“The concept of it being a luxury to have your young son play with a water gun in a public park is a problem…luxury is the wrong word to describe childhood. The idea of white privilege being the ability to interact with police and not be treated like a fully armed terrorist is not privilege, it’s citizenship.” –Baratunde Thurston

I really enjoy Baratunde Thurston’s podcast “About Race.” In the latest episode Bartunde and his co-hosts discussed a variety of recent current events including the Rachel Dolezal fiasco.

Toward the end of this particular episode (around the 45:40 mark), the subject of white privilege is brought up. The three commentators mutually agreed that how the concept typically gets framed can be problematic in some respects. I personally am fine with the phrase, but I do see how framing it the way Baratunde does above could be helpful when talking to uninformed white folks who may scoff at, dismiss, and/or disbelieve the idea that they’re “privileged” when they themselves may be poor, for example, or have endured their fair share of struggles in life.

What Baratunde is essentially doing in the quote above is looking at the concept of white privilege from the white persons perspective, and this is, perhaps, why describing white privilege as not so much being certain advantages for white people, but as simply citizenship and the absence of the disadvantages of black people, could be quite helpful when talking about systemic racism with defensive white people who don’t think racism exists anymore.

Tags:About RaceBaratunde Thurstonracismwhite privelege