rhetoric of white privilege contributes to its invisibility and corroborates the myth of white innocence. In order to more fully state the problem and make the case for a transformative Interrogating Privilege, Transforming Whiteness four White Privilege 76 approach, I will draw here upon the debate of sameness and difference. I question the long-term usefulness of valorizing difference, as well as of assimilationistapproachestopowerstructures.Iadvocateacommunicative ethic, informed by the relational nature of difference. I also want to emphasize the importance of the participation of both marginalized and privileged groups in jointly confronting exclusionary ideas, practices, and structures. One of the most powerful and eloquent voices in such work is that of Stephanie Wildman, whose penetrating analysis exposes privilege that is often viewed as an objective norm hiding within the language of the dominant discourse of our society. Wildman ’s work demonstrates that once we learn to look for this privilege, and how to look for it, we start to discover it in virtually all aspects of ourlives.Hereffortisnotsimplytonameprivilegebutalsotodestabilize and change it. I want to contribute to that effort with an examination of some of the complexities and difficulties, in the hope of deepening and strengthening this effort. The Problem of Defining Privilege and Deficit The relationship between privilege and non-privilege, or “deficit,” is difficult to describe. Wildman defines privilege as a “systemic conferral of benefit and advantage,” triggered not by merit but by “affiliation, consciousornotandchosenornot ,tothedominantsideofapowersystem.”1 In other words, privilege is a system by which groups of people actively acquire or passively attach to reward without earning it, simply by membership in privileged groups such as whites, heterosexuals, males, ablebodied persons, or a combination of these or other categories. Individuals and groups can be privileged in society without being all of these, a point which complicates recognition of privilege. For example, a black female heterosexual can access structures of privilege as a heterosexual, even if she may not be privileged by her status as a member of a racial minority or as a woman. If privilege is relatively simple to define, its relational other is not. This difficulty casts doubt on the validity of a definition of privilege, as well as on the lived meaning or social construction of the term. French structuralistswouldseekthemeaningofprivilegeinoppositiontoother Interrogating Privilege, Transforming Whiteness 77 meanings: the significance of a word is located through contrast.2 But an opposite to privilege is not readily available. Until recently, most dictionaries did not contain the terms “aprivilege,” “nonprivilege,” or the term Margalynne Armstrong employs, “unprivileged.”3 The definition problemis more pronounced when approached from a postmodernist or poststructuralist orientation.4 Instead of a spectrum of terms to express thenature of groups that access systems of privilege at multiple sites, few sites, or no sites, there is only the term “underprivileged.” “Underprivileged” functions problematically as a linguistic companion to privilege; it unfortunately reifies the notion of privilege as normal and unquestionable. In indirect contrast to privilege, underprivilege is a kind of special case, to indicate those falling below an assumed normal level of social existence. It is the assumption of what is normal...