The Privilege of Ignorance

The title is a phrase that stuck with me from Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. From my (limited) experience, white people don't examine our privilege too often or at all. I imagine many would deny any such thing. It feels like a personal failing to not understand better or do more. It's so much easier to sit around doing this thing for no-one than actually get involved.

But maybe it can lead to ... somewhere. Michael Eric Dyson tries to get through.

We all can see the same videos. But you insist that the camera doesn’t tell the whole story. Of course you’re right, but you don’t really want to see or hear that story. 

At birth, you are given a pair of binoculars that see black life from a distance, never with the texture of intimacy. Those binoculars are privilege; they are status, regardless of your class. In fact the greatest privilege that exists is for white folk to get stopped by a cop and not end up dead when the encounter is over.

Those binoculars are also stories, bad stories, biased stories, harmful stories, about how black people are lazy, or dumb, or slick, or immoral, people who can’t be helped by the best schools or even God himself. These beliefs don’t make it into contemporary books, or into most classrooms. But they are passed down, informally, from one white mind to the next. 

The problem is you do not want to know anything different from what you think you know. Your knowledge of black life, of the hardships we face, yes, those we sometimes create, those we most often endure, don’t concern you much.

Update (September 12):  Natalia Khosla and Sean McElwee examine the lack of acknowledgement and the significance of white privilege.

Acknowledging white privilege could present an opportunity for making progress on racial justice. But the problem is that when most pundits talk about race in America, they don’t focus on the complicity of whites in creating racial inequality or the equal stake of whites in eliminating it. They focus instead on nonwhites, so that race gets portrayed as a “people of color” issue instead of as everyone’s shared issue. ... [R]ace problems aren’t people of colors’ problems; they are white people’s problems with people of color, and they are the negative effects of this on everyone through racism and inequality in society.

Update (February 25, 2018):  John Feffer explains the dangers of majoritarianism and a "besieged majority".

After the victories of the civil rights movement and other social movements, some white people have acquired the mentality of a besieged majority: They fear that they will lose their remaining privileges, like members of an elite frequent flyer program forced to sit back in economy class. Perhaps only a minority of white people — mostly white men — feel like a besieged majority. But for the next decade or so, before demographics decisively downgrade white status, this group will continue to flex its political muscle.