White Privilege essay
Harlan Dalton states that the Whites fail to see their whiteness, because in the civilized world being white has become something natural and unconditioned. They do not suffer from race-based prejudices, so have no need to create any tools to protect themselves from racism. Being initially put at the top of the social totem pole, they become oblivious to racial issues. It means that in defining themselves they do not tend to use any reference to their white race, because in the world where the whites are dominating, this reference is not something making them different. Another question is how race and ethnicity correlate, and here it comes out that being white may mean reference to different ethnicities. Belonging to some culture is what makes difference.
However, exploring the power of invisibility, Harlan Dalton together with Richard Dyer, claim that it is crucially important to study whiteness because it now influences social relations globally. Richard Dyer states that racial imagery is in the center of the way the modern world is organized. Prejudices create barriers mostly hurting non-whites, while the white people are not racially approached and that has become a norm. Still, globalization and humanization demand to seek new approaches to understand the racial problems. The labels coming from standards and ordinaries are to be abolished and substituted by conscious identity policies. Having enjoyed unearned advantage and conferred dominance for long, the whites are to become more aware of what they are and what they are not.
James E. Barrett and David Roediger explain that whiteness is a socially constructed identification. They show how it happens on the example of many immigrants coming to the United States in search of better living. They have to work hard, and for a long time to get access to their human and citizen rights and to win the status of white people, even though they are initially white by the color of their skin. Being white in the civilized world does not only mean the color of skin, but it refers to social status, origin and access to privileges one is able to enjoy only when many circumstances coincide.
Neil Foley explores the way how Hispanics become Americanized. Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Panamanians, and other ethnic groups of Latin American descent are rather labelled ethnically, not racially while Asian Americans are first and foremost the representatives of another race. Like Latin Americans, they tend to create their own ethnic communities and still experience segregation. Meanwhile they often have to choose either to acknowledge and protect their heritage or to fight for whiteness and become absolutely integrated into the American society with its cultural norms and abnormalities as well.
Abnormalities include discrimination and social stigmas constantly arising in the American society. Thus, Stephanie M. Wildman and Adrienne D. Davis investigate what privilege is and where this very word comes from. They explain that privilege is not something easy to define, because language itself makes the sense of the word invisible and regenerated at the same time. Privilege is something invisible to the bearer of this privilege, and this bearer is hardly interested in losing the privilege. However, the authors show how privileges appear. Categorization is a natural operation of cognition. Trying to explore and understand the world around us, we need to divide it into categories. And language naturally reflects this division. But those who are not privileged i.e. suffer from being deprived of something, turn to be discriminated.
