White Privilege is Fact. Period.

[sheshe2]

by Milt Shook

Too many white people think white privilege is an opinion and they believe it’s within their power to deny its existence and, if they do, it will suddenly cease to exist. White privilege in the United States is fact. Denying its existence is tantamount to denying that the earth is round or that we’re breathing air. It’s like looking at the temperature statistics and denying climate change. No matter how much you deny its existence, it remains a fact. It’s just a fact that white people have a built-in advantage in this society. This is not a debatable point, and the fact that a few Black people, like President Obama, Colin Kaepernick and Dwayne Johnson (who is now the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, which has also freaked out a significant number of white people) have made it in this society doesn’t change the reality.

White people have run this country since a series of European monarchies started building boats and crossing the Atlantic. The Revolution was a group of white people overthrowing other white people. When the country was founded and a Constitution written, only white men with land were allowed to vote. Only white men could own land or run a business in the town square. Only white men could be doctors or lawyers or attend college and become a professional. In fact, Black people were barely mentioned in the Constitution, and only because slaveholders in the South were worried about being under-represented in Congress, so they came up with a compromise in which Blacks were counted as three-fifths of a person. That was only for counting purposes; make no mistake; slavery meant about 90% of the Black people in this country were considered property and as less than human. They had roughly the same stature as the family dog or cat and slightly less than the family’s horse. By the time the United States was founded, slavery was a 150-year-old tradition and it took about another century to abolish it in the law and another century to make Black people technically legal under the law. Note that I said “technically.” Society is usually behind the law and, to this day, white people still too often think of Black people as “lesser.”

Since white people came here and slaughtered most of the native people and took their land and established a society in which everyone who comes here was/is all but legally forced to live by white standards, why would any thinking human being believe that this is not essentially a “white country”? How could anyone think white people don’t have a built-in advantage?

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I keep saying it, but it’s because it is important; white privilege is a fact. And you can’t fix what you don’t acknowledge as real, my fellow white people. Imagine a football game between the white team and the black team and for the first three quarters, the black team was tied to a ball and chain and fall behind by 500 points. If, at the beginning of the fourth quarter, you remove the ball and chain, is that actually fair? Basically, Black people were behind 500-0 by 1964, but many white people think we’re all even and there is no more to do. Is that how you think fairness works?

http://pleasecutthecrap.com/white-privilege-is-fact-period/

FYI. This is posted in the African American Group. I am a white woman that acknowledges that White Privilege exists and I wish to see it end.