my anthro professor: gives rambling, sensationalistic, and wildly inaccurate information about kuru,

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my anthro professor: gives rambling, sensationalistic, and wildly inaccurate information about kuru, speaks sensationalistically and insensitively about HIV, and makes inaccurate and inappropriately lighthearted comments about John-Roger Hinkins’s sexual abuse of his followers

me: ?!?!??!?!!??

plaidadder: rememberwhenyoutried: “All white

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plaidadder:

rememberwhenyoutried:

“All white people benefit from racism,” is a statement of fact, not an accusation. It’s similar to, “All rich people have money.” As white people, we can use what we have to help people, we can just sit on it and reap the benefits (passively hurting people who don’t have what we have) or we can actively use it to hurt people, but that’s up to us. 

I’ve thought about whether one could explain white privilege to white people (such as myself) by using the Catholic concept of original sin. As with original sin, you didn’t personally ask for white privilege; you were born into it willy-nilly; there is no way to rid yourself of it (Catholic doctrine holds that original sin can only be washed away via God’s grace, usually bestowed via baptism). Though you may have done nothing to attain it, you still have it, and it’s still your responsibility to fight it. If that doesn’t seem ‘fair,’ well, it’s nowhere near as unfair as racism is.

But then I think that although this analogy is striking, it reinforces the very problem that the OP is addressing, which is that to point out the existence of white privilege (or systemic racism, which is what sustains white privilege) to a white person often results in their becoming so personally offended by your supposed “accusation” of their own moral impurity that they reject the entire concept and therefore the reality of systemic racism.

And then I wonder if part of what creates white fragility in the first place is that white people are, consciously or unconsciously, conceiving of racism in theological rather than social terms, as if it is a sin that one must expiate as opposed to a problem that one must help to solve. Because this seems to me to be one of the barriers to addressing systemic racism (as opposed to interpersonal racism): getting white people such as myself to understand that the problem with  racism is not that it stains our personal souls, but that it harms other people–and that the goal of fighting racism is not moral purity for us, but less harm done to people of color.