Editor’s note: This commentary is by Tom McKone, of Montpelier, who is a retired English teacher, school principal and library administrator.
What if my twenties had been fake? Twice in the months before George Floyd was killed by police after giving a store clerk a bad $20 bill, I had used bills that clerks put through counterfeit detectors to make sure they were real. I was in stores at service stations at highway exits, one a few miles from my house and the other in another state. Both times, my twenties passed muster. But what if they hadn’t?
Here’s a little more info: I’m a middle class white man who drives a hybrid SUV. That sums it up, doesn’t it? If one of the bills had been fake and the store had called the police, there’s no way four cops would have shown up, and there’s no way I would have ended up dead. That’s not how middle class white people are treated in the United States.
Police probably would have questioned me about where I had received the bad bill and if I had known it was fake. Odds are very high that it would have been a professional, respectful conversation, and they would have been mainly interested in figuring out where the bill had come from. I would have lost some time and been out $20, and the police would have thanked me for my help. Based on decades of life experience, that’s what I expect would have happened.
Taking a walk or a run — even in a different neighborhood — is just as easy. Unlike Ahmaud Arbery, I don’t have to worry that a couple of vigilantes will follow me in their truck and kill me because they say I look suspicious. If I am birdwatching anywhere in America and I politely ask a woman with a loose dog in a restricted area to put him on a leash — as Christian Cooper did in Central Park — even if the woman has anger management issues (as that one did), she wouldn’t call the police to falsely and hysterically claim “a white man is threatening me.”
No, if my white body had been in George Floyd’s shoes, Ahmaud Arbery’s shoes or those of Christian Cooper — all Black men — I wouldn’t have been in any danger. Those incidents are stark reminders that life isn’t the same for all of us. My whiteness is rarely on my mind, but not being white is a frequent consideration for many people of color.
The White House disagrees with me. The recent presidential order putting restrictions on federal racial sensitivity trainings states — among many other things — that there is no advantage to being white or to being male, and that saying so is divisive, anti-American propaganda. Really? It’s anti-American to point out some groups are advantaged and some are disadvantaged? Isn’t recognizing discrimination and disparities important to ending them?
Whiteness has been an advantage in America since the first enslaved people were sold in the colonies in 1619, and slavery played a large role in the growth of our country and the development of the American version of capitalism. While the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery almost 160 years ago, it didn’t end racism. Today, white is still generally treated as the norm, with many white people considering it superior and anything else inferior. The problems and injustices caused by white dominance go far beyond the Black-white issues I’m addressing here, affecting American indigenous peoples and almost anyone whose ancestors didn’t come from Europe. The deeply entrenched advantage that white people have is often called “white privilege,” a term that applies well to most but not all whites. (All poor people, for example, are so disadvantaged that to call any of them “privileged” is a stretch, even those who are white and have an edge over other poor people.)
Research has definitively shown that racial disparities permeate our culture — in education, in the workplace, in access to health care, in family wealth, in where people live, in treatment by police and the courts, and sometimes in the freedom to move about freely and safely. But even without research, we all know it’s much easier to be white. Do some Black people break through racial barriers and find great success? Of course. But the majority of people who are not white face overt and hidden discrimination that makes their lives more difficult and often holds them back. It’s not simply a matter of working or trying harder: if you are not white, history and many laws, policies and attitudes are stacked against you.
In 1860, Jefferson Davis stood on the floor of the United States Senate and said that America was founded “by white men for white men.” That belief is a legacy we are still fighting to overcome. If we really believe this should be a nation “of the people, by the people, for the people” — of all the people, by all the people, and for all the people — those of us in advantaged positions can help to realize that dream by raising awareness and pushing to change laws, policies and attitudes.
The opening lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” — a novel about wealthy white people — still ring true almost a century later: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’” That was good advice in 1925 and it still is today.
