For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege,
or who are looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps
this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like
Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that
of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to
judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even
as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly
typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a “fuckin’
redneck,” like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if
anyone messes with you, you’ll “kick their fuckin’ ass,” and talk
about how you like to “shoot shit” for fun, and still be viewed as a
responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather
than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in
six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out
of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community
college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to
achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as
unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first
place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town
smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state
with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island
of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people
don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S.
Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means
you’re “untested.”

White privilege is being able to say that you support the words
“under God” in the pledge of allegiance because “if it was good enough
for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me,” and not be
immediately disqualified from holding office–since, after all, the
pledge was written in the late 1800s and the “under God” part wasn’t
added until the 1950s–while if you’re black and believe in reading
accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because the
Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school,
requires it), you are a dangerous and mushy liberal who isn’t fit to
safeguard American institutions.

White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make
people immediately scared of you.

White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member
of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from
the Union, and whose motto is “Alaska first,” and no one questions
your patriotism or that of your family, while if you’re black and your
spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with
her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she’s
being disrespectful.

White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers
and the work they do–like, among other things, fight for the right of
women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end
to child labor–and people think you’re being pithy and tough, but if
you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month
governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in
college and the fact that she lives close to Russia–you’re somehow
being mean, or even sexist.

White privilege is being able to convince white women who don’t
even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your
running mate anyway, because suddenly your presence on the ticket has
inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your
party a “second look.”

White privilege is being able to fire people who didn’t support
your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or
being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being
black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political
machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.

White privilege is when you can take nearly twenty-four hours to
get to a hospital after beginning to leak amniotic fluid, and still be
viewed as a great mom whose commitment to her children is
unquestionable, and whose “next door neighbor” qualities make her
ready to be VP, while if you’re a black candidate for president and
you let your children be interviewed for a few seconds on TV, you’re
irresponsibly exploiting them.

White privilege is being able to give a 36 minute speech in which
you talk about lipstick and make fun of your opponent, while laying
out no substantive policy positions on any issue at all, and still
manage to be considered a legitimate candidate, while a black person
who gives an hour speech the week before, in which he lays out
specific policy proposals on several issues, is still criticized for
being too vague about what he would do if elected.

White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years
whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely
criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an
explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring
Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in
speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God’s punishment
on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you’re just
a good church-going Christian, but if you’re black and friends with a
black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S.
Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of
U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its
effect on black people, you’re an extremist who probably hates
America.

White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when
asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for
asking you such a “trick question,” while being black and merely
refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O’Reilly
means you’re dodging the question, or trying to seem overly
intellectual and nuanced.

White privilege is being able to go to a prestigious prep school,
then to Yale and then Harvard Business school, and yet, still be seen
as just an average guy (George W. Bush) while being black, going to a
prestigious prep school, then Occidental College, then Columbia, and
then to Harvard Law, makes you “uppity,” and a snob who probably looks
down on regular folks.

White privilege is being able to graduate near the bottom of your
college class (McCain), or graduate with a C average from Yale (W.)
and that’s OK, and you’re cut out to be president, but if you’re black
and you graduate near the top of your class from Harvard Law, you
can’t be trusted to make good decisions in office.

White privilege is being able to dump your first wife after she’s
disfigured in a car crash so you can take up with a multi-millionaire
beauty queen (who you go on to call the c-word in public) and still be
thought of as a man of strong family values, while if you’re black and
married for nearly twenty years to the same woman, your family is
viewed as un-American and your gestures of affection for each other
are called “terrorist fist bumps.”

White privilege is when you can develop a pain-killer addiction,
having obtained your drug of choice illegally like Cindy McCain, go on
to beat that addiction, and everyone praises you for being so strong,
while being a black guy who smoked pot a few times in college and
never became an addict means people will wonder if perhaps you still
get high, and even ask whether or not you ever sold drugs.

White privilege is being able to sing a song about bombing Iran
and still be viewed as a sober and rational statesman, with the
maturity to be president, while being black and suggesting that the
U.S. should speak with other nations, even when we have disagreements
with them, makes you “dangerously naive and immature.”

White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW
has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being
black and experiencing racism and an absent father is apparently among
the “lesser adversities” faced by other politicians, as Sarah Palin
explained in her convention speech.

And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could
possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with
George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is
skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and
the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because a
lot of white voters aren’t sure about that whole “change” thing. Ya
know, it’s just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more
years of the same, which is very concrete and certain.

To hear an awful lot of white folks tell it, the problem with
black people is that they just don’t want to work hard enough in
school. They act up and refuse to study or get good grades, because
they don’t want to be put down for “acting white.” In other words, the
African American community is beset by a culture of
anti-intellectualism, contrasted, one supposes with our own white
culture of studiousness and academic achievement.

