I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.
In the early days of the run-up to the 2016 election, I was just beginning to prepare a class on whiteness to teach at Yale University, where I had been newly hired. Over the years, I had come to realize that I often did not share historical knowledge with the persons to whom I was speaking. Whats redlining? someone would ask. George Washington freed his slaves? someone else would inquire.
But as I listened to Donald Trumps inflammatory rhetoric during the campaign that spring, the class took on a new dimension. Would my students understand the long history that informed a comment like one Trump made when he announced his presidential candidacy? When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best, he said. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems, and theyre bringing those problems with us. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists.
When I heard those words, I wanted my students to track immigration laws in the United States. Would they connect the treatment of the undocumented with the treatment of Irish, Italian and Asian people over the centuries?
In preparation, I needed to slowly unpack and understand how whiteness was created. How did the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted citizenship to any alien, being a free white person, develop over the years into our various immigration acts? What has it taken to cleave citizenship from free white person?
What was the trajectory of the Ku Klux Klan after its formation at the end of the Civil War, and what was its relationship to the Black Codes, those laws subsequently passed in Southern states to restrict black peoples freedoms?
Did the United States government bomb the black community in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921? How did Italians, Irish and Slavic peoples become white? Why do people believe abolitionists could not be racist?
Trumps Kool-Aid Drunks should educate themselves with this.
Isnt Donald J. Trump the epitome of White Privilege?
He can swear, call people names, corrupt the office he holds to enrich himself, family and special friends, threaten to deport immigrants and/or put them in Concentration Camps, even call for US citizens of ethnicities other than his own to be deported, while maintaining healthy, consistent support, and yet not be impeached by the White leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties.
Now, if thats not White Privilege in a bottle, then the term has no meaning and one would have to come up with a description for all those cumulative circumstances of egregious behaviour only a White man (person) could get away with.
On the other hand, imagine any Black man (person) lucky to assume any position of such high authority, least that of President, conducting him/herself in a similar manner, is it not easy to assume that person would have be turfed out of his office with fewer allegations against him/her?
I swear, if Obama and his family had behaved similarly, White Democrats would have joined with their Republicans counterparts to impeach him; even a few blacks wouldve joined in.