What makes this system of white supremacy so sinister, on an ideological/theoretical level, is that the system says that white people are the best because they are the most pure, they are not harbored by ay ethnic blood. Therefore they deserve to be at the center of everything, having ultimate power over everything. So if you imagine this system as concentric circles, white people are in the inner-most circle, with minorities in the next circle just outside. The center has been determined as “where you want to be,” where you can enjoy your freedom and exercise your rights fully (“All men are created equal” in the middle of the circle). For those outside of it, they do not enjoy the same freedoms, at least not on a consistent basis nor in a similar way. 

 

So “omission of race,” one of my “white privilege factors,” denies or glosses over the fact that such a system exists. My guess is that this is probably the most common form of white privilege, mainly because the education of white people on race, generally or specifically in relation to the U.S., is so poor and that means that because race doesn’t affect their everyday lives, white Americans can simply move through the world not worrying about it. This is how American Pickers remains the same without any reviews or write-ups that point out this disparity in the show: It isn’t clear to white people what is happening to minorities and their history/culture. 

 

The other “white privilege factor” here is the blame/comparison game. To blame others for objecting to the lack of diversity in a show, a movie, a book, a community, whatever it is, is how white privilege is protected. This sounds like: “You care about race, not me! Move on, slavery happened 300 years ago. I don’t own slaves, therefore I’m not racist.” White people have defined and continue to define race in this country, and then ignore and use it as they please. That is the truest definition of privilege. And to keep that privilege, this blame/comparison game is used to shift the focus completely from reality to abstract scenarios. For example, blaming the Black Live Matter movement for deteriorating race relations is conservative whites way of blaming those in minorities for being in the situation they are in. The BLM movement seeks to make sure that Black lives matter in relation to the system of white supremacy where Black people, as well as other minorities, are kept out of the centers of power, and therefore loose access to their “inalienable” rights. The examples of “driving while Black” or being gunned down in interactions with the police do not exist if Black lives actually matter to white people.

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The response that “All Lives Matter,” aka white people should be included in this conversation, is so sinister because of the way to totally distracts from the fact that white people already have the most privilege, and yet some how we as white people turn the conversation about race inequality into one that includes us.  Similar to the fact that minorities cannot be racist towards whites, white people’s lives fundamentally cannot “not matter” because they are at the heart of this system of white supremacy with total access to all of its privileges. 

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Ta-Neisi Coates made a powerful observation in his book, Between the World and Me, about understanding white supremacy and how we must approach these conversations. He says, “All our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. [One] must never look away from this. [One] must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body” (p. 10). I feel it’s important to call this out here because while I’m interested in the ideological/theoretical meaning of the show American Pickers, as well as the situation surrounding Colin Kaepernick, it’s crucial to remember the real world ramifications that all these words and ideas have. 

 

As I white author, I want to call out my own position, which benefits from white privilege, and I want to make sure that I am included in the group I refer to as “white people.” I am not above or outside of this group, and I think it’s important to not only highlight how whiteness manifests itself in this country, and to put the responsibility on white people to confront race and come to understand our role in the systems of power that exist in this country. William C. Rhoden interviews Jonathan Walton, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School, as a part of his article, who summarizes perfectly what I’m trying to get at. Walton says, “That’s the history of America. My freedom is dependent upon somebody else’s enslavement; my freedom is based on somebody else being terrorized; my safety is dependent on somebody else being stopped and frisked, somebody else being patrolled by police constantly.” I do not want to forget that. Thank you to the four Black authors I quoted for helping me to understand my own position of power and how to see it in other areas of American culture.