In a lot of ways, I have had a long time to think about this question. As a woman, and a woman who has been through particularly harrowing experiences specifically because I AM a woman, I know what it's like to have to be aware, as Tim Wise describes, of more realities than simply my own. I have been taught to be aware of a straight man's reality, constantly: if I wear this outfit, if I talk this way, if I go this far, I know that there's a chance he might think I owe him something. I know that there is a chance that if I do not grant what he perceives he is owed, he might take it and, all the while, not fully understand how or why his actions are wrong. This awareness is a part of my subconsciousness; whether or not any particular man will fit this description or not, I am always aware of the possibility.
This awareness also makes it easier to look beyond myself. I know what it's like to see and understand at least one reality which isn't my own. With that knowledge, then, I can train myself to look at not only where I am oppressed by iconic images of straight white gender roles, but also at where my participation in commonly accepted roles as a straight white woman oppresses others. In other words, I participate in and take advantage of white privilege, but I have been raised by my experiences as a woman to understand the concept of multiple realities, and thus am forearmed with an ability to examine how my own reality differs from others.
Both of my parents went to college. Furthermore, my mother did so even after becoming pregnant with my older sister at the age of eighteen. She lived in a strict religious little town in the mountains of Utah, surrounded by Mormons but raised by a well-educated secular couple. My mother, at eighteen, with a two year old in hand, graduated high school. She went on to college, married a man, had another child, divorced that man, went on to graduate school and won a custody battle over me in Salt Lake City in which she and her female partner managed to convince the state of Utah that she was not an unfit mother. Telling this story, it's easy to see my mother's strength and fortitude, her extreme dedication and refusal to let others push her down. I am not denying any of these traits when I say that she is extremely, extremely lucky to be where she is today: several degrees under her belt, a position at a well-known public university in Ohio, three children, two of whom are in college and the last of which is definitely college bound. We are an absurdly lucky family; there is no denying that a part of this, perhaps a larger part than even I want to admit, is linked to white privilege.
The most obvious place to start would be with my ancestry. My family is descended from the British. My ancestors were among the first Europeans traveling to America to escape religious prosecution. In other words, the social construct of race as discussed in class was essentially built by my ancestors - the elite, the privileged. My grandparents would not have lived in the wealthy, conservative little Mormon town, a white town, if they were black. Their educational background would have been drastically different. My mother, as a white woman, pregnant at the age of 16 in the 1970s, was only barely able to escape a life of complete, uneducated domesticity - but even that uneducated domesticity would have born its own race-based privileges, though my mom would not have tolerated it. My mother's escape only came about because she had wealthy, liberal white parents who pushed her and challenged her to pursue her education and who had the means to support her and her child as she went to community college and then moved up to a four year university. While my grandparents and great-grandparents were becoming educated and earning wealth, the grandparents and great-grandparents of a black woman in a similar position as me would have had no such chance.
It's important to share this background when talking about how white privilege shapes my every day life because it is important to emphasize that the very core of my own personal history is shaped by the privileges my great-grandparents and grandparents passed down to my mother. There was never any question, as I was growing up, as to whether or not I was college bound. I was going to grade school to get the grades to test into better classes in middle school to achieve the reputation to be tracked as an Advanced Placement student in high school to launch myself into college. In fourth grade, I wanted to attend New York University. In seventh grade, I had set my sights on Yale. By high school, I was surely bound for Ohio State. By my senior year of high school, I was registered at Ohio University and found myself disappointed that I wasn't enrolled somewhere more prestigious, even though I'd fallen in love with Athens the minute I drove past the mountains on Route 33. That disappointment came so easily to me. Getting into college was no big deal - the possibility of NOT going to college never even existed to me. This is white privilege. It's not that some black families, some families who fit the description for other race-based minority labels, don't have the opportunity to send their children to college. But my placement in higher education was set for me by ancestors who were dead before I was even born. This is fundamental to my mindset as a human being. I may be aware of realities outside of my own, but the reality of college being a privilege is still baffling to me. Even sitting in my sociology class talking about poverty and racism and classism and knowing that huge portions of the American population will only just barely make it through high school, the thought that anyone could look at their future and NOT see higher education is hard to conceptualize.
This is my everyday life. I am preparing for a future that is available to me because of who my ancestors were, because of the color of my skin. As a woman, I am at a disadvantage in matters of controlling and expressing my own sexuality as something that belongs wholly to me, and not to straight white men. But as a white woman, I have been given a voice in police officers who believe me, in the absence of too many negative stereotypes, in the fact that I have never been asked to make a choice between fighting to defend myself on basis of my race or fighting to defend myself on basis of my sex. I was never forced to analyze my whiteness with the same scrutiny and anxiety that I have been forced to analyze the fact that I am a woman, and even now analyzing my race is a choice that I have to consciously make. It is not something that I have ever had to be aware of. I see that, because I have had to be aware of my gender in ways that haunt me most every hour of every day. On top of that, I know that my extreme awareness of my place as a woman is not nearly as widespread among white women as the extreme awareness of social place a black person generally has to have in order to live in a white man's world.
There are so many examples of my privilege as a white person. I have been pulled over by the cops numerous times for driving a beat-up old car with a missing taillight at two in the morning through the suburbs of my hometown outside of Dayton, but I have never once been treated with hostility nor given a ticket. I know how to play up a polite, unassuming personality that plays off well with my average white female face, so as to constantly appear to be the responsible and tired girl who just got off a late shift at work. It works well with the demographic of the area I lived in and put me on the extremely hard-to-find good side of a cop looking for hooligans at two in the morning. As an average white woman, I am not fetishized as "exotic" by straight white men, which is a way that women in racial and ethnic minority groups are often framed. There is a much thinner veil of stereotypes and negative associations around me as a white woman than there is around almost any other demographic in the United States. It is all stress off my back.
A little bit of stress goes a long way. Every day, every minute that I do not see and live through and struggle against my own race and how my race is perceived against others is a privilege I have over large sections of the population. It is a privilege that I feel I understand, in one respect, as a feminist who is often aware of her otherness and distance from the norm. I may empathize and know what it means to be other, however, I cannot truly understand what it's like to be racially or ethnically a minority. This inability to grasp that full awareness is a part of white privilege as well, a detriment to myself that I, personally, am using as a catalyst into sociology as a major and social justice as a life's goal.
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