Checking Your Privilege Means Nothing
Like many of my white peers, I would always be consistently “checking my privilege” and referencing my indisputable White Privilege™ during political discussions — which usually were held among my white friends and I in our college dorms (paid for by our parents). This acknowledgment of the benefits of whiteness didn’t really mean much. We would recognize our privilege and then immediately carry on benefitting from the systems that constructed it.
Because that’s all the term white privilege is meant to do — signify that white people know they’re treated better, yet enable them to continue to participate in and benefit from the systems that perpetuate this preferential treatment. It’s a safeguard against acknowledging the systemic causes of these privileges and implies that white privilege is natural. However, it’s not because white people are white that they experience this privilege, but because we live in a society in which power structures reify and enforce whiteness at the expense of Black and brown people.
Checking your privilege is a meaningless gesture performed by white people desperate to prove their allyship — another platitudinous term that ultimately means nothing — instead of doing something substantial that will result in material benefits for marginalized groups. In order to actually acknowledge your privilege, you, as a white person, have to recognize that your entire life is facilitated by the anonymized, exploited labor of Black and brown people. That white people are naturally privileged, as is implied by a term as vague as white privilege, is a capitalist myth necessary to perpetuate systems dependent on cheap labor.
The manufactured idea that the lives of white and/or wealthy people is deservedly and naturally easier is necessary to bolster the concomitant belief that institutions that facilitate their lives magically appear; the sidewalk just happened to be clear of snow, the grocery shelves were fated to be stocked, the shoes were fixed by magical little elves. And when the laborers behind this facade are revealed, they’re propagandized as “lazy,” “entitled,” or “dumb.” Essentially, these laborers, who are often, poor, Black, and/or immigrants, must be either anonymized or slandered so that the elite class is able to enjoy their life without being privy to the brutal exploitation responsible for their lifestyles. And acknowledging white privilege is a necessary tool in the arsenal of liberal rhetoric so that white people can cloak the reality of their lives with good intentions and banalities.
Assata Shakur wrote in her autobiography, “as long as some white middle-class people can… reap the benefits of their white skin privileges… then they are ‘liberals’... [who] feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged.” White people need someone to feel pity for to assuage their white guilt so they can continue to experience the privileges born of white supremacy without being expected to do anything about white supremacy. This has been repeatedly proven throughout history when white people vote or pass legislation against the interests of poor, Black people and other people of color under the guise of good intentions and superficial concern for social issues. So long as they can feign socially aware consciousness by “checking their privilege,” they will continue to deny material benefits that would actually help the communities they claim to want to help. They want to continue to live a life of comfort at the expense of Black and brown lives, while still pretending to care so they can accumulate political and social capital.
The term “white privilege” was especially tokenized and appropriated during the George Floyd protests. The Internet became overwhelmed by infographics explaining what white privilege is and checklists of banal activities Black people have been harrassed for that white people are able to do unencumbered. Not to mention, Instagram was polluted by those ghastly, nonsensical black squares. Suddenly, there was an overwhelming display of white people, consumed with ostensible shame, renouncing their privilege.
This ostensible portrayal of shame even made its way to the political stage, where politicians knelt with protestors and donned kente cloth before announcing plans to fund the police; those of influence are farcically agreeing that the system is corrupt and needs reform (though they wouldn’t dare suggest it needs total dismantlement), while doing nothing substantial to help. So long as they hide their ineptitudes behind palatable rhetoric, they can shield themselves from actual criticism. White people can check their privilege and read White Fragility and share their “Vote Blue No Matter Who!” posts and do everything a good ally is supposed to do, but it all means nothing when they don’t also acknowledge how these empty platitudes enforce a white supremacist system.
Meanwhile, Black and brown people are being disproportionately affected by COVID, they represent a majority of “essential workers,” and they are still being murdered by police, even during these protests. The people lamenting their privilege soon became the same people villainizing the protests as “riots” simply because their beloved Wendy’s was burning or Target was being looted. They had no problem acknowledging that they are granted unfair preferential treatment, so long as the institutions that perpetuate and enforce their privileged lifestyles remained intact.
The term “white privilege” is also used to simplify the white supremacist institutions that facilitate society. Many use the discriminatory practices of the criminal justice system as evidence of the existence of white privilege — Black and brown people are disproportionately targeted and killed by police, although half of police shooting victims are white. White people often receive much more lenient sentences for the same crimes that Black people receive deplorably harsher sentences for, but white privilege is not the culprit of this inequity. Despite not experiencing the extremities of punitive justice as severely as Black people and people of color, the fact that (mostly poor) white people are still jailed delegitimizes the white privilege myth. Blaming white privilege on this unjust system not only completely ignores the systems meant to reify whiteness, but it also authenticates a criminal justice system that is functioning perfectly. By blaming a white person’s privilege for the leniency they experience, it is implied that the criminal justice system suffers from imperfections that can be reformed through implicit bias trainings; through this logic, if socialized racial biases have been exorcised from the criminal justice system, then it can proceed to function equitably.
But there is no way to reform an inherently racist and capitalist system. The reason white people are not punished as severely as Black and brown people is not because of their whiteness, but because the criminal justice system was developed with the sole function of, as Frederick Douglass puts it, “imput[ing] crime to color.” According to Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete?, the police and the prison industrial complex were literally created to incarcerate Black people to provide cheap labor and for eugenic reasons. White people don’t elude incarceration because they were white, but because the system was never meant to punish (rich) white people to the extent it punishes Black people and people of color. To simply blame white privilege assumes we can reform the criminal justice system to not have partialities toward whiteness, and thus further legitimizes a system that does more harm than so-called white privilege.
White supremacy and capitalism will continue to evolve to be more palatable and will continue to co-opt social movements until we collectively identify the systems that purposefully disadvantage some while bolster others, and dismantle them. White people can’t check their privilege and also not acknowledge that the reality of said privilege is manifested as luxuries that are the result of exploitation. To truly deconstruct the systems that necessitate this privilege, we have to be willing to sacrifice many of the comforts and luxuries we take for granted.
White people are considered privileged because their lives are not racialized the way the lives of Black people and people of color are. Not experiencing racism is not a privilege; it’s a right that, in our current society, is only granted to a certain demographic. White privilege is nothing more than an ineffective platitude meant to pacify white guilt. The term simplifies the role white people play in continuing a tradition of exploitation and racism, as well as trivializes the institutions responsible for targeting Black and brown people. By constantly discussing the concept of white privilege, people are not focusing on the true causes of systemic disparities: white supremacy and capitalism. Check your privilege and be a good ally all you want, but you’re diverting focus from the systems responsible for manufacturing the institutional problems that plague Black people today. As long as the focus is on white privilege, white people will continue to cling to these privileges and the interracial solidarity necessary to combat these systemic issues will always be nothing more than a pipedream.
About the Author
Modesty Sanchez (she/her) is a senior at Emerson College majoring in Magazine Publishing, and minoring in Sociology and Postcolonial Studies. She enjoys writing about topics relevant to young adults, such as sex and sexuality, politics, identity, and pop culture. She is also the Sex & Love Editor at Lithium Magazine. When she’s not writing, though, she can be found reading, going to concerts (when they were a thing), watching Seinfeld, or not living up to her name. You can keep up with her here.
