Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 47

I would like to open today's post with an exchange of emails that occurred yesterday: "Hi Aaron thanks for writing- it's always great to get mail from our ever-thoughtful listeners. Your points about white privilege are well taken, but I'd just make a few counter-points. First, I'd say that privilege isn't just about having monetary wealth, but there's a "wealth" that comes from just being white- you get to start the race with a headstart, no matter how small, but it's there. And thinking about what you said about there being no men on the panel, well, most such panels are dominated by men, but what struck me was that those three women talked almost exclusively about injustices suffered by black men. But your overall point, that there's prejudice and inequality everywhere, is I think worth heeding- and perhaps the best we can do as individuals is treat every single person with equal respect. That would solve a few things. Again, thanks for writing!" My reply: "I find it concerning that black men would need women to speak on their behalf, which is why I would have appreciated hearing it in their own voices. I think that the way white privilege is being addressed is a bit late in the game, or the horse is already out of the barn. We still have vast residues of white privilege from colonialism, post-colonialism and Eurocentric white-supremacy, but this is rapidly being supplanted, thanks to global capitalism, into a kind of winner-takes-all, and race and racial privilege are being replaced by economic success and prowess that seems to be quite colour-blind. To put it bluntly, the poor are turning into the new niggers. I hope this gets addressed in a future program. cheers Aaron" "One other idea, which I think I've already covered in my blog, but would be worth further exploring: is it white privilege, or middle class privilege, or both? Is it chicken or egg? Unlike a lot of people who believe that white privilege exists (and I actually believe that it does, but that's become somewhat diluted by other concerns) I was not born and raised middle class and I've always been poor. I have also known a lot of people of colour much better off than me, as well as other white people. I think this is why I tend to question this. If you are white and middle class then our experiences are going to be decidedly different. cheers aa" White, middle class, and...dare I say... of English parentage? The English and the Spanish contain some of the most egregious cultural arrogance in the world, and for the simple reason that these two nations have been the most shameful and brazen of the global colonizers. Even worse than the Portuguese. Worse than the Belgians. Worse than the French or the Dutch. It was in Colombia, formerly the Spanish colony of Nueva Granada (more than two hundred years ago), that I first really began to notice and consider the concept of collective trauma. I assumed that this would have been entirely because of the fifty year civil war with FARC. After doing some thinking, research, reading, observing and conversing with people, I came to realize that FARC was the packaging, or gift wrapping, for yet the latest version of the same kind of collective trauma that had been visited upon the aboriginal peoples of Latin America, the indigenous peoples of North America, thanks to the British and French and newly minted Americans, and the survivors and descendants of black African slaves throughout the world and especially in the Americas and specifically in the United States. England has never been invaded or occupied since 1066. Spain drove out the last of the North African Muslims in 1492. Two small, bullying, overweening and arrogant nations set to explore, colonize, rape, murder and plunder and all for their respective ruling sovereigns, each invoking God and Holy Church as their justification. Even if I am calling White Privilege a structural myth, Gentle Reader, I still believe that it exists and still holds sway over how our society has evolved, developed and mutated. The current branding of White Privilege as is being bandied about in the popular media? That needs to be examined and scrutinized. now, a further word about my own experience of White Privilege. Even though I am Caucasian, I am not English. My ethnic background is half Scots, and half Black Sea German. I have mentioned previously that my Scots-Canadian father was a white supremist, and how impossible it was having a rational conversation with him. Here's an example. My father was going on about "Indians" and was insisting that the way they dress and live "they want to be white men." I replied to my father that when I was visiting Scotland in 1991, I was intrigued at how similar everything was to the English. I assumed then, as I do now, that when a people has been conquered, colonized and occupied, there is going to be a marked trend towards imitating the new overlords, and often there will be little option because local traditional practices are often going to be oppressed, discouraged or downright forbidden. We have only to consider what happened in the cultural genocide against our own First Nations People, thanks to the Residential Schools. My reply not only shut my father up, but helped turn him against me permanently and irrevocably, thus almost completely ending our relationship. So be it. My father, by the way, as the son of Scots immigrants, did not have an easy time himself. I'm sure being Caucasian gave him and his brothers some advantage, but they all had to leave school early and work hard together to form a thriving auto body repair business. They had none of the social connections to the English elite of Vancouver, and thanks to their ancestral experience of English colonization of their mother Scotland, were going to have nothing but contempt and grudges towards their English "betters." My mother was the granddaughter of Black Sea Germans who immigrated to North America from Crimea in the eighteen eighties. They had already a legacy of being treated like second class citizens in Russia and this collective trauma they carried with them to the New World, just as my Scots grandparents carried with them the collective dominance of English (not British) dominance has gone on to influence and affect their descendants, including my own family. Still, this is but an owie next to the particularly grave injustices suffered by the African peoples because of slavery, but there still is some comparison here, and I think some relevance to the argument that it is more than just race that makes White Privilege so dominant and so insidious. Plus, one has to reckon with the huge collateral damage from the impact of collective trauma upon African American people because of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and racial profiling. But I think it also needs to be considered that they are not the only victims, and even though race plays a role, it is not the only factor, nor is the only vector in this disease of prejudice, exclusion and bad treatment that impacts a very broad swathe of the human demographic. More tomorrow, Gentle Reader.