Part 6
In which Darrin starts to reexamine everything he thought he believed regarding social justice, racial and gender equality and the whole concept of privilege.
I feel like I should pause here to note that this is where things start getting more interpretive. What follows is how various pieces of information started to coalesce in my thoughts on my way to reaching some of the views I now hold. I know there are people who may disagree with my interpretations of both American history and my own family history. I’m not going to caveat every point at which I make a logical leap or reach a conclusion by saying this is just how this registered with me at the time. Just bear in mind that I’m relating an evolution in personal thought, not sociological research.
At the end of part 5 I had just gotten to the point where I had a glimmer of understanding that things I had taken for granted my entire life were not the norm for some or even most people. As I started to realize the impact that educational opportunities and advantages were having I got to thinking about my family history and where those opportunities started. I had the advantage of having college educated parents, but where did that start? The short answer is that on both sides of my family I am at least the third generation to go to college.
My belief at the time, and it doesn’t take much investigation to confirm this, is that children of college educated parents are more likely to go to college themselves and more likely to be successful there. See Footnote. So education is a self perpetuating cycle. If you come from a family that goes to college you are more likely to go to college and your kids are more likely to go to college. But is that racial privilege or socio-economic privilege? Well, I think it’s both really. You only have to go back a couple of generations to get to a time when higher educational opportunities for people of color were extraordinarily limited. My college educated grandparents were contemporaries with people who were former slaves or the children of former slaves and were still struggling to be recognized as human beings. The educational advantages of being white in the US in the early 20th century are undeniable. So the cycle of education starts at a time when college opportunities for people of color were almost non-existent. I guess you could say that it is socio-economic privilege that has it origins in racial privilege.
One of the other evolutions in my thinking came from taking my mandatory US History classes. I have always thought of myself as being fairly well versed in history, but it turns out that there were aspects of economic history that I had neglected. I had always thought that the vast majority of the economic impact of slavery was mainly in the plantation economy of the south. Without going too far down the rabbit hole of 18th and 19th century US economics I came to understand that the slave trade and slave labor fueled US industry and the economy even in areas that did not have large scale slave ownership. While this doesn't change my long standing statement that I have never owned slaves and as far as I know none of my ancestors ever owned slaves, it did change my belief that no one in my family had benefited from slavery and more specifically my belief that I had never benefited from slavery. I now believe that I was and still am benefiting from the history of slavery. The economic structure of the country I grew up in was founded on slave labor. I'll come back around to this in another post, because the idea that even if I was not directly responsible for something I may still have benefited from that thing becomes a recurring theme.
I read a few books around the same time that made big impressions. One was “Coming of Age in Mississippi” by Anne Moody, another was “The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass”. Those were both assigned reading in school. After I graduated I read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “Black Like Me” by John Howard Griffin. I won’t try to get in to what I took away from each of those books, but one consistent thing that became clear was that there is no way for me to viscerally understand what it is like to grow up and live as a black person in the United States. This may seem trite. After all we all know the old cliche "Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes." But what if the gap is so profound that you can never make that walk? What if the worlds you live in are so fundamentally different that they can't be internalized in less than a lifetime?
Somewhere in all of this it started to dawn on me that there had been a fundamental flaw in how I was thinking about privilege. This is where the definition of privilege that I have been including in every post starts to come in to play. It took me 20+ years to stop associating privilege, and in particular white or male or white male privilege with what I thought I was hearing when I was 17 (See Part 2 for a recap). I finally started to understand that privilege means something other than having everything.
I think as a culture when we hear the word privilege we tend to think of extremes. We hear privilege and we think of Ethan Couch, the affluenza teen whose defense four killing four people while driving drunk was that he had grown up too rich to know right from wrong. We hear privilege and we think of a C student getting into Harvard because his family donated a building. We hear privilege and think of Brock Turner getting sentenced to six months for assult and rape and only serving three. Or maybe that’s not cultural perception, maybe that was just me. Be that as it may, once I stopped thinking of privilege as having everything and started thinking of it as having one thing that is not generally available to other people I started being able to see privilege everywhere I looked.
I said in the chapter intro to this post that I reexamined a whole slew of things and I’ve focused mainly on racial and economic privilege. I may try to delve more into gender bias in a future post, but for now this has taken me far too long to write, so I’m going to hit publish and move on.
privilege
[priv-uh-lij, priv-lij]
- a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most:
- a special right, immunity, or exemption granted to persons in authority or office to free them from certain obligations or liabilities:
- a grant to an individual, corporation, etc., of a special right or immunity, under certain conditions.
- the principle or condition of enjoying special rights or immunities.
Footnote
Only about 30 percent of 18 to 24 year olds whose parents did not graduate from high school reach college, compared to about 85 percent of 18 to 24 year olds where the householder has a bachelor’s degree or more from college.
Only about 30 percent of 18 to 24 year olds whose parents did not graduate from high school reach college, compared to about 85 percent of 18 to 24 year olds where the householder has a bachelor’s degree or more from college.
Day, Jennifer C., and Curry, Andrea E. (June 1998). School Enrollment-Social and Economic Characteristics of Students: October 1996 (Update). U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, P20-500. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
