Gouging Our Eyes Out
By: David Shorb
Tags: Life, Race, Culture, Racism, Life Lessons

Gouging Our Eyes Out

The blindness of white privilege.

Image by Martin Redlin from Pixabay

As a white person who is descended from Mayflower Pilgrims, I have a certain amount of social currency. Because my skin isn’t dark, it allows me to move mostly unhindered in my community. However, I didn’t know I had this privilege, or that I was being treated differently until I moved to Portland, Oregon.

White privilege is an insidious poison of our collective culture. It’s one of the reasons for slavery in America. It’s why we had the Civil War, and it’s what cause the genocide of Native Americans during the western expansion. It’s the driving force behind Jim Crow laws, and why it took so long to end segregation. It’s the why so many people of color have died at the hands of the police.

White people are blind to it because it’s so ubiquitous that we accept it without thinking about it. We allow it to blind ourselves because we benefit from it. We profit off of it, and we don’t question it because it makes our lives easier at the expense of people of color. Driving while black isn’t a new thing, it has been around for as long as there have been cars and horse-drawn carriages.

We have to acknowledge that white privilege is why so many people of color have been harmed by every white person. The list of how white privilege has harmed people of color is so long that I couldn’t begin to list the ways it’s impacted the black and brown communities.

I would like to take this just a bit further and say that where you find white privilege at its worse is in primarily white Christian churches. The idea that just because you’re white that somehow that means that you should have preferential treatment is flawed and dehumanizes people of color. It has created a system that causes harm on a daily basis.

Parents of color shouldn’t have to fear that their children won’t be coming home because some racist cop decided it’s open season on black and brown people. People of color shouldn’t have to fear for their lives any time they get pulled over, or fear that they are going to have the cops called on them just for holding a barbecue at a local park. They shouldn’t have to worry that they are going to get shot just for reaching for their wallet.

White people need to see that they have contributed to a system of racism that has made it ok to view people of color as less than. We have to work to make our society more equatable and more color blind. We have gouged out our eyes so not to see the harm we have done, yet we refuse to do the work that would create a system that works for everyone.

We shouldn’t have to have mass protests to get corrupt racist cops charged with murder. We shouldn’t have to have riots to make people hear the wounded cry of American citizens who have been wronged in the worse way. It’s been 155 years since the Civil War, and it’s been just over 50 years since we ended segregation. Yet in that time we still haven’t balanced the scales for people of color in America.

We still treat people of color as if they mean less than a white person. We have to start walking a path of equality for all. Because if we don’t, then we are going to see a lot more violence in the streets. Our nation is still broken and is less united than ever. We have to start the healing process or this grand experiment will fail.