My white liberal brothers and sisters,

This linked blog entry is a tough pill to swallow but it must be read and reflected upon to corrective action. Ultimately, Mia McKenzie’s piece shows how white privilege in mainstream media creates an emotional distance in people of color whereby we can be de-sensitized to “white suffering.”

(via autostraddle)

Read more here

Todd Clayton’s thoughtful essay addresses white privilege in the mainstream LGBT cultural narrative. Invoking gay author James Baldwin, Clayton writes:

Baldwin, more than anyone else, taught me that although I am gay, I am white, and that being white always involves persistent privilege that must be recognized and accounted for. Baldwin explains that white LGBTQ men and women feel slighted precisely because they know that had they been straight, they would have been heirs to incomparable privilege.

Read more here.

rising:

The story that needed to be told about the victims of the 2004 Tsunami in South Asia:

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WHITE PEOPLE????

Rejected Taglines:

The story of a vacation cut tragically short.

One family thought they were just going on an exotic vacation. They were wrong.

Rejected Titles:

Homeward Bound IV

Escape from Sri Lanka

Well nothing is more “universally touching” than a disaster narrative as told through white privilege.

Akiba Solomon’s op-ed at COLORLINES.COM is an important call out on the political myopia of those in the gay rights movement. In particular, Solomon takes down Washington Blade editor and co-owner Kevin Naff for his recent opinion piece, “All aboard the Trayvon bandwagon,” where he is all too self-righteously privileges LGBT struggles over racial injustice, as though both things never intersect. Naff concludes:

But portraying Martin as a hate crime martyr is premature and irresponsible. We don’t know the facts and in the weeks since the Martin shooting, LGBT people have been attacked, shot and killed in the U.S. without a press release or peep of protest.

Only through his own racial privilege could he hierarchize sexuality over race as though LGBTIQ people of color don’t experience discrimination because of both things often at the same time. 

Naff, of course, is just a mouthpiece to elements in the gay rights movement who clearly do not see the broader vision of social justice: that even when LGBTIQ attain the same “rights & privileges” as our heterosexual/gender-confirming counter-parts, the fight isn’t over because racial injustice remains in the lives of LGBTIQ people as well.

Essayist Tim Wise’s analysis on Trayvon Martin’s murder and the working of white denial is spectacular. Thanks Manny G. for the lead. Below are two great quotes; The first on empathy, which is underlines the progressive perspective of politics and society:

Empathy — real empathy, not the situational and utterly phony kind that most any of us can muster when social convention calls for it — requires that one be able to place oneself in the shoes of another, and to consider the world as they must consider it. It requires that we be able to suspend our own culturally-ingrained disbelief long enough to explore the possibility that perhaps the world doesn’t work as we would have it, but rather as others have long insisted it did.

And below, a reminder of how racial privilege contours political postures.

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from someone suggesting that perhaps we should begin to sport buttons like those that became so ubiquitous in the case of Troy Davis last year. You know the buttons, right? The ones that said: “I am Troy Davis.” The ones that aimed at solidarity with an unjustly executed man, but which, on the lapels and t-shirts of white people seemed, to me at least, more banal and offensive than anything else, since we were not, in fact (and would not likely ever be) in the position of Troy Davis.

The perfect illustrative follow up to my previous post on white privilege.

[via:mycultureisnotatrend]

In July 1998, Robert Jensen, a Caucasian professor of journalism at the University of Texas, wrote a piece on white privilege for the Baltimore Sun. 12 years later, the beginning anecdote of the piece (read below) remains a clear example of white privilege at work in the discourse of conservatives who not only continue to oppose affirmative action, but maintain the conceit that we are now in a post-racial society just because the nation elected a bi-racial, African American-identified President.

Here’s what white privilege sounds like: I’m sitting in my University of Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white student about affirmative action in college admissions, which he opposes and I support. The student says he wants a level playing field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he thinks that being white has advantages in the United States. Have either of us, I ask, ever benefited from being white in a world run mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is something real and tangible we could call white privilege.

So, if we live in a world of white privilege – unearned white privilege - how does that affect your notion of a level playing field? I asked. He paused for a moment and said, “That really doesn’t matter.” That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate white privilege: The privilege to acknowledge that you have unearned privilege but to ignore what it means.

+ here

[via:adailyriot]