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Slappydavis
How much do you think your whiteness added to your current position? Does your whiteness ever keep you from feeling proud of what you've accomplished or whatever it is that you are on track to accomplish? Do you think of being white as being akin to taking steroid? And by that, I mean that even if you take a steroids, you still have to work out for it to do anything for you. And I know that people choose to take steroids, but they don't choose to be white. That part of the metaphor is not what I'm referring to.
Re: How much did being white contribute to my life-
Oh it's definitely hard to say with certainty. And I wouldn't expect basically anyone to tell.
The piece that really stands out for me is how much I was pushed into college. Like I mentioned before, my highschool grades were not great, and yet people told me all the time that I seemed like the kind of person that would just go to college. Some of that was probably due to my parents both being educated (my dad was halfway to being an engineer before having a powerful dream that made him quit and take up being a pastor), some of that was due to me hanging around kids that DID get good grades, but some of that was almost certainly that I was white.
Another piece where there was a noticeable difference is that that I wasn't bullied in school. By all accounts, I was your typical bullying target, I was small (still am), quiet (less so now), and nerdy (definitely). But I wasn't bullied. The kids of color were bullied (to the point that one of the black kids at my school had to loudly talk about how much he hated black culture seriously ALL of the time just to get it to stop) and the LGBT kids were bullied (incessantly, seriously it was crazy). But I grew up in a white & conservative area. So while I was a seriously fantastic bullying target, I was still "in" because I was straight & white.
Maybe that's just the way my schools are, and it's idiosyncratic to my life, but it's something I realized after doing the sort of self-reflection I'm talking about.
Re: Steroids- The steroid example is interesting, and I think I see where you're going with it. Without putting a ton of thought into this metaphor, to me high economic status are steroids, where being white is more like just being default (that sort of default status comes in a lot to conversations about white privilege too, as you probably know) and being non-white is more like someone making you carry a barbell. Is it always totally debilitating? No. Is it harder than it should be? Yeah.
Re: Pride- I'm totally proud of who I am and what I've done! I'm not proud of everything, but I like myself a whole lot! Probably too much! But a lot of my pride in myself is totally separate from economic status (which is one of the most direct places where race comes into play).
If I'm guessing at where you're going correctly: would I tell someone who is very proud of their economic status that they should be less proud because they were on "easy mode" (so to speak)?
Not really. It's more like this for me. I think you should totally be proud of the way that you took the advantages given to you and were able to find a productive spot in society. But you should ALSO take pride in the advantages themselves, and recognize the parts that you didn't do on your own, and maintain them for other people to use.
I'll put it a different way. If someone was able to produce on fertile soil in such a way that they died a millionaire but the soil was left arid/useless, I probably wouldn't think they should be very proud. If someone was able to produce on fertile soil AND they were able to help other people get access to similarly fertile soil, then yeah! Be proud!
Getting a random advantage isn't something to be ashamed of, it's more like something that you owe to society to keep it going. The parts that I might say would be "shameful" would be getting an advantage that comes at the expense of other people. But the world isn't a zero-sum game, so you CAN both get an advantage AND share it with others so that everyone is a little better off.