White Privilege
By: Tiffany Elliott
Tags: Hillary Clinton, Covid 19 Crisis, White Privilege, White Supremacy, Conspiracy Theories

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

Our world is governed by White privilege. There’s no way around it.

It’s the idea, nay, the mid set that the world revolves around the comfort of the White man. That his every whim and desire, no matter how selfish, must be met at all cost. Their authority, privilege, and special standing in the world at large, is natural and unquestioned.

To those of us who dare question it. Well, you’d better watch out.

White privilege pervades every area of what we call, modern society. Entertainment, business, culture — everything. Whether we know it, or not.

Most of us don’t like it, but we can’t help it. It’s been encoded into our DNA, spoon fed to us from birth, this so-called “natural” order. We support it, because, well, we’ve been trained to.

This is what the “pro-life” movements of the 1960’s and 70’s tried to fight against, and why they’ve been vilified by White society ever since. Because a bunch of abused minorities — Black, homosexual, women, Indigenous, the poor — victims of White, Protestant colonialism, apartheid, and war, stood up and demanded to be treated as human; with the same rights as their White brethren.

The only problem; the White man never saw these undesirables as equal to them. They still don’t. Instead they beat, humiliated, jailed and murdered them. They would engineer their genocide, with more war, more colonialist oppression and apartheid; neglecting their suffering as new, unfamiliar diseases, such as HIV, jumped from animals to humans — the result of our own selfish destruction of the planet.

All the while, excusing their own selfish behavior as “progress” and capitalism”; blaming the Third World (created by their rape, pillage and murder of Black and Brown bodies, resources and land), women, the “gays,” or the “Communists” for daring to step out of line.

All because the “undesirables” demanded they be recognized, with the “special” right, of human dignity, equal to that of the White man.

Just this weekend, the fundamentalist Right is out in full force in Washington State, protesting the state-wide vaccination mandates for all state employees. People I once associated with, protesting their “right” to murder others, as they’ve always done, in the guise of “freedom.”

The pandemic did nothing more than expose the White privilege that governs our world. It forced everyone, including me, to take a closer look just how much this designed reality permeates every fabric of our daily life. It also showed us who will fight to the death, to see this fabricated order is never dismantled.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t exaggerating when she called this moment a “constitutional crisis.”

In the aftermath of 9/11, the White man — enabled by the fundamentalist Bush Administration — convinced a shell-shocked nation that the greatest threat to democracy were Black and Brown Muslims. We committed unspeakable horrors, all in the name of “preserving democracy.”

Now, a greater threat exists within our very own boarders, committed not by Black and Brown radicals, but by those who look, and think, like “us.” Many of us refuse to face this threat, because we can’t simply believe that White privilege is real; or that those who look or think or believe as we do, are capable of violence. But, as January 6th demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt, for all the world to see — we are.

I we don’t face the reality of White privilege, and the harm it’s cause to our nation and the world, we will lose much more than our country. We will lose our souls.