Monday night a tree in a yard down the street from my house uprooted and fell across the road. It took out everything in its path, including dozens of power lines and a pickup truck that was driving down the street when it fell (don’t worry – the driver is fine). Our power was out for about a day - not much, I suppose, because quite a few people lost power before us and are still without it right now. They’ve been working on getting the tree out of the road ever since then. Between the guys cutting up the tree and the half a dozen MGLW trucks (this tree meant business), it was even crazier yesterday than today. The road has been blocked on both sides from the beginning. I've been sitting outside a lot watching the workers some of the time, but mainly watching people as they drove up to the traffic cones that are spread across the street.
Since the street I live on intersects with a large highway right by my house, a lot of people drive down it to avoid traffic jams, etc. It’s also a great shortcut to get to another major street in the area.
All those cars were having to turn around because of the blocked road – well, they were supposed to anyway. It pissed me off to see so many people run right over the traffic cones or even drive up onto the SIDEWALK to get around them. It has gotten THAT ridiculous.
After two days of watching this happen over and over, I realized something – not ONCE had a non-white individual tried to get over or around the traffic cones. Every single one of them was white. It made me recognize yet another area that white people (certainly not every individual, but as a whole) expect exceptions to be made for them. If a non-white individual had done it, the MPD officer present at the scene would have probably at the very least pulled them over. It goes along with white privilege and continually stems from the governing societal norm that says it is perfectly okay for someone to disobey laws and do whatever they want so long as they are white.
This ish makes me angrier than just about anything on the planet. Technically I’m white, but I’ve never really felt "white," and I honestly don’t understand the twisted world we live in that allows exceptions to be made for “people of no color” (testing out possible new terminology) so much that when one isn’t made for them, they flip out. (If you’ve never been told “no,” hearing it for the first time when you’re 40 years old would shock anyone.)
I long for a day when we will truly be an equal society. I want to live in an America that fulfills the promises it made to me as a child when I first learned about the Constitution and learned words to the Pledge of Allegiance. "...[W]ith liberty and justice for all" still does not exist, and I’m sick of living in America that lied to me.
I don’t know how to get us to a place of equality, but it’d be one hell of a start if white people would start recognizing and admitting to the existence of white privilege.
*Rude comments/messages will be deleted and reported. My blog is one place neither free speech OR white privilege exist.
Interesting blog - I totally feel you on the whole wishing white people would learn to recognize their privilege. That is part of being privileged - having the privilege to not even know you are privileged and to not have to see it! The more we talk about it, the more people can recognize it, so thanks for sharing :)
ReplyDeleteNot sure if you've read any of Peggy McIntosh's work on the "invisible knapsack" of white privilege, but you would probably really enjoy it.