In a previous article on privilege, I write: “White identity was and always has been highly unstable.”

In other words, I’m talking about America’s long history of Affirmative Action for white people. It provides them with a place in the social hierarchy, a belief in the possibilities of upward mobility and, most importantly, a sense of identity – they can know who they are because they are not “the Other.”Īmerica established that privilege – in law – from the very beginning, indeed, from before the beginning. Although it is constantly obvious to almost all people of color, privilege is utterly invisible to most whites.

One of the most fundamental aspects of privilege – the privilege to ignore, the privilege to remain innocent in the mind – still retains its durability among far too many, perhaps especially among liberals. Very early on, the notion of privilege became one of the prime ways in which this was accomplished. Question: What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?įrom the very beginning, the essential core of the white American psyche was formed in opposition to the imagined Others of the world: those who threatened the innocent community from the outside (Native Americans) and those whose presence on the inside (African slaves) who, by their very existence, constantly called that sense of innocence into question.īecause of its innate contradictions, white identity was and always has been highly unstable, and it required the construction of an entire mythology to hold it together. “Logic and reason will not penetrate the hard shell of white denial.” Most whites have been able to live out their lives completely unaware of the long term, institutional factors that have kept people of color down – and themselves up.

When affirmative action was white book