Where White Privilege Will Not Go: White Poverty in America

Last updated on: August 15, 2016 at 4:45 am by Sam Rocha

Where White Privilege Will Not Go: White Poverty in America 2016-08-15T04:45:44-05:00 Sam Rocha

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The questions of race, ethnicity, culture, and more are among the hardest to understand because they are almost impossible to consider with any honest sobriety. They tend to become projections, distorting mirrors, self affirming defences. When the different, but related, questions of racism, genocide, and cultural harm come into play, this is even harder to understand. I hope you will take this short and insufficient post as a way to perhaps think about such ideas as faithfully to reality as possible.

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One of the most insightful aspects of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent book-length letter to his son, Between the World and Me, was its consistent denial of the metaphysics of White identity. One finds no White people in that book, only so-called White people. I was inspired by the same sentiment in Malcolm X’s speeches when I delivered a Chapel Talk at Wabash College in February 2011, titled “White History Month.”

I understand the logic of race that supports the notion of “White privilege,” but I have long felt that its structural and systemic analysis leaves a great deal incomplete, subverting more ambitious attempts, like Coates’, to disestablish the very idea of Whiteness. I am no fan of those who dismiss ideas of White privilege as “reverse racism,” but I cannot ally myself to the idea of White privilege as a whole either. Among other things, I am not sure what the notion of privilege (White or otherwise) does that the preferential option for the poor cannot do. Furthermore I am not sure how power can replace the more intimate realities that govern social relations.

The biggest issue I take with the idea of “white privilege” is that it is incapable of giving an account of the person in a way I recognize as real within the life-world. In other words, my primary critique of the notion of “white privilege” is phenomenological. At some point I hope to provide a book length phenomenology of race, which I nod towards in my book Folk Phenomenology. But for now I can only point to a strong counter-narrative that has recently enjoyed some good writing online (and elsewhere) in links to follow on the topic of White poverty in America.

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