84% of white people killed every year are killed by other white people. So why dont we talk about white on white crime? Why do we pretend that black on black crime is more prevalent or more destructive than white on white crime? Ill tell you why: its so that when a person of color kills, the entire race can be vilified. And when a white person kills, its viewed as an isolated incident that has no relation to any type of power structure. White people are discursively extrapolated from the power structure of this country so that this power structure cant be identified. In other words, the way we talk about white people in this country and in the media makes them exempt from the same way that we talk about non-white people in this country and in the media. The current racial hierarchy in this country is constructed, enforced, reinforced, and completely depends entirely on this illusion: white people are not a racial category in the same way that black, Asian, Native American, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern people are. White people and whiteness, therefore, are not a real thing. Not a thing that can be studied, like Native American culture. Not a real thing that can be contained, like Middle Eastern terrorists. Not a real thing that can be policed, like black thugs. Have you ever noticed that the majority of white people you speak to are remarkably defensive when you start talking about them as a community? Thats because white people arent viewed as a community: they are viewed as a collective of individuals. The protests in Ferguson are a continuation of conversations which challenge white assumptions that they are exempt from the same discourses to which they subject non-white people. The protests in Ferguson reveal that not even all white people benefit equally from privilege; that gender, gender expression, economic status, and social status all play a role in the way privilege is distributed. In fact, there is only about 1% of the entire world who remains untouched by the events in Ferguson, if they dont benefit from it. 100% of these top 1% are white, but 100% of white people are not the top 1%. The sooner white communities realize that the privilege they enjoy is a a chimera to hide the privilege of the 1%, the sooner theyll realize that pointing fingers at Other communities only keeps the 1% at 1%.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 21:04:49 +0000