Racism, Baratunde Thurston, and My White Privilege

In late April, President Obama posted his long-form birth certificate, a move in large part due to Birther Donald Trump’s recent stoking of the issue. I’ve spent the last two weeks or so trying to unpack my reaction to it and more specifically, what that reaction says about me as a white person.

When the news broke on April 27, I groaned and cussed a few times because the whole Birther thing is so stupid and plainly racist. If you were following me on the twitter machine, you saw a little frustration, then a spate of retweeted jokes about it.

Then I went on with my day and didn’t really give it much thought. I certainly didn’t consider how it affected me personally.

That evening, I came across this video by Baratunde Thurston and started to question both my attitude and my unintended white privilege.

(If you haven’t seen them, here are President Obama’s press conference and Trump’s press conference, which led to Thurston’s video.)

As I watched that Thurston’s video for the first time, I recognized the look on his face. I’d last seen it in my own mirror last autumn when so many gay little boys and young men killed themselves, leaving me feeling like I was being punched in the gut over and over for six weeks.

I remember seeing my LGBT friends experience the same feelings and verbalize the urgency that goes with them, but then seeing my straight friends distractedly say “That’s so sad,” shrug it off, and then talk about a LOLCAT.

After processing the resulting anger over the situation, I finally gained a grudging understanding that my straight and cis-gender friends had the privilege of not being so personally affected by the deaths. They were able to put the deaths in the category of “wrong things that happen” and set them aside, while we were forced to know them as “wrong things that happen to us.”

Much to my disappointed surprise, I found myself in the position of my straight friends on April 27, as my African American friends were all over facebook and twitter in obvious pain and reasonable rage over the Birther nonsense while I got to make a joke of it.

My point here is part mea culpa and part call to mindfulness. If you’re in a majority group, be mindful of the inequities that others are living with that you haven’t even considered.

And then…do your best to shed your privilege.