Tales of White Privilege

The BBQ Pit
1

(Just gonna place this one in the Pit so I can properly mock all the racists when they come in here and deny my/our experiences, or helpfully explain that there is no such thing as white privilege. Also, it may help them stop hijacking Huey’s thread with their bullshit.)

So I’m gonna pop in here with some tales of white privilege which I have experienced or witnessed (usually experienced). I’m a 51yo white guy with a professional demeanor and I see this stuff happen all the time. It happens to me regularly.

But let’s start with a story that I was involved in, but the privilege was somebody else’s…

So, my kid was at a party a month ago and to kill 2, 3 hours before I picked her up, I turned on the Uber driver app. First call, about a mile from her school.

I get there and there are two PD vehicles, lights going, and a 50-something white man, looking a bit disheveled, is there with the two cops, arguing with them… “this is bullshit. Don’t you have anything better to do?”, idiocies like that.

Apparently, Mr Man was such an asshole to his previous Uber driver to the point he got kicked out, with the driver calling the PD. Usually this would result in a ticket, a warning, perhaps some time in the local drunk tank to cool off.

The police… get this… USED THE MANS PHONE TO CALL HIM ANOTHER UBER!

So I look at my app and note it’s going to a section of town with million-$ houses. Get the guy in my car, the cops tell me to take him home, and we’re off.

… Not 30 seconds out, the man says “We’re not going home, I want to go downtown.”

Well, I take him downtown - can’t do otherwise right, else it’s kidnapping.

On the way down he says “I want you to take me to <intersection> 'cause I wanna buy some crack.”

(!!!)

“Not in my fucking car you are!”

So Mr White starts arguing with me!

“Dude, don’t be a dick like that other guy (referencing the other Uber driver). We’ll just go to the convenience store and they’ll give it to me through the window. I do this all the time.”

“Well, you’re not doing it in my car.”

Anyway, I take him close to his intersection, drop him off next to a PD car (so he won’t be physically belligerent), and drove off.

But he was successful in his quest, and I know this because he left me a $20 tip 2 days later.

So, uh, yeah. If you look like a white executive you can be abrasive and abusive towards people, have the cops called on you because of this, and even if the problem was your Uber driver doesn’t want to assist you in committing a crime, the cops will call you an Uber so you can go successfully buy crack and make it home 30 miles away with no problem.

So that’s one tale among many. What are yours?

2

I get offered drugs all the time.by dealers I don know. guess I look affluent and non-threatening.

Also hair products, I can use anything on the shelves, my (black) wife has to go searching for expensive stuff that few places stock. She’s always saying how lucky son is to have more European hair.

3

People are always throwing drugs through my open car windows.

But the cops never believe me. :frowning:

4

In Asia, people can get hired as English teachers if they’re white, even if their English is terrible, while ethnically Asian people with great English get passed over due to, well, not being white.

To be fair, it goes both ways; schools in America would probably want to hire a brown-skinned person to teach Arabic or Mandarin rather than a white person who doesn’t look the part.

5

There’s a new breed of Mexican heroin dealer that refuses to sell to black people.

6

Word is, Col. Sanders got away with using the n-word.

7

A lot of good example here.

8

Look around this country and try to imagine where literally just about every goddamned thing in it came from: White People. Misogynistic, greedy, racist mutherfuckin’ white people.

And you wonder why all the white priviledge bullshit? :rolleyes:

9

Not that long ago, I went to a local supermarket in the less affluent part of town. It’s a nice enough market but it’s almost always crowded with long checkout lanes. I was probably the only white, non-latino person in the store at the time and dressed reasonably nicely. So, like everyone else, I’m standing in a long line waiting my turn when the store decides to open another register. Sure enough, the checkout person walks past several other lines and tells me to come over to the brand new line she’s opening. I even told her that all these other people were there before me and she just looked annoyed and said “Just please come over”.

10

nuff said.

11

I saw a police officer use a Taser to subdue some drunk white idiot. Every single person commented that the guy was lucky he didn’t get shot. That’s white privilege.

12

A quick poll: A. The black guy should have been treated just like the white guy.
B. The white guy should have been treated just like the black guy.
C. You’re cool with the disparate treatment.

13

D. They ought to be treated the same.

14

That was kind of A (or B). So you basically don’t care which?

15

Yeah, when I look around this country, and I see racism, and inequality, and suffering, I do see that just about all of it comes from white people. Very good observation.

As far as the building of the wealth and infrastructure of this country, that was not done by white people. That was done by immigrants, voluntary or otherwise, who were not considered to be white by the ruling nativist supremacist class of the time.

