A Rigged Game

Debbie recently posted a link to a commentary about a TED talk given by a psychologist about research on the effects of economic inequality, the feeling (or fact of) being wealthy, etc.  If you watch the video, he shows clips (which surprised me -- I guess he got participants' permission) from a study he did in which two participants played Monopoly under patently inequitable conditions and the people in the "rich" condition (started with more money, got more money from passing GO, etc.) attributed their victory in the game to their own actions and not the unfair advantage that they had over their opponent.  (The commentary she links to also has a written summary of the research if you don't feel like spending 16 minutes on the talk itself.)  Depressing stuff, to be sure.

Toward the very beginning of the video, the researcher uses the phrase "a privileged player in a rigged game," and that phrase stuck with me as I watched the video and thought about his audience.  Because my quick estimate is that the vast majority of the audience for that TED talk and, to my knowledge, all readers of Empirical Question are privileged players in a rigged game.  It's called Being White in America.

I know, I know.  Many of us believe we are "color-blind" and "post-racial."  We don't (for the most part) believe in making Negroes drink from different water fountains and other such nonsense.  We have a black President, so clearly race is no longer a barrier to accomplishment in our society, etc.  (Somebody call George W. Bush so we can put up the "Mission Accomplished" banner.)  If you have any doubts that a hell of a lot of white people are very strident in their belief that racism is not (any longer) a major factor in people's experiences and outcomes in our country, start reading the comments on that last link.

I don't want to start a competing victimization Olympics tryout forum here, but I am struck by this interesting societal disconnect -- that many, probably most, middle class white people seem broadly accepting of the idea that the privilege of wealth is unfair and has important effects on people's lives (unearned positive outcomes for the rich and unearned negative outcomes for the poor), but the same people are (it seems) largely resistant to the idea that the privilege of whiteness even exists, let alone that this unearned privilege makes a difference.

That wealth privilege is easier (for middle class white people) to understand and get upset about isn't super-surprising.  Economic inequality/wealth privilege exists along a continuum, and it's easy for most of us to see people who are richer than we are and thus more privileged, to think of times when having more money would have made life easier for us, etc.  From comments of friends on FB, it's clear to me that I know people I'd consider very well off who nonetheless have a lot of negative energy toward rich people and support policies (like higher taxes) that would separate the wealthy from some of their excess money and redistribute it to people with less money.  But in many cases, it seems that people operationalize "rich people" as "people who have more money than I do."  Hence the brilliance of the whole 99% movement.  The majority of people can view themselves as "not privileged" by virtue of upward social comparisons (compare yourself to Bill Gates and we can pretty much all feel poor and unprivileged) and unite against the small rich elite. You can be quite rich indeed but still feel a sense of grievance that you do not own your own island or whatever.  Boom: you're part of the 99%.

White privilege doesn't have as much of this continuum thing going and is not as easy to game with strategic definitions and social comparisons.  Most people in this country are white, period (as race is understood/constructed in our society).  I do not mean to minimize the issues of people who are multiracial or to suggest that there are not differences in status among different non-white racial groups, etc., but there is not nearly the ambiguity around "white" that there is around "rich."  It does not seem likely that the typical white person in the US has any sense of somebody else being "whiter" and hence more privileged than they are, or thinks that things would have gone differently in some situation if they had only been "whiter," or anything along those lines that would give them a personal experience with being on the short end of the racial stick.  White privilege can be pretty much invisible to you if you are white.  The solutions are also a lot less obvious with white privilege than wealth privilege -- for example, because race is not fungible or exchangeable the way money is, I don't see how it's feasible to transfer "whiteness" from a white person to a person of color -- so the whole thing can easily feel really awkward, like it's an intractable problem (that we might as well avoid to spare us the discomfort).  Also, it's pretty threatening to realize that the average white person is the racial equivalent of the uber-rich "1%" elite.  There is no "help people of color by taking the white privilege away from people whiter than me" to hide behind.  But hey, one of the advantages of being in the "72%" racial elite is that white people can use their (our) numerical majority in combination with their social power to create an environment in which people don't talk (as much) about race.

If you're not totally clear on what white privilege is all about, I strongly recommend Peggy McIntosh's Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (1989).  (That's a 5 page document, so it won't take all night to read, and it's very conversational in tone, not stereotypical academic jargon.)  It includes a set of white privilege effects (that has been modified into white privilege surveys like this one) that supplies a bunch of concrete examples of situations in which race makes a difference in one's lived experience.  I think she makes it clear that she is talking about institutional racism, a societal power structure that confers advantage on people due to their race, and not about individual white people holding prejudicial/stereotyping beliefs about people of other races or about the racist acts of individuals.  I mean, obviously the Archie Bunkers of the world still exist, and still have their negative impacts, but racism is about more than that. 

And for a bit of extra scholarly goodness, let me also recommend taking a quick look at this under-one-page summary of the stages of white identity development (Helms, 1990) (and as a bonus, black identity development by Cross).  White commenters on mainstream web sites like Slate appear to cluster in the stages of contact (marked by cluelessness), disintegration (marked by cognitive dissonance), and reintegration (marked by overt racism).

This is not easy stuff.  Peggy McIntosh discusses in her paper how she (a white person) struggled with these concepts as well.  It is definitely more comfortable as a white person to take the path of pretending to live in a color-blind, post-racial society than to admit to being a privileged player in a rigged game.  These ideas can really shake you up, start you questioning things, make you feel uncomfortable or angry or depressed or scared, but I don't think the head-in-the-sand option is viable for me as a person who cares about the truth.