Got Privilege ?
How White Pride and Whiteness Itself Works as a Way to Further Marginalize and Exploit Colored Bodies.
“Consider whiteness as a category of experiences that disappears as a category through experiences, and how this disappearance makes whiteness worldly”- Sara Ahmed
I was born and raised in Mexico up until I was 4 years old, we later immigrated to America. Unlike other Mexican immigrants my mother and myself’s complexion was fairly light so it was easy to pass as an American citizen. However, my mom was still very fearful of ever being found out and ever since I could remember my mother enforced the idea to blend in with the crowd, to not call attention to myself, so that I would be deemed a “good immigrant”. I never really understood why my mom enforced this idea of blending in, until one incident at the mall that finally cleared it all up. Basically my mother and myself went to the mall to do some back to school shopping. Despite the fact that we were poor she saw it necessary to invest in good quality clothes in order to look the part as an American. So as we are entering the mall it seems like I have entered a whole new world, everything seemed so luxurious and glamorous. So luxurious and glamorous that it made me feel like we did not belong here, which by how fast we finished shopping I could tell my mother also felt the same way. We quickly went up to the cash register to purchase our things everything was going smoothly, the cashier was being very sweet and polite. Up until she attempted to have a conversation with my mother, who did manage to answer back but of course with a Mexican accent, which is when things went sour. It was like a switch flipped inside of the cashier ladies head because she became a completely different person and in a sense we became a completely different person to her. We were no longer a mother and daughter doing back to school shopping but we were a Hispanic mother and daughter doing back to school shopping. Even though I was very young and didn’t fully understand the situation, what I did manage to understand was the fear in my mother’s eyes. So as a result, I decided to blend in by not only learning the language but by also looking the part. I wanted to look and talk like all the other little girls in my class, I wanted to be validated by them, coincidentally those little girls were all white. Blending in was to my understanding by default a white body. Sara Ahem states, whiteness and what is perceived as whiteness is marked by our experiences. The values, and ideologies of what it means to be white has seeped into our everyday experiences and has become the background to our lives. As a result, whiteness has become the assumed norm. It has come to represent an image of power and privilege that my mother and most immigrants who come to this country strive for.
Despite whiteness seen as the norm I find it strangely intriguing as to why white bodies find the need to constantly claim that they are being discriminated or that minorities are “stealing” their jobs. They say “their jobs” implying that they are the only ones who have the right to make a living. Yet for the most part these jobs that immigrants are “stealing” are usually hard manual labor jobs in which they are constantly being exploited , like agriculture jobs. That for the most part white bodies would never choose to work in. So why are you so fearful of our bodies existence?
You fear our bodies because they are a threat, a threat of the imagined other, i.e. the minority whose proximity, whose existence threatens not only to take something away from the white bodies but to replace them as the dominate culture. They are essentially fearful of being treated as a minority, i.e. being treated as less than a human. I find it ridiculous for white bodies to claim to feel discriminated when the country that you live in has exploited minority bodies for years. It’s this very exploitation that has provided all the resources that are distributed in the society through a system that is set up solely for the benefit of white bodies.
Yet, despite this white bodies have started a counter movement called, “white pride”. They have exercised their pride in their whiteness by making a mockery out of minorities cultures. They use our cultures as Halloween costumes and as themes for their fraternity parties. Like the one held at Baylor University on May fifth hosted by the campus chapter of Kappa Sigma, called “Cinco de Drinko”. The party had students dressed up as maids and construction workers while the students chanted, “build that wall”. These types of events has managed to once again reaffirm your white privilege. What that entails is that you as a white body have the privilege of understanding everything around you in relation to you. Essentially, what this mean is that everything is available to you, even the appropriation of our culture.You take bits and pieces of our culture without making any effort to understand the culture or the people. Our culture has become used in countless ads as the new hot trend. Yet, in all those ads there is no colored body in sight. The lack of representation of colored bodies just reaffirms the motion that our things are good enough but our bodies don’t quite make the cut. Our bodies are just here to be exploited while white bodies like Kylie Jenner, and Miley Cyrus can make a profit out of it. So if white bodies are constantly making a profit, have access to resources, and power,please explain why white pride is even a thing. Aren’t white bodies satisfied with having white pride 365 days out of the year?
