Aviva's just full of awesome links - here's a fantastic post about the way white privilege has manifested itself in the presidential campaign. I've excerpted part of it below:
White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.
White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you’re being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--you’re somehow being mean, or even sexist.
White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it, a “light” burden.
And there's more! This is a must-read.
1 comment:
Someone sent me this essay in an email yesterday... hours later it was up on blogs everywhere. (Andrew Sullivan with the Atlantic... you would dig me thinks) Although I think the writing is heavy handed enough for conservatives to quickly write off as liberal dribble, it is refreshingly eye opening for anyone with enough smarts to not be conservative. cough cough... Makes me want to watch Obamas race speech again.
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