An excellent take on white privilege and Critical Race Theory in a nutshell

[StarfishSaver]

Link to tweet

A primary aspect of white privilege is the opportunity to learn about anti-Black racism through classroom study -- not daily experience, community life, family history. We fragile whites have so many racial privileges that we can pick, choose and throw out ones we don't want.

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

I'm weird, I guess. When listening to people talk, if I feel uncomfortable, that's when I listen harder.

I'm not talking the creepy feeling of discomfort when someone makes my skin crawl.

I'm talking the kind of discomfort you can feel when someone is telling you about their experiences in life and you start to feel on the spot. Instead of getting defensive or shrugging it off, I will ask myself why I feel that way.

My mother taught me to do that. It started out as a lesson in feeling guilty but extrapolated out as a means to see the how and why of something you believe, think, feel, or have done. Which can lend itself to empathy. Mostly you start to feel like you don't know anything.

It's not a one and done kind of thing either. It's a daily choice to decide to listen. To question and challenge your own assumptions. Your beliefs. What you think you know.

I fail at it more than I care to admit.

I mostly live in the ether of uncertainty. I don't know. I'm not sure. Is that right? Is that correct? Have I considered everything? What have I missed?

Oh, there are a few things I'm certain about. But I will question my application.

[yonder]

2. +1.

[StarfishSaver]

3. This is an amazing post

I'm going to bookmark and link to it for use when people here complain about how uncomfortable conversations threaten to drive away allies.

Thank you.

[Solly Mack]

4. If a person is uncomfortable talking race, gender, etc., they are uncomfortable for a reason.

In my experience, it starts inside the person feeling uncomfortable. It's not the topic - it's the internal struggle.

I know some who have said they fear being labeled a racist or a sexist or homophobic - and that could happen - depending on what they want to say. What they believe or think may very well be racist, etc..

But the thing is, the honest effort to understand and grow will acknowledge that fear, accept it if what they think/believe is racist, sexist, etc., and then say - teach me better.

Instead of closing down, shrugging, going on the defensive, or being dismissive.

I'm uncomfortable talking race at times - but then I shut up and listen. Learn.

As with any growth, you have to learn to get out of your own way.

I'm still growing. I'm still learning.

I hope that remains true of me always.

Even when I fail.

Especially when I fail.

Thank you.

[Triloon]

5. Sounds good, but

"the opportunity to learn about anti-Black racism through classroom study" hasn't really been around all that long and white privilege and racism precede it by a few thousand years. So it can't be a "primary aspect". In addition, the non-white students who have had the privilege of classroom studies on this subject also pick and choose through the bits they find useful or important at the time they are learned.
I'm an old guy and there was never in my education anything like a Black History class or Minority Studies. Nothing like that at all. But my white privilege remains intact. So I cant agree that the opportunity of these classes is a "primary aspect" of white privilege in any way. The classes are a shared privilege, as it should be, and it is one that was never available to me, nor to most people on the planet.
Community life and family histories are just packed with information to be sifted and understood. It does take some courage and humility to plunge into them and see what's there.
Maybe these classes train students to gain and use the courage and humility necessary and not just the historical facts. I hope so. Learning it on your own is tough enough that a lot of people never get close to it.
As usual, I feel like an ass for saying anything about this at all. Because after all these years of stumbling down my personal road I still can't see the end of it.

[StarfishSaver]

6. It actually has been around for quite awhile in the form of Black Studies programs

But many school districts rejected that curriculum so many students went through school without learning any of this. However, it's not a new thing.

[Triloon]

7. I assure you...

It was not around when I got out of school 50 years ago. If it had been available I would have been all over it. I did find my way to a couple symposiums and there were plenty of informal discussions, but there were no scheduled classes, no credentialed teachers, no curriculum, no organized teaching. Anybody that was interested in it was on their own. There were plenty of books on the subjects, but no one was showing them to us. Like, I read Soul on Ice when it was first published, not because it was part of any schooling, but there was a review of it in a hippie street newspaper so I went looking for it. Same with W.E.B. duBois. I was reading him in 6th grade on my own when my classwork was reading Huck Finn. Right? lol. So I'm pretty envious of later students who have had whole organized courses of study formally available to them, and I consider them all to be wonderfully privileged by it.
And that's why I'm not so impressed with the young mans twitter post in the OP.

[StarfishSaver]

8. The fact that YOU didn't study it 50 years ago doesn't mean it wasn't around

I was in school then and my school district did have Black studies classes.

Your experience is not universal.

Google Carter G. Woodson. You will learn something about the history and development of Black Studies curricula. It didn't just begin a few years ago when you first heard about it.

[Solly Mack]

11. Negro History Week first began in 1926. It went to a month and renamed Black History Month in the

60's during the Civil Rights Movement.

And, W.E.B. Du Bois recognized and wrote about Negro History Week, whose founder, Carter G. Woodson, also wrote the The Journal of Negro History in 1916.