When making this argument, and knowing that it might sound a bit
disparaging, even racist, we white folks love to refer to the
high-profile black folks who agree with us. So we point to Bill Cosby,
for instance, who said this same thing a few years ago and hasn’t
stopped saying it yet. The fact that a dozen or so studies have found
that there actually is no unique peer pressure or ostracism that black
kids experience for doing well in school (over and above that which
all kids who are viewed as brainy often face) fails to move them. The
fact that longitudinal data actually shows that black students are the
most likely to believe in the importance of getting a good education,
the least likely to cheat and the least likely to skip class appears
to matter not.

But what I have always found interesting about the
anti-intellectualism charge coming from whites and pointed at persons
in the black community, is how readily it emanates from a group of
people (white adults) who seem to actually revel in
anti-intellectualism, as evidenced by our voting behavior and
political sensibilities, made especially clear during the current
political campaign.

What else but a deep contempt for education (or book learnin’ as
we sometimes jokingly refer to it in the South) could explain why
Barack Obama’s Harvard Law School education can be mocked as elitist
and out of touch, while John McCain’s bottom-feeder academic record
and Sarah Palin’s four colleges in six years and degree from the
University of Idaho, makes them ready to lead, and more like “normal
people?” (And please, don’t tell me how it isn’t his education that
poses the problem, but rather his comments about rural folks clinging
to God and guns when times are tight, since a week after he made that
comment, Dick Cheney implied that West Virginians were all a bunch of
inbreds, and rural whites didn’t seem to care, since at least he isn’t
an uppity black guy).

What else but a deep contempt for education could render Obama’s
time as a law professor, teaching constitutional law at one of the
nation’s finest law schools, all but irrelevant in the eyes of
millions? To hear a lot of people tell it, his time in the classroom
doesn’t count, and doesn’t indicate anything about his fitness to be
president (even though, ya know, being an expert on the Constitution
is intuitively a good thing for the president to be, or one would
think), but having been a prisoner of war, or a hunter and hockey mom,
and “just like the neighbor next door,” makes you fit for the nation’s
highest offices.

What else but a deep contempt for education could explain the
free pass given to George W. Bush for bragging at a Yale commencement
a few years ago that he had been a C student, but that was OK, because
even with a mediocre academic record you could go on to be president?
If a black person told students that, they’d be viewed as downgrading
achievement, but not Bush. Is it the accent? Is that all it takes to
make people think you’re one of them? A bubba drawl and the spinning
of downhome homilies? Or the fact that you like to shoot guns? If this
is the love for learning, and the intelligence that white folks seem
to think blacks inadequately value, can I suggest that perhaps such
intelligence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?

What else but a deep-seated anti-intellectual streak could
explain why so many white voters in 2000 and 2004 regularly mentioned
how they preferred Bush because he was the “kind of guy you feel you
could have a beer with” (as if that had anything to do with being the
leader of the so-called free world), and how they disdained the
intellectual certitude of Gore and Kerry, whose command of policy
details made them feel like they were being talked down to?

What else but a commitment to the long-term abdication of
critical thinking could explain why millions of whites take so quickly
to Rush Limbaugh: a guy whose motto for years was that he would “tell
you what to think” and whose fans call themselves “ditto” heads (as
in, “same as above,” which is nearly the perfect metaphor for people
who follow someone else like sheep).

In fact, the white love of anti-intellectualism in politics goes
back quite a ways further than that. So when Ronald Reagan decided to
skip out on a policy briefing during an important overseas trip, all
so he could watch The Sound of Music on television, or when he
regularly failed to know the names of foreign leaders, most white
folks still loved him and considered him a great leader. Perhaps it
was because he had a ranch, liked to wear cowboy hats, and had that
folksy aw-shucks grin?

As a white person, and as one with plenty of antiracist and
critical-thinking white friends, I realize that not all whites fall
into this anti-intellectual trap. Perhaps most don’t. But it appears
that enough do to make a difference in elections. And surely, the
embrace of anti-intellectualism is at least as severe in the white
community as it is in the black community, where we constantly hear
talk of it, coming from the very white folks who then turn around and
tell us that the Earth was created only 5000 years ago, and that
despite having no scientific training, they are sure that global
warming is a myth, but that Obama really is a Muslim, or maybe the
anti-Christ (as once-upon-a-time celebrity, Victoria Jackson claims on
her website).

In short, when it comes to “acting white,” if the term means
paying no attention to policy details, but rather voting for the
person who you’d most like to hang out with at a sports bar, then
perhaps we need not only black and brown folks to forswear such
lunacy, but for those of us who are white to turn on whiteness too. To
not do so would be to confirm that whiteness is inversely related to
mental acumen. I for one, would like to think we were capable of
better. But as for evidence to support my hope? Well, I’m still
waiting for that.