White Privilege Does Not Exist
Go ahead, get pissed. You’re wasting your energy and helping no one. We all need to wake up to cause and effect. No one is in control of the ship. We can scream through our thumbs into the isolated echo chambers of antisocial media, or we can put down our phones and think logically. We are not in control of what happened, no one is. Grow up.
White Privilege implies that some system or some group or some person exists that explicitly treats people differently. The problem is information. Information leads to resources: shelter, food, sex. We are wired to have sex. Again, grow up everyone. We are fucking fucking machines. (We have the opportunity to be more than that, not merely fucking machines, or we can just fuck a lot and die — fuck a lot then fuck right off and die, if you will.)
When we get access to a sex partner, we screw. Or, if we have access to food and shelter, we use it to gain a sex partner, then we screw. Whichever order it happens, all roads lead to procreation. People don’t like to talk about this, but we exist to keep humans existing. That’s it. Sorry, first we exist to keep existing, then we turn our efforts toward creating more of ourselves. Not only do we all not want to die, that’s not good enough, we want to see more of ourselves roaming the planet before we die.
After we have kept ourselves alive and created little copies of ourselves, any shelter and food we get is used on the copies of ourselves that we created. We help our copies stay alive until they’re old enough to do so. We used to say things like “keep the family name alive” but family names are recent inventions. That was just the latest good story we shared to hide the incomprehensible absurdity of existence.
When we gain access to sex, we use it, we procreate. We then have offspring who require food. When we get access tot he food, we give it to the people we have sex with, and the people we produced by having sex.
So, yes, a system does exist. It’s called parental love. It’s how humans survive.
Let’s pretend there are 4 colors in the world, as all humans insist on over-simplifying and talking about people as if they’re colors. You guessed the first two of course, black and white. Enough of those two already, how many headlines do you need. Let’s just call the other two are yellow and red. Don’t try to say ‘yellow’ is any particular person or nationality because no person is actually “black” or “‘”white.” It’s all absurd, including “white privilege.”
Anyhow, here’s your experiment. I write code for a living. I strongly grasp and adore the power of simple logic. I maintain queries for ever-changing reporting systems at the world’s largest financial institutions. It’s boring work on the surface. But if you take the general concepts and redirect them out into the world, then it gets fun.
That’s what we’re doing here: black, red, white, yellow. There are four colors only. Each color has 1000 tiles. So, you guessed it, in this example we have 4000 tiles. If we randomly assign a color as the victors in the fight to capture North America around 1750, let’s say it’s black.
Let’s really mix it up. Let’s also pretend that men have babies, and women do not. For a million years, the male body, in all its stinky, hairy glory, has contained new life, and birthed all new humans. After a baby was born, women, hunted and gathered. Because of the physical toll of labor, and the fact that men’s hair nipples provide milk to our new babies, women were the only ones available to hunt and gather. Men had to stay home to keep the babies alive and were too weakened by what they gave to be able to travel very far.
Women became explorers. Women didn’t go off and find food and eat it all themselves, leaving their exhausted men, who were caring for their fragile offspring/copies, to die. No, the women obtained resources to give to the men and children. As technology was created, mainly by women, because the men had no choice but to focus on keeping the babies alive, the technology was used to obtain more things. The look and feel of those things changed, but they always mapped back to the basic needs of shelter, food, sex.
Better bows? More food, more shelter, more sex.
Better transportation? Let’s move shelter/protection, food, sex partners.
At some point the idea of money was invented. Money is just a technology, nothing more. It was a human innovation that allowed for more types of things to be acquired. It wasn’t enough to kill food, now the women wanted some spices for the men to put on their food.
Writing came along, the women hunters and explorers now used writing to acquire even more types of things. But as they did, they always used what they gained to give to their own, their family.
Remember, we have four tiles. Let’s focus on some of the best female hunters, creators, warriors on earth, who happened to be from a region called Europe, and who happened to be red. Because of the way humans work, if a mother is red, and a father is red, a child will far more often than not be red. People lived close to families, which meant that all around them would be shades of red. There might be a lot of variety, but we’d lump them all into ‘red’.
Now, everything increases, innovations beget innovations. Technology builds on technology. Societies become quite advanced, but, due to the fact that technology made them settle down and stop wandering, like the most epic game of musical chairs ever, red ended up in Europe, white ended up in Asia, black ended up in Asia and yellow ended up in the Americas. Everyone looks roughly the same all across the world, except for the four colors. Cities rise. All resources obtained by a family are kept close to the family. Whenever someone rises through society, they look out for their family. Again, children are going to look like their parents.
Technology rises in different ways around the world. The red women of Europe have the best sailing tech. The red women visit every continent. They have viruses on them no one can even imagine, leading them to just feel there’s something special about them — red woman’s burden, if you will indulge this mad tale further. Animal slavery has existed in every society since the dawn of time. Humans did it to other humans. Humans still do it to animals. We capture sources of power and use it to our advantage. The red women world conquerors from Europe were brutal and enslaved any color human they could (but so did the yellow, black, and white, they just didn’t happen to have the same technology as the red.)
Fast forward to 2020, and everyone is shouting about Red Privilege and ignoring the complexity of our world — the randomness of genetic mutation, the fact of taking care of those who look like you because they’re your family. The red took over North American from the yellow, while enslaving the white. They had a huge lead on everyone, and information was slow to spread. What looks like some sort of planned system is in fact the result of a few patterns buried inside the chaos if history and nature.
Red run the show. They run the banks. They run the government. It just happened. Why? Because the generation before was mostly red. Why? Because ever since the red claimed the land for themselves, they gave what they could to the people who shared their genes.
What we should be doing is figuring out how to spread the information more evenly. I work at a bank. Do you know what a repo is? Not repossession, like I once thought it was. Repos and reverse repos are fucking profitable. That’s what they are. Options? Not something you understand, but if you did, you’d be fucking rich. Capital gains? Not something you understand, but if you did, you’d be rich. Information has historically been hard to obtain. People spent entire lives learning, then sharing what they learned, slowly, with their children. We think information is free today, it is not. Bitcoin? Well, you’ve all heard about it now, but the people in the right places due to history beyond everyone breathing’s control, heard about it first.
There will always be people who have access to information ahead of others. This will be based on who was in the right place at the right time. If the red are in a better position today (closer to the more useful information) it is through no action of their own. It is simply the consequence of history.
To blame some system today is to make all of human existence about the now. It is to ignore the complexity of cause and effect over time and place blame at the people who, randomly, were produced by the people who captured this country. How can you blame children, really?
Systems are just collections of ideas. Systems are ideas pieced together over time. If there is a system the needs to be fixed, we cannot afford to waste time making up absurd myths about privilege.
