The White Privilege Vice

This week’s topic was Social injustice and it was correlated with the reading, “White privilege: Unpacking the knapsack” by Susanne McIntosh. In this paper Susanne McIntosh explains that there are certain privileges that are attributed to whites because of their skin color. She explains that these individuals who receive these privileges are unconscious of it because it comes to them not as a result of their will power but due to their ethnicity. In this paper Susanne lists all the privilege she is receives not because of merit but because she is Caucasian and also some things that she doesn’t worry about encountering.

                This topic was a very interesting one to me partly because it was a familiar topic that I had discussed in my 101 (I was excited to see how the discussion will resemble or differ from the previous one). This topic was also interesting to me because I am a girl of color and I have had such conversations with friends of different races. I strongly believe and accept McIntosh’s point, I believe that there are still some privileges that a white girl of equal status as me will receive that I won’t necessarily receive or maybe I will receive it but in a lesser amount. These privileges are not to be correlated with discrimination because they are not. The individuals who give out these privileges do so unconsciously, just like the receiver of these privileges are mostly unaware of these privileges and don’t see them as privileges.  Sometimes the individuals who are the givers of these privileges are of a different race; usually the minority race. An example of this is the story a fellow classmate of mine told about her experience at Walmart with her boyfriend. Raven explains that while walking out of Walmart, she wasn’t stopped to be checked while her boyfriend who was a Latino was stopped. I also noticed she mentioned that the service guy who stopped her boyfriend was also a Latino. After hearing these stories, something dawned on me: we all participate in some way, intentionally and unintentionally, to the continuation of these unearned white privileges.

                While also participating to this discussion in class, I thought of a famous, yet controversial scene form Paul Haggis’s Crash.  This scene was the scene between Ludacris and his friend, where they discussed the unfair privilege the waitress who was an African American had given to the white individuals. She had unfairly handed out more privilege to her white customer by pouring out more coffee to the white customers than she had to the black customers. This was an act that she had performed unintentionally because she had been acting under the power of what I just termed “the white privilege vice”. This further proves that each of us are influenced by this subtly hand that controls us all called “the white privilege vice”.