What is White Privilege?
According to Charles Mills, there is a global system of white supremacy that is behind political thought. This racism has been refined over the long period of European cultural, economic, political, and social domination. Mills states that when political theorists developed various political philosophies, they did so to protect white privilege. Charles Mills wrote The Racial Contract (1997), a book that should be read by all. According to conventional social theories, a society is created when a group of individuals voluntarily and collectively agree to safeguard one another’s rights and liberties. Despite the fact that racial exploitation is the historical foundation of the majority of contemporary societies, Mills points out that these theories generally ignore white supremacy. When philosophers treat race and racism as irrelevant to the structure of a society, they miss the fact that racism is precisely the reason our society have not been able to rid the country of racist thinking. Mills proposes the racial contract theory as a way to explain how politics, economics, and social power in the modern world are structured along white supremacist lines.
White privilege is the inherent advantage that a white person enjoys due to skin color in a society governed by racial injustice. White privilege is a set of benefits that are given to people whose skin is lighter and whose physical characteristics are European. People who identify as “white” hold powerful positions in many institutions. Having greater access to power and resources than people of color is one of the primary privileges. In other words, doors that are closed to other people simply because of skin color are opened to “whites.”. For instance, “white” people in the United States are more likely than people of color to obtain housing loans based on their financial history, without taking into account centuries of hatred generated against Black and Brown people.
“White” people can rely on the fact that history will be taught in such a way as to exalt European contributions while trying to prevent the teaching of Black or Brown studies classes. I don’t have to remind you about the racial lunacy of various state governors trying to prevent Black history from being taught. Parents of Native American children are aware that their children will not be taught about the contributions made by their people in school and the murder of their people by General Custer and dozens of other murderous racists. As if no indigenous people had been killed there, white crosses at the Little Bighorn Battlefield serve as an illustration of the high regard for whites killed there but none for those native people murdered at that location. The Alamo is but another example of white racist hero worship.
If one is a so-called white, they generally do not have to worry about being racially profiled and murdered by police officers who grew up in small towns where being white was a ticket to peace and prosperity. As if their reality is the only reality, White people have been permitted to use their experiences as a benchmark for everyone else. This is frequently interpreted as being able to say racist things without being held accountable for them and being “safe” from hearing the rage and pain of people of color. Another way to appear superior is to establish the rules for “standard” English and compel others to follow those rules. White history is what is generally taught in schools across America, and they can get away with this by not calling it “White History,” but it is what it is.
