Coming from a Position of Privilege

I no sooner publicly acknowledged bright sides of pandemic living when we were again thrust into turmoil due to recent incidents showcasing racial inequality.

First, there was Ahmaud Arbery, killed while on a neighborhood jog. It took local law enforcement more than two months to charge two gun-wielding vigilantes with murder despite clear evidence they went well beyond whatever bounds they believed they were entitled to have. I thought back to an early morning jog I took in the mid 1990s in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. I lived in a typical middle-class, mostly white neighborhood bordered by a lower-income, mostly black one. A house I'd run by earlier had been burglarized, and police stopped me a couple of blocks over upon arriving at the scene. And rightly so. Who expects to find someone running for pleasure at 4 in the morning? All I had to do, though, was explain that I was training for a marathon and where I lived and they let me go.

Would they have done the same if I'd been a woman of color? And especially a black man? No, I feel certain I would have been further interrogated at best and hauled to jail at worst. That's privilege.

Yesterday I spent time as I usually do watching Sunday morning news programs, soaking in various social and political takes on the civil unrest unleashed after George Floyd was killed by police officers (yes, all four!) while onlookers recorded the scene. Local prosecutors took longer than expected to arrest the primary officer, and still haven't charged the other three who failed to stop actions that might have saved Floyd's life. Both peaceful and violent protests soon erupted, including here in San Diego.

On one of the Sunday programs, ABC correspondent Pierre Thomas discussed being pulled over in the D.C. area solely because he was a black man driving a nice car. "It's not a comfortable feeling," he told a panel. He noted that more recently, he'd stopped to wipe off a shopping cart before entering a grocery store and a white woman tried to grab the cart, believing Pierre was wiping it for her, not him. It reminded me of a class I took with Pierre some 30 years ago when we were both students at Virginia Tech. For one class exercise, Pierre and I had to pretend we were a couple (at a time when interracial dating was not common) and he had to break up with me. Some of my classmates were visibly uncomfortable--including Pierre. He also apparently had not had as much experience with romantic rejection as I had. I handily won the argument that meant we'd stay together.

Now I see his classroom discomfort in a new light. Seeing how his career took off but life remained rooted in stigma and stereotype made me realize that all along I had an advantage he didn't: privilege. And that perhaps that's why he stumbled and relented to my pleas that day in class.

Finally, there's Amy Cooper, the now-infamous former investment banker who refused to leash her dog in Central Park after being confronted by a black birdwatcher demanding she follow the rules. She was fully aware of her white privilege as she summoned police on her cellphone by claiming she was being threatened by a black man in the park.

Nothing is going to change until people use their privilege to force seismic shifts in our American culture. And such a concerted effort is not going to happen in a nation so divided now. Many white and wealthy people say they are sympathetic but still don't understand the advantages they received by virtue of their ethnicity, race and maybe gender. That's partly because they have minimum exposure to groups outside of their own. Even when in the minority, white people in this country carry the weight of ancestral preferences and power into a conversation or confrontation.

For anyone who still doesn't quite get it, I offer this widely circulated video that helps explain the advantages some receive and others don't purely by the circumstances surrounding their births and upbringings. Note also who still goes for the prize, and who allows others to have a fighting chance.