This is What Someone Who Benefits from White Privilege Looks Like

You know those t-shirts that say "this is what a feminist looks like?"  Sometimes I want to make one that says "this is what someone who benefits from white privilege looks like."  I doubt they'd sell well, but that's not the point - the point is to call out whiteness where whiteness is present so that it doesn't remain invisible, taken-for-granted, or normative.  So I'll say it now - being white is a huuuge leg up...seriously, if you're not white, you're missing out, because this shit is thoroughly good.

Case in point: I returned last week from a trip to Canada with my family to see my grandmother.  Bear with me through this walk down patrilineal lane.  My sister flew in from Georgia and my mom and dad drove up from North Carolina to pick us up en route north.  My dad had gone up last spring to help my grandmother move out and sell her home, and he had taken a scenic route he wanted us to see.  Oh, readers, I can't begin tell you how significant were the many moments during that trip when the benefits of our whiteness was starkly evident.  But, as this is blog where I try to tell you everything you never knew you wanted to know about me, I will try!

As promised, it was a beautiful drive, even given the overcast weather.  There were lots of lovely rolling hills with clouds settling in the background, and plenty of gently winding roads that can make road trips so romantic, at least for the first few hours until your bum starts hurting.  There were also a number of small towns we passed through, some quainter than others, others a bit worn down.  My dad is a fan of local cuisine ("Why go somewhere new and eat what you can get back home?" is his travel philosophy), so he prefers to stop at roadside places and grab a quick bite.  On the way up, somewhere in Pennsylvania, he spotted a little family restaurant in an older, wood-sided building with a hand-painted sign, Finn's Family Restaurant.

Inside Finn's, of course, were only white people.  Mostly white people over 60, but definitely just white people.  I knew we were already a bit out of place (as any visitor is to these roadside restaurants) as out-of-towners, but I wondered...what if we were a Black family?  Would we stop at a roadside restaurant?  Would we even feel completely at liberty to take the scenic route?  Maybe it would just be easier to stick to the main highways and pick up McDonald's...at least the people serving us would probably look like us.  It reminded me of the time my Asian American partner and her white friends stopped in tiny Calypso, NC, on their way to the coast, and a little white girl who was definitely old enough to be past the staring phase stared at her the whole time she was in the gas station.

Even more broadly, crossing the Canadian border itself is always an act of white privilege.  My dad, who's very well versed in such things, is usually pretty nervous and sometimes bumbles what he's going to say.  A few years ago, when asked if he had anything to declare, he said "oh, just some materials."  The officer looked up sharply and asked, "What kind of materials?"  My dad hastily explained that he was referring to some ornaments and chocolates or whatever it was, but I have no doubt that people of color would have been stopped right there for such a gaffe.  Especially if they looked, um, non-Christian.

This time, there was no word faux pas, but the officer called attention to the fact that my dad has had a Canadian/British greencard for twenty years while the rest of his family are American citizens (my mom naturalized about fifteen years ago).  Would this have been more suspicious if we weren't a nuclear white family?  Likely.

When we reached my grandmother, we drove up to her new residence at a graduated assisted living facility.  (It's not a nursing home, my grandmother keeps telling me, because they don't have nurses and she can do her own laundry...but it's basically a glorified nursing home).  As we walked through the halls, my grandmother knocking on doors - usually the wrong ones - and waving to everyone, I wondered to myself, where do the old people of color live?  Certainly not at this facility.  This may be tied in part to class privilege - more on that next - but Canada has a healthcare system that actually takes care of all of its citizens, no matter their income.  Were assisted living facilities segregated by choice or by happenstance (or what Berube calls unintentional whiteness, where the whiteness 'just happens' because no on thinks about including anyone else)?  There were certainly no gay couples there, either, which made me wonder where they live, too.

Our white privilege became most evident to me on this trip when my grandmother sat us down in her living room and handed us all envelopes.  Enclosed, in my envelope at least, was a check for $2,000 in Canadian dollars, and my parents had a much, much larger check (let's just say theirs had a lot of zeros).  In April, my grandmother had sold the house she and her husband bought in 1956 for $13,000 for a whopping $360,000 - that's an impressive profit even accounting for inflation (which would have made the house worth about $110,000 today).  Due to my grandfather's pension and other state/personal income sources, my grandmother is more or less making money for the rest of her life.  She decided she didn't need the profits from the home, so she wrote a check to all five of her grandchildren and a very large check to each of her two children.

Three words, dear readers: White privilege much?

The brilliant irony of all of this is that my grandmother's check came at a time in which I am finding my privileged white ass unemployed.  (Well - more like about to embark on four months of working for free, yippee!).  This fall, I will be networking and conducting field observations for my dissertation research on white privilege, and there is no money in that.  In short, my grandmother's check - acquired through white privilege and race-based historical access to the transformative assets of home ownership - will be subsidizing my research on white privilege.  As the elders say, if you aren't using your privilege, you're wasting it!

So I can cross national borders, stop at roadside restaurants, and be pretty sure my nursing home will filled with folks who are as pale as me.  If I have no job, no worries!  An elderly relative will sell her house and cut me a share.  And while my cousins are buying new couches and roofs (all valuable investments), in a hilarious twist, I'm going to use my part of the proceeds to study white people.  Oh yes...this is definitely what someone who benefits from white privilege looks like.