White Privilege prevents being treated as a human being, just because you are a human being. It prevents giving "the benefit of the doubt."
My friend Zeb Cobb is a barber. Since 1980 he has been the owner/operator of his shop. He also owns the building it occupies. One morning as he opened for the day the Everett Herald reported:
"In 1995, police officers entered Zebedee's early one Saturday [at gunpoint] as Cobbs was opening his shop, Cobbs was quoted as saying, "One of them kind of got next to me, and said, 'We just want to find out if you belong here or not.' I said, 'Yes, I own the building, I own the business, I've been in this town for 23 years.'
"They saw a black man from the road, and assumed I was going through the till and robbing the place," Cobbs said."
These officer's "assumed," incorrectly, that because he was black he was a criminal.
As a young prosecutor I was stopped close to home for expired tabs. Gun drawn, the officer told me to "keep my hands" where she "could see them!" For expired tabs? Mistakenly, I put them on wrong: on the front plates. She held the gun on me until she walked around to see the front plates: my story checked out.
Here the black traumatization is clear. But how are the whites traumatized? I suggest that like all trauma, White Privilege desensitizes and this eventually dehumanizes.
When one denies the benefit of the doubt to blacks because of race and grants the benefit of the doubt to whites because they are white, arguably, it generates a delusion. This delusion is a form of "trauma." Why? Because it prevents a correct perception of reality: A business owner becomes a robber; a young prosecutor becomes a threatening street thug. Arguably, isn't persistent cultivation of this sort of delusion the reason why innocent people get shot?
White Privilege: Healing the Comfortable Illusion
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