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(Yesterday I said I would write only one entry on the Don Imus debacle. I should have known better.)
There is an old Saturday Night Live routine in which Eddie Murphy (yes, I'm dating myself here) decides that he wants
to find out what life is really like for white people.
So Murphy uses makeup and a wig to disguise himself as a white man, learns to stiffen his walk and his speech, and takes to
the streets with a hidden camera to discover The World According to Biff. What he finds is that when no people of color are
around to watch, white people simply give things to one another for free: the day's paper at a newsstand, movie and ball game
admission, cars, houses, everything. White people, he is shocked to learn, have no actual need for money. Hard-earned currency
is for suckers -- that is, it's for people of color, around whom whites pretend to use money in order to preserve their handy
little secret.
Murphy's SNL riff is very funny, unlike the Don Imus "nappy-headed ho's" spectacle now playing out nationwide. But
Murphy's parody also does all of us a service. It gets to that much-denied but insidiously pervasive condition, white privilege.
White privilege is the stuff that happens -- or, more often, doesn't happen -- to whites because they are white. White privilege
is the state of not being followed by store detectives on the basis of your race; of not being told the lie that an available
apartment was just rented 10 minutes ago; of not having a woman take one look at you in your suit and tie and then clutch
her purse; of not having movies treat women who look like you as bossy and unattractive; of not being shot 41 times or 50
times or (you can insert the next incident's number here) by police officers.
Don Imus doesn't get this.
Imus has no idea (although he is now beginning to learn) how his throwaway racial slurs and epithets feel to those who have
to live with the daily slights and threats and fears that he is spared. He has no clue about the bubble he inhabits as a white
American male, let alone a rich one with a radio show. He doesn't know how his being free, white and 67 afflicts him with
a reckless and ruthless sense of entitlement toward social "others." And, worse, he doesn't know that he doesn't know.
But that, Don, is precisely the nature of white privilege. And yours is a textbook case. To you as you sat behind the microphone
on that fateful morning, the lives of five black women on the Rutgers basketball team -- at a moment that was both their greatest
triumph and their most crushing defeat -- were nothing but crude raw material, disembodied and beneath human regard, the equivalent
of a handful of Mississippi cotton for you to pluck and fling in the air.
I know you weren't thinking all of this as you did it, Don. But that's the point: White privilege thrives at a level beneath
conscious thought. By now, after centuries of racially differential treatment and expectation, white privilege is so deeply
imbued as to be reflexive.
White privilege, Don, is your presuming that the feelings and reputations of five young black women at one of the nation's
top universities are yours to play with, like yo-yos or Slinkies, in a whimsical moment of grunting amusement. White privilege
is your believing that you're too special to lose your job over a flagrantly abusive racial act that violates the stated standards
of your employer. It's your assuming that you can hang your head and be sorry and then walk out of the courtroom; that your
freedom is unlimited; that your privilege is irrevocable.
That, Don, is why you feel shocked and mistreated by NBC's having now dumped your show, and why you will feel ambushed and
martyred if CBS does the right thing and fires you outright.
Welcome to the real world, Don, the world outside of white privilege.
Tough out here, isn't it?
(Posted 4/12/07 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
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