Week 4

It is impossible to privilege one group without disadvantaging another.
-Laura Pulido

Whiteness, in this country, is the paramount factor in deciding supremacy over and subordination of all other groups of color. The idea of whiteness as superior has manifested itself in both institutionalized racism within the legal system and the conscious production of racialized environmental inequities. What results is a vastly unequal distribution of wealth and power that is largely ignored and rarely contested. Harris and Pulido address the notion of white privilege and the highly implicated manifestations of such.

In order to fully understand the ramifications of white privilege, Harris traces the history and trajectory of white privilege as going from “color to race to status to property” (1714), where the nature of whiteness necessary entails “a right to exclude” (1714) and a right to define. When given the power to define race and social hierarchies, the “external imposition of definition maintains the social equilibrium” (1765). Thus, while whites have historically been given the role to define all races regardless of status, people of color have historically been forced to take a passive role in that process, where those racial definitions has been imposed upon them. The process of defining race is inevitably linked to white supremacy and white privilege. Yet there continues to be an almost blindness to white privilege and the inherent racism within our society. Whites are rarely cognizant of their own white privilege, yet all are still able to enjoy the effects of such. The fact that there is an “inability to sever intent from outcome that allows whites to acknowledge that racism exists, yet seldom identify as racists” (Pulido 15) continues the cycle of subtle or entrenched institutions tacitly employing racial subordination.

Although the readings of the week did not necessarily focus primarily on the connections between white privilege and socioeconomic status, I found the linkage to be very interesting. Both Pulido and Harris emphasize the oppression of race above the oppression of class, noting that “those whites that are disadvantaged in society suffer not because of their race, but in spite of it” (Harris 1786). In a society that is built on the oppression of people, of “the other”, whether the oppression is felt through class or race or both attests to the massive injustices forced upon the people. Thus, the “articulation of racism is predicated…on class divisions” (Pulido 27). It seems as though class and race is invariably linked. Because, let’s be honest, those in the super affluent and upper classes are rarely non-white.