Black Studies became a college degree program in 1968. (In California - but other colleges and universities were teaching black history all over the U.S. and not just in traditionally black colleges.)

In 1976, Ford signed a proclamation recognizing the national observance of Black History Month. It is now called African-American History Month.

The schools you attended probably chose not to teach it. Many of them did refuse to teach it and that's a shame. That is absolutely your loss. And not just yours.

But the material was there. It was available to any school that wanted to teach it. All they had to do was get the materials from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (formerly the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History). And, like you stated yourself, there were many books on the subject available to any teacher willing to teach about the history of African-Americans in America.

I started school at age 4 in 1968. We studied black history. This was in Atlanta, Georgia.

I attended schools in the foothills after we moved and while they also taught black history, they did so in a manner that showed they didn't take it seriously and had not been teaching it for long. The students were ignorant of black history. Couldn't even answer "Who was George Washington Carver?" A softball if there ever was one.


And you are missing the point of the tweet in the OP.

He is saying white people can learn about racism in the classroom - as opposed to living it ("daily experience, community life, family history" ) like black (brown, First Peoples, Asian-Americans, etc.. ) people do.

That is what he means by privilege - the safety of learning it in the classroom as opposed to the dangers of actually living it while black.

And, since your own words have demonstrated, some schools chose not to teach black history even though the material was available for over a century (1916 & The Journal of Negro History and other books), it was white privilege to decide to not teach about the full history of America - one that must include the role of African-Americans in U.S. history - and instead present a sanitized version of history with little to no mention of Black Americans. " And Black people were slaves" is not the extent of African-American history in America.

But, and this is an important but - black students were presented with history books that only told a story of white people in America. Oh, and black people were once slaves.

That was the extent of what was taught at one time.

Black people slaves. White people did everything else - all the stuff worth knowing about.

That is also what he means by privilege.

To be able to erase or not teach the history you don't want to teach.

Take all the various massacres of black Americans in America - Tulsa, Atlanta Race Riot, Rosewood, Thibodaux, the Red Summer, Opelousas and the list goes on - until the last couple of decades, those never made the history books used in middle/high school. They were all intentionally forgotten history - unless you were black.

[Triloon]

13. this is very good

Thanks for writing. I do think the twitter guy was trying to make a different point. Regardless of that, I consider it a great privilege for any students to have the opportunity to go over these materials in an orderly way. I call it that because it was something that was denied to me, when I was hungry for it, and it could have been provided. Just as you have said. Thanks again for the good stuff.

Oh yeah.. 900 students in my HS graduating class, with just one black student. Maybe that's a clue...

[StarfishSaver]

14. Black people were slaves but MLK gave the I Have a Dream Speech and everything got better

[Solly Mack]

15. Exactly.

Got to add that a black man became president and America entered into a "post-racism" existence. (Snort)

Crispus Attucks to Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King, Jr. to Barack Obama to Kamala Harris.

(and nothing in between)

All done.

Slaves. Not slaves. A dream. Obama. Harris.

[cinematicdiversions]

10. A few Thousand Years?

So the Gauls, Celts and Barbarian with privileged over the Romans and Mali?


Mali was the richest and most powerful country till say the 1400's so at best you might get 700 years but even that is stretching it. (Not to mention Attila the Hun or the Chinese empires.)


Yeah, I would safely say maybe five hundred years of White privilege if you were the right kind of white... maybe.

[Triloon]

12. Yeah, a few thousand years.

I'd even push it back a couple thousand more into the Neolithic. But it gets pretty foggy back there. The field of Archeogenetics has produced loads of new information in just the last few years and I expect a lot more to come. I am not and never will be an expert in this field. The first appearance of genes for blue eyes and fair skin comes just before the domestication of the horse and the invention of the wheel on the eastern shores of the Black Sea in the Maykop culture. The blue eyed and fair skinned Circassian people of that region are a genetic remnant of this. These genetic traits along with the cultural innovations of the wheel, etc were transferred to a tribe of nomadic horse herders on the steppes just to the north. These people are called the Yamnaya. Over the next couple thousand years these people took their new wagons and horses and bows and overwhelmed western Asia and Europe. They absorbed all the cultures of old Europe and laid down the basis of all the european languages now spoken. They didn't leave anything written so it's hard to know their minds, but an eastern branch of these people mounted their battle wagons and headed south and east through present day Iran and India. Which they conquered. These were the Arya and they did leave writings behind in the Rig Veda. Some of these writings describe the supremacy of the Arya over the subjected indigenous and dark skinned Dravidian people of south India. This was part of the basis for Hitlers Aryan Supremacy bullshit. I think this all makes a good candidate for the origins of White Supremecy and White Privilege.
This very brief and off-the-cuff description is full of flaws and skipped over details. Please don't pick it apart, it's not meant to be some kinda final Truth. I'm no expert. You can shrug it off as just more internet baloney if you want, I don't care, I'm not trying to persuade anyone about anything. I only say it here to answer your question about why I said "a few thousand years."

[StarfishSaver]

9. Kick