Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 48

I have never benefited from White Privilege. I am white. This doesn't mean that White Privilege doesn't exist. Of course it does. I have been arguing in these last few posts, not that there is no such thing, as certain of you, my Gentle Reader, have misunderstood. I am arguing that White Privilege is not the entire story. It is far more nuanced than the angry African-American women with university degrees are yelling and white Canadian academics of all genders are nervously whimpering. Being born Caucasian is not a ticket into privilege and fine living. There are many other factors. Type of European ethnicity can also make a difference. If your background is British, and particularly English, then you are already a shoo-in. You would have to be incredibly stupid or lazy or indifferent or disabled in order to be British-English Canadian and not be somehow well off. Or maybe not. I'm not even sure that that's a guarantee. These sweeping clichés about privilege all have wide cracks in their credibility that even an elephant could fall through. If you have had the good fortune of being raised by upper middle class parents in a good neighbourhood then it is only natural that you are going to spend the rest of your life "coasting on White Privilege." Well, privilege. However, a lot of those successful upper middle class families are no longer white. Many of them happen to be Chinese Canadian. Many are of South Asian provenance. A lot of Filipinos, too. Bang goes the cliché. None of those demographics are white. They are hugely successful, buying up properties and living in very choice neighbourhoods in very luxurious and expensive homes. Please, all you well-intentioned eggheads, explain to me why none of those people are white. I am not begrudging them there success. After some of the horrendous racism in our cultural and historical foundations, it is about time that people of other ethnicities and colour are finally enjoying the good life. I am actually very pleased for them. Even if the best I can hope for is that the nonprofit that runs my social housing building isn't bought up by market interests and I end up having to live out the rest of my old age in a low barrier shelter. There remain, of course, three particular racial and ethnic categories that still suffer terribly: people of African heritage, Latinos, and Aboriginals. I am going to suggest here that the collective abuse and attempted destruction of the cultural, moral and psychological integrity of the persons who inhabit these demographics, these acts of wholesale genocide, has been so barbarous, egregious and prolonged as to have completely hobbled them and their descendants for many generations to come. I would say this is particularly true for North Americans of African heritage as for our First Nations people. The Latinos would occupy a rather different category, given that racially and culturally they are largely the outcome or the fruit of generations of diverse culture and races mixing and blending together. But still, Mama Espana committed atrocities of such prolonged barbarism that to this day we are seeing the results in their descendants. Racist policies in the US and elsewhere, of course, have really helped exasperate things, and yes, I am naming White Privilege here. It does have its uses as a measuring rod, even if it also has its limits. The ancestors of most African Americans were simply abducted from their home in Africa and taken overseas to be despoiled of their heritage, their culture and their identity. They became the property of whites. Even more than a century and a half after the abolition of slavery, they are still treated like second or third class citizens, racially profiled, discriminated against, and no wonder many of them are so angry. Our aboriginal peoples, like their cousins in Latin America, were invaded by Europeans, their culture destroyed and themselves slaughtered and decimated. Even now, here in Canada, many on reserves live in Third World squalor. No wonder many of them are angry. Of course they are going to see this all through the lens of White Privilege. I think it is important to acknowledge and respect that. It is equally important to acknowledge that that is going to be their lens and not ours. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.