Pushing "White Privilege" Ensures Its Survival

Well, once again an innocent black man has been shot down by whites. The Ahmaud Arbery killing video seems like something from a screenplay based on a John Grisham novel, or from a movie version of true events of the 1960's. How can this be 2020 and we still have whites driving around in pickup trucks looking for black men to lynch? The truth may be the unintended consequences of attitudes of well meaning people. Many people do not realize that the modern concept of "white privilege" has a lot to do with a narrative that was pushed in the post-Reconstruction South after the War Between the States. That is not to say that racism and white supremacy were not preexistent, but our discussion is of the concept of "white privilege", not the former prejudices that probably go back centuries. After the Civil War, the South's agronomic system was forever changed. Slavery gave way to a new model for the landholders. The euphemism for it was "tenant farming", but all of us who had ancestors who lived in the South during the period know it by its better name--sharecropping. The tenant farming system was, as many scholars have described it, "slavery by another name". Sharecropping, however, had one very salient component which would be quite significant in our history--tenant farming was a type of existence from which the white man's skin color did not protect him. The Southern way of life at the time, at least to the landholders, depended on a continuation of the ways of the Old South as much as possible, but with slavery abolished and the great exodus of blacks from the South, whites would have to supply a great percentage of the tenant farming labor. How would white tenant farmers ever put up with the abysmal conditions of sharecropping without rising up against the system? Now that you had whites falling into the system and experiencing its burdens the same as black sharecroppers, how could the landholders prevent the population of tenant farmers black and white from using the power of the vote to legislate better working conditions? The history shows a two fold approach. One strategy was the myth of the "Lost Cause". The Confederacy and "old South" way of life were glorified, and the Union was lampooned. No opportunity was missed in pointing out the failures and corruption of Reconstruction governments. The Union victory in the Civil War was blamed for all of the South's postwar problems, and a narrative that "if the South would have won, we'd have had it made" began to be formed. As Reconstruction lost ground and waned, culminating in the Compromise of 1877, white landowners were then poised to take control of the State legislatures once again. A one party region emerged. The mighty Democratic Party instituted a whole host of measures meant to keep tenant farmers from voting, including poll taxes and literacy tests. We think of these today sometimes as one and the same with the Jim Crow laws meant to oppress blacks, but the truth is that nearly all of those measures were also used liberally against poor whites to keep them from voting as well, since white sharecroppers were out in the fields all day with black sharecroppers, being ripped off by landowners and retailers step for step. Remember the movie Places in the Heart? Yes, the KKK attack on Danny Glover's character was difficult to watch, but the movie also portrays Sally Field's character as being pushed around by the bank on several fronts and nearly ripped off by the cotton gin operator, and her character was actually a white landowner, though her acreage was small and financially in distress. White privilege was the notion pushed, that no matter how bad your life was, at least you were white, and that was better than being black. Thus even though whites were effectively being victimized the same as blacks, the white sharecroppers were fed a steady diet of constructs from the white gentry. In the movie Mudbound, you see that there's not a whole lot of difference in the way the black sharecropper family was treated from the white sharecropping family, but just enough that white tenant farmers may have found their plight more palatable. Fast forward to modern times. Agriculture is highly mechanized, and for better or worse there are very few farms of any kind left in the South today that are worked by lots of native born laborers. The use of migrant workers from Mexico replaced the tenant farming system, and their treatment in many cases still amounts to "slavery by another name". In fact the administration recently was quoted as needing to find a way to LOWER migrant wages so that farmers can survive the pandemic. What do the landowners want, to bring back slavery so they can make more money off their crops? Notice how things change in the South, yet still stay the same. During the 1960's, black activists took offense at the way that black lynchings were not looked upon in the same light as when white civil rights workers were killed. Instead of recognizing that that was simply a byproduct of decades of the "white privilege" narrative being pushed in the country, they began to distance themselves from whites. For many, all whites became the enemy, and their help was not wanted. Remember the much criticized scene in Malcolm X where a white student was told in no uncertain terms that her help was not wanted? Whether or not that actually played out as it was in the film in real life, it is a true attitude that many had at the time. Fast forward to today. Anytime a white person tries to sympathize with the plight of blacks, they are immediately eviscerated by left wing activists who lampoon them. It is now preached with a loud and unmitigated voice that whites can NEVER understand or sympathize with the black experience, and they shouldn't even try--that there is a privilege of being white that will always be there, and whites will always be treated better than blacks, no matter how poor or downtrodden they are. Well, isn't that what the aristocrats and those modern "haves" want the "have nots" to think? The right wing and left wing lobby groups, the Democrats and Republicans, all are perfectly fine with that way of thinking, because it preserves the status quo. Nothing changes because of it. No good can come from it. Thus we still have blacks being shot down by whites who act with impunity, and half the whites read stories like Arbery's and subconsciously what runs through their mind is "Man, I'm glad I'm white." Wouldn't it be far more effective at engendering change if we flipped this "white privilege" narrative on its head, and all of us were shocked and horrified no matter what our color is, because we realize that actually what happened to Mr. Arbery can happen to a white man--nay, likely has happened to whites countless times but we never heard about it because the media also helps to push the modern "white privilege" narrative? They only show up when there are racial tensions to be exacerbated. This is not to say that "white privilege" doesn't exist, but rather that it continues to persist because the very people who lament it are unwittingly aiding and abetting its survival. How many whites tried to comment sympathetically this week about the death of Mr. Arbery, and were told by some well meaning but misguided poster (or worse, an Internet activist troll),"What do you know? You're white. You don't understand. You voted for Trump."? In fact, Trump himself called the video "disturbing" and "heartbreaking". How did the far left respond to Trump's comments, which were rather sane for him? Until we stop looking at these crimes through racial lenses and start looking at them together from a united front, I don't think much will be done. Police brutality and overreach will continue. Corporations will continue to rip off small businesses. The haves will continue to perpetrate terrible injustices upon the less fortunate, because they've used "white privilege" for so long to keep the races divided that they've actually perfected a system in which the "have nots" keep themselves in bondage by believing the narratives that were force fed to them for decades. The "haves" just sit back and watch while the "have nots" chain themselves with division and lack of unity. Imagine if. Imagine if George Wallace had not been a segregationist when he ran for President, shocking both parties by winning five States? What if he'd gone on, with black support around the country, to show that a person does not need the Republicans or Democrats to win? What if the Bernie bros complaining about their student loan debt and lack of jobs united with the blue collar, gun totin' Southerners complaining about the lack of jobs and opportunities in rural areas? Well, those that benefit from the status quo ensured that those "ifs" never became a reality, didn't they?