On Check your privilege [? / !]

White Privilege and Systemic Racism when spoken as synonyms confuses Americans with the former and prevents the resolution of the latter. What are they? Teaching tolerance traces the problem of racism through the phenomenon of racial bias. White privilege is the benefits individuals obtain from avoiding the harm of racial bias. Some examples of racial bias are: "These biases can become racism through a number of actions ranging in severity, and ranging from individual- to group-level responses: A person crosses the street to avoid walking next to a group of young black men. A person calls 911 to report the presence of a person of color who is otherwise behaving lawfully. A police officer shoots an unarmed person of color because he “feared for his life.” A jury finds a person of color guilty of a violent crime despite scant evidence. A federal intelligence agency prioritizes investigating black and Latino activists rather than investigate white supremacist activity. Both racism and bias rely on what sociologists call racialization." Racialization theory posits that the micro-aggression of individuals towards racialized groups is the source of macro-aggression such as slavery. Resolving the problem requires individuals to look at themselves first as beneficiaries and agents of oppression. As the broader obvious social injustices, such as legal restriction on the rights of African Americans to vote are resolved: "people’s feelings of guilt and moral responsibility will diminish. As they do, the liberal project’s political support will come to rest heavily, and precariously, on motives of altruism and enlightened self-interest. It’s imperative, then, that whites not be “let off the hook” for disparities disadvantageous to blacks, which is the effect of considering causes other than discrimination as the source of those disparities. By extension, straight white males must not be let off the hook for disparities disadvantageous to any American outside their diminishing ranks. This, the entirety of America’s inequalities, is on them, all of it, and they must be made to feel very, very bad." The problem with this approach is that it does little to encourage a positive approach to resolving social injustice. White privilege the resolution of injustice as a problem of privelege rather than right. Making apologies for freedom, health and education does little to provide these goods for those who have none. Indeed it hardens the position of those who refuse to be held guilty for being born. I hold hope that those same conservative Christian working class whites who support Trump and rail against the idea of White Privilege could be convinced that the social benefits (referred elsewhere as privileges) that were available to them should be available to other Americans.The liberal desire for psychological self-satisfaction is blocking the critical work of communication between and among Americans. Simply put, if you are defining white as bad, don't be surprised when whites change the channel.Terms like "Check your privilege" shut down the conversation and strengthen the respective echo chambers of "right" and "left". Do not be surprised when your strident negative message falls on deaf ears and instead places your audience in the camp of real racists. Would we get farther with a message that black is good, white is good, brown is good? Can't we all just get along? Yes we can. Si Se Puede!

Systemic Racism on the other hand is a real and expensive problem to resolve. As alluded to above, the rights that whites enjoy (referred elsewhere as privileges) are not available to other Americans. The predominant material cause (excluding factors such as cosmic injustice and culture) is the long range impact of past Racism on current Americans. Capital R Racism. Slavery. Jim Crow. Redlining. Explicitly harmful, violent and impoverishing. Nehitsi Coates provides a simple example in the form of one man who I think most Americans could identify with. He starts in Mississippi: "When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping. This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism." Ross lived as a second class citizen: "Then, when Ross was 10 years old, a group of white men demanded his only childhood possession—the horse with the red coat. “You can’t have this horse. We want it,” one of the white men said. They gave Ross’s father $17. “I did everything for that horse,” Ross told me. “Everything. And they took him. Put him on the racetrack. I never did know what happened to him after that, but I know they didn’t bring him back. So that’s just one of my losses." As an adult Ross moved to Chicago seeking the normal rights of an American. Unfortunately Mortgages were not available to blacks: "Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated." The modern examples show that Racism ended neither with Slavery nor with Martin Luther King. Kanye West said: "Racisms still alive, they just be concealin' it But I know they don't want me in the damn club They even make me show I.D to get inside of Sam's club"