Why I don't like the term "white privilege"

[JustAnotherGen]

39. Have you spent time

In America as a black person living under Jim Crow? Or in living quarters with someone who did?

That's my experience. And not all blacks in America 100 years ago were share croppers - my family was not. My grandfather and his father both voted in Alabama - they were known as staunch Republicans. They were also known for having hidden wealth and doing business with shady people.

But those things did not stop my grandfather from getting his three sons out of America by any means necessary during the 50's and 60's. It also didn't prevent my father from telling us the "rules of survival" in the 1980's.

Not just about how we were to deal with authority figures - for survival. But that in a country where STILL so few that "looked like us" we're privileged we had a duty to honor the privileges granted us and to remain humble, empathetic, and understand but there but by the grace of booze (yes booze) go I.

Something I've read at DU ever since the Snowden debacle - Authoritarian. That word.

It's a word of white privilege.

Because my nephews, my brother, my cousins, my surviving uncle - they don't have the "luxury" of not acknowledging that traditionally defying authority - be it the authority of the social construct - gets you shot or lynched. Ask the spirit of Jordan Davis. If he had only done what that man wanted him to do . . .

Barack Obama is like me - only difference is my parents were married til death did they part. I understand him. Perhaps even more so than a person who grew up with two black parents. He is about a decade older but I'm sure - having read his work - that like me it's okay to say - we ARE different even though we are ALL Americans.

And well - his story like mine - could only have happened in America. I remember his visit to Ireland. I've seen the same look in my eyes in pictures of myself from my first visit there and my first visits as an adult to Southern France. That ability for a person of African descent (be it a post colonial child of an African immigrant or a descendent of slaves) to have direct connections to their European heritage - that's an American Tale.

I don't doubt your life experience - and truly it is amazing. It has colored your world view. But so has mine.