Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person

[IrishAyes]

14. With the advantage of being raised in a multi-racial environment,

I never needed white privilege explained to me. The most diligent efforts to deny or extinguish it never did entirely. Consciousness can and must be raised if any hope of true equality, peace, and justice are ever to be achieved.

Even where I retired in RedNeckLand because that's the only place I could afford, I basically keep the worst LEOs off my law-abiding back by making it clear it's more trouble than it's worth to hassle me. Until they finally caught on, I had no end of trouble. Can you imagine a town zoning official appearing at my door with the police chief! to try to intimidate me into letting my northside neighbor annex a 10'x120' strip of my yard just because he said he wanted it? They used all kinds of abusive behaviors trying to make me crumple.

Because I was so shocked and horrified into a certain amount of disbelief, I let the farce go on much too long. But that finally wore off enough for me to get my Irish up, and I sternly ordered them to leave. Ordered! And got away with it by threatening to turn massive negative attention on their illegal and immoral behavior. Not for one second was I unaware that I survived largely on the basis of white privilege. But they scared me so much anyway that for weeks afterward I slept with a pistol under my pillow.

Since then they've had a bellyful of me at enough council meetings, for instance, that they're far less inclined to yank my chain.

This is the tiny town where one black lady, a widow, made the mistake of coming to escape urban violence after her children had seen and experienced too much violence in the city. The high school kids took her teenage son down to the courthouse around midnight and conducted a mock lynching. I hope and pray her family found better conditions where they moved next.