White Privilege and Critical Race Theory

By Mary Fahnestock-Thomas, Hamilton

In the May 19th Bitterroot Star, Donna Gibney addressed the term White Privilege, and in the May 26th “Star” her husband, John, addressed what is known as Critical Race Theory. Many of us white folks probably share their feelings at least at first, because we feel personally attacked and are naturally defensive. But more reading and learning and caring suggest it really is about opening our eyes to the actual history of our country. 

It’s an amazing and wonderful place and is very important and much admired around the world, but that didn’t happen automatically because the people here are any more amazing or wonderful or important or admirable than other people elsewhere. It happened because we were so well placed to take advantage of the natural resources here, including timing, lots of space, and a good climate.

The primary foundation for our wealth and success emerged from the fact that, starting in the 15th century, European explorers were ranging ever farther into Asia and, especially, Africa, which was teeming with people who seemed primitive to the European eye and who also looked different, because the hot, sunny climate had favored protective melanin in their skin over millions of years.

The missionaries who followed the explorers may have intended simply to “civilize” those people, but businessmen realized that here was a source of practically free labor to raise the cotton and sugar cane and tobacco that would make America rich. Most people are not eager to work harder than they have to if they can get someone else to do it (consider Tom Sawyer), and besides, the difference in appearance meant it would be easier to keep these people in the place assigned to them.

It was ambition and the desire for wealth that created and depended on a kind of slavery not seen much in the rest of the world, because these Black and Brown people had no hope of escape, and it would be quite a challenge to get home to Africa if they did.

It was ambition and the desire for wealth that brought about the Civil War, because plantation owners refused to treat these human beings as human beings.

It was fear and the desire for wealth that cut the Reconstruction Era after the war to twelve years, because white people began to feel threatened by freed slaves and both North and South were concerned about their economy.

It was fear and the desire for wealth that supported Jim Crow laws in the South, which virtually maintained slavery by another name and brought about red-lining of real estate in northern cities where, again, white people felt threatened by people who looked so different from them.

And so on up until today. People who look different offer an easy target for frivolous traffic stops and general suspicion; and white nervousness in their presence makes it easy for unremarkable situations to escalate into incarceration and death. 

How many stories have there been in the past few years of white people calling the authorities on Black people doing things that they probably would not even have noticed if those people hadn’t looked different from them?

How often has each of us taken a second, leery look at someone we happened to see on the street or in a store just because they looked different from us?

Unless we dress outrageously or perhaps have an obvious physical challenge, we white people aren’t subject to those leery looks. That’s White Privilege. Nor are our names often out of the ordinary, so we’re less likely to be passed over when applying to schools or for jobs. That’s White Privilege. And Affirmative Action over a few decades cannot erase the effects of centuries.

Critical Race Theory holds that the concept of race was not applied to human physical characteristics until the early 18th century. Europeans were white and dominant and so took on the job of classifying these newly discovered human beings, and it proved to be in their favor to maintain their own superior position. That turned into our system, which never tried very hard to change; hence we have systemic racism. 

That’s not an insult, just as recognizing our White Privilege is not an insult. It’s simply a matter of opening our eyes to American history in the world as it really was, to the fact that people tend to be looking out for their own good and sometimes take advantage of others in their way. That’s universal. But as our ancestors followed their ambitions, they took unprecedented advantage of a whole obvious set of other human beings because they could. We white people have always benefited from this system, and now perhaps we can wake up and change it at last.

So yes, the “equality” and “democracy” on which our representative republic was founded has always been iffy, to the benefit of white people, especially males. Time we fixed that.

(There are so many new and older books out there to help us understand where we have been and where we are now! Consider Heather Cox Richardson’s “How the South Won the Civil War,” Isabel Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” and “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” Nell Painter’s “The History of White People,” and, if you prefer fiction, Octavia Butler’s “Kindred” and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.”)