Back to the topic:

Here’s a white privilege story, and I’m pretty sure statue of limitations has passed on all of it.

This is nearly 20 years ago, and I’m driving with 4 of my friends in my car to a hemp-fest. We got pretty well blazed before heading out on this 1 1/2 hour trip. I don’t know exactly the contraband that we were carrying, but there was quite a bit.

So, we are going down this back road, and I don’t know exactly how fast I am going, as my speedometer had broken a few years prior, but, it’s pretty damn fast. As I come up over a rise, I see the lights on top of a police car ahead coming in my direction, and I slam on my brakes.

Of course, he pulls a U-turn behind me and comes up with his lights on.

I pull to the side of the road, and as the officer is approaching my car, I realize that I am wearing an implicitive t-shirt, so I quickly zip my jacket up, just as he is coming to my window. White officer, of course.

I roll down my window, and he asks, “Where are you going in such a hurry?” He says this in a bit of a drawl. Not exactly southern, but more the semi accent sported by the ruralites around here.

“I do apologize, officer, we are on our way to go camping. It’s been a while, and we were quite excited.” I matched his accent, having known many people from these areas, I was quite familiar with it. Not in a mocking way, but in a way that seemed to make him relax a bit.

“Do you know how fast you were going?”

“Sorry, officer, I wasn’t paying very close attention to my speed until I saw you.”

“Well, I clocked you at 93mph, and you had ample time to slow down before I got a reading.”

I grimace at the officer. “Like I said, we were just really excited. It’s been years since any of us have gotten a chance to go camping.”

“Where you heading?”

I replied with the name of a campground I knew was in that general direction. “I was wanting to get the campsite behind the quad, it’s a bit more isolated from the others. If they don’t have anything available, then we might try over at …”

He asks me what kind of tent I have. I reply, “When I was in Boy Scouts, I had a really nice Eureka dome tent, but since my nephew joined a couple years ago, I gave him that. Now I just have something that I bought at Wal-Mart yesterday.”

He says, “Well, the weather tonight is supposed to be pretty beautiful, so you shouldn’t need much. Nice of you to help your nephew along.”

So, we chat for a few minutes about camping and boy scouts. Finally, he says to me, “Well, I’m gonna have to give you a ticket. If you were just going 10 or 15 over, I’d give you a warning, but you were nearly 40 over. So, what I’m going to do is write you up for 74 in a 55, that way, you won’t have to go to court.”

I thank the nice officer, and pull away.

I strongly believe that, had I been black, things would not have gone so smoothly.

And it wasn’t just that I had white skin. It was that I had white experiences. The cop identified with me because he felt that we had similar interests, and as such, he wanted to do what he could to help me out.

That’s where the real privilege exists. When you see someone that looks like you, you assume that they have similar interests as you do, and have to be disabused of that notion on every point. If you see someone that looks different, you assume that they have no similar interests, and you are surprised for every point of similarity.

16

Once I killed a foreigner just to watch them die and the police just hi-fived me and said ‘way to go Whitey, we’ll get them all yet’ then they took me for ice cream and we didn’t have to pay because we were white.

17

I’m a darker-skinned white person. In both Spanish-speaking countries and some Asian countries I will be spoken to in the local language if I’m alone and not looking touristy, which is never the case for my fluorescent white partner. I’ve been threatened and hassled explicitly for presumably being a POC, as well as followed around in stores (presumably so I don’t shoplift), which doesn’t happen to my partner or other lighter-skinned white friends.

18

You’re a member of the border patrol?

19

Sorry, I started my country-examination in the produce section of my supermarket. It didn’t really turn out how you described.
As for white privilege, I live in an area that’s so white (and was even whiter when I was younger) that I don’t really have a basis for direct comparison. I have had a traffic stop or two where I was speeding and got let off, but my takeaway was that I was let off because I came off like an apologetic idiot. The time I didn’t sound like an apologetic idiot but rather a confrontational arguer I got a ticket that could better be described as a reaming.

If you were to tell me that a non-white person wouldn’t have escaped my other tickets the way I did, I’d be inclined to believe you.

20

I was once the victim of non-violent, but personally upsetting, anti-white racism. It was unprovoked aside from my wandering into the wrong place across the wrong crowd at the wrong time, as far as I can tell.

White privilege means I dealt with some assholes once and it hurt my feelings… as opposed to dealing with that sort of mistreatment or worse on a* regular basis*. I don’t know how well I’d handle it, if I faced behavior like that regularly and not as a one-off situation, or how I’d handle being treated with perpetual suspicion.