We are born into a world spinning and webbed. We learn to be boys or girls, rich or poor, black, white, brown or yellow. These are not words, these are preordained categories, each carrying a history charged with expectations, scars, and protections.
We all learn to be human. We learn how to see and how to be seen. There is nothing natural about this process. We are constantly receiving feedback about right and wrong, correct and incorrect. We learn language codded with the culture of the victors. We eat food that has been cultivated for our convenience and pleasure. We are not learning, in fact we cannot learn, in a bubble, isolated from others or history.
We are dependent creatures, in so many ways. Consider just a few of the enormously complicated systems we depend on daily. The systems I am sure you are participating in right now. There are 450,000 miles of high voltage power lines and 160,000 miles of overhead transmission lines in the United States, connecting your home to a source of energy so you can turn on a light at the flip of a switch. Miles of pipes bringing clean (sort of) water to your faucets and carrying away your waste. There are people working everyday to ensure that those systems are safe and consistent. And you likely did not grow your own coffee, make your own clothes or build the chair you are sitting in. And these are just our material surroundings; consider the laws, languages, music, and ideas created by others impacting you.
And yet, some still believe in the myth of the individual. Believing that each decision they make is wholly theirs, with out influence, that their attitudes and assumptions were created in their brain; vacuum-sealed from the rest of humanity.
I think that the myth of the individual is protecting and making invisible white privilege.
White privilege is a system as much a part of our daily lives as the power grid and yet many deny its existence. What I hear over and over again (mostly from white people) is: I am not raciest, I do not hate black people, I have not been given any special advantages.
How have you suddenly untangled yourself from the elaborate web of culture, history, and humanity?
A system powerful enough to convince humans to enslave and dehumanize other humans is not one that is easily taken apart, and it is not one a single individual can just opt out of.
I learned to be white with out even knowing it. I was taught that people who looked like me invented civilization; I learned that my skin tone was the color of flesh colored crayons and that almost everyone on TV, in movies, in magazines and in Washington looked like me. I learned that I was normal.
We do not learn these things alone and we cannot unlearn them alone either.
We are not sitting still and motionless on a spinning planet and we are not capable of surviving outside the elaborate web of humanity, we are all stupidly, gloriously dependent.