"I'll vote for a black dude over a bitch."This comment recently came from a white former boss of mine who said she was echoing the sentiments of her relatives. My former boss relayed the sentiment as if it were a joke and chuckled when she said it, but she wasn't bold enough to repeat the actual word, "nigger," so she clumsily used "black dude" instead.
She said her kin-folk in Kentucky plan to vote for Obama/Biden rather than McCain/Palin. Somehow I think her relatives will do something altogether different when they go inside the voting booth. In fact an Associated Press report suggests this very same sentiment.
You've probably already read or heard about the report so I won't spend a lot of time on it, what I want to talk about are bigots who don't know they are bigots.
The former boss I mention above is the same person who was shocked because I'm not like "other black people." She told a white colleague - a friend of mine - that I was "different." She said that Alicia (another black woman she hired, I am not using her real name because this is a true story) is really tough-acting, from the projects of New York where she lived with her single mother, and has a father and a brother who are both in prison for murder. Our boss wondered why I wasn't like Alicia.
Mind you, this from the very woman who hired me.
"How could she be so different," our boss asked my friend, making reference to me. "Because they are two different people," my friend responded.
My friend was astonished at such ignorance; I wasn't.
See my former boss is a bigot, only she doesn't know it. That's because she, and others like her, are blinded by something called white privilege.
Tim Wise wrote about it recently. White privilege differs from racism and prejudice in that the person benefiting from white privilege may not necessarily hold racist beliefs or prejudices themselves. Often, the person benefiting is unaware of his or her supposed privilege, or so says Cornel West and other scholars who subscribe to this school of thought.
Problem is, because these people are so unaware of their bigotry, stupid things often come out of their mouths.
Most don't realize they act or sound like bigots. What's worse, they in fact look down their noses at racists like David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. And still others will keep a straight face and tell you they aren't racist, but then will turn around and vote for someone like David Duke (remember he was elected to the state legislature in Louisiana as well as campaigned for that state's governor and President of the United States).
Or they make dumb jokes like "If Obama wins, will we still call it the White House?"
Wait, don't think me a bigot, but that one is so stupid that it is actually kinda funny.
For more on white privilege, watch this video:
No comments:
Post a Comment