"White Comfort"

[haele]

11. I'm an old white woman, growing up counter-culture adjacent.

I saw "White Comfort" all the time growing up, even in supposedly liberal university settings. (Hint - Berkeley was never really Liberal)
The deference to White leadership and White ideas on how progress should go forward in many of the civil rights efforts that I saw was noticable even to a young child. My parents dropped out of so many of those student groups because they didn't feel that the experience of the minorities in those groups were being listened to.
My mom grew up in a diverse poor working class L.A. neighborhood.
The lady nextdoor to her, basically her surrogate mother after her own mother started dying from cancer, was black. The kids around the street she lived on were Japanese (returned from the internment camps), Mexican, Black, and Armenian refugee families. She and her brother were pretty much the only WASP looking kids around, but she said she never felt slighted or picked on even though she was considered different, and her pappy would have whooped their asses if they treated any of the kids and families differently due to culture or ethnicity, as he came from an immigrant (Finnish/Swede) family himself and always believed in the melting pot idea of America. The kids in her neighborhood were raised and protected by that neighborhood. And while she understands how "White/Christian" is the default in this country, she never accepted the deference given to Whites as anything but shallow mendacity or hypocrisy. Nor did she allow me or my brother to accept it.
White comfort policies -and gender privilege policies - are pandering to the status quo, and a hindrance to real progress.

Haele