our dirty little secret: white female privilege

much of my life these days is defined by doing all manner of messy work: supporting friends, dismantling white privilege, challenging patriarchy, embracing anger, calling bullshit out when i see it.  and i am doing it all with people i really love and care about.  but there’s this nagging undercurrent to many of the conversations i’m having these days, especially as we approach the intersection of white privilege and sexism.  i have built alliances with other white women in this work, women i trust and appreciate, but when we get to that intersection, so often i hear the phrase “white male privilege” used as a shield, as something to hide behind.  it is used a lot in this way and i get angrier every time i hear it.

i want us to come clean.  white male privilege exists, yes, but so does white female privilege, and i think it’s time we acknowledge that and challenge it, instead of pretending it away so that it can go unchecked and wreak havoc in our communities.  we, white women, derive privilege from our skin just like white men do.  some examples might include:

• white women are the beauty standard, which means we can challenge the beauty standard because we define it–for me this means that i can wear my chin hair out with a less extreme penalty.  in fact i am often appreciated for my courage, but that courage rests on the backs of women of color who put my white beauty on a pedestal.
• we are the purity standard, the feminine standard, the standard for all things consider woman and wonderful, really.  which, like being the beauty standard gives us the power to define what it means to be woman.  and we do, every day, whether in our shockingly white feminism or in our media dominance.
• we can be emotionally expressive all along the spectrum: from anger to vulnerability, without much repercussion.  sure, i’ve been made to feel crazy because i was screaming at a man, but even then other people circled around me to support me.  i have seen the exact opposite response from the same community when it was a woman of color expressing her anger.
  

  notice that these are ALL white women. but we wont complain about that part. nope.

• we are deemed worthy of protection.  white women, because we are the ultimate feminine, are defended and given more institutionalized protection than women of color.  you’ve heard it before, someone dismiss a woman of colors fears, saying she can take care of herself.  i’ve heard about it happening in my supposedly “radical” occupy community.  that is bullshit.
• we get media images and histories of people that look like us reminding us that we are the makers of history, the paramount in worth and value.
• the list goes on.

hell, we have the privilege of pursuing social activism.  and still we cannot admit that we harbor an oppressor inside each of us.  it’s so much easier to say that we are the oppressed, that we are struggling alongside our sisters of color without distinction.  it’s so much easier to ignore the role we play in upholding white supremacy.  trigger words, trigger words.  are you getting defensive yet?

ok, let’s take a breath.  i get that it’s painful to admit that we, too, uphold racism.  especially painful for white women who think they are part of the solution.  who think they are sisters in solidarity.  but we do more damage by ignoring our white female privilege than we undo in all of our cool anti-racist work.  so let’s step up and check our privilege.  we do not get to stay comfortable at the expense of the struggles of other women.  we do not get to pretend we are exactly the same as women of color, that we do not directly support the oppression of those women.

no, white boys, this doesn’t mean you’re off the hook.