EXAMINING PRIVILEGE
 

A time of societal upheaval may be a great opportunity for new self-examination, and reevaluation/challenging of assumptions.  This article is probably not worth writing or reading, without my offering an intensely personal example of how one's own assumptions and "narrative" may get turned upside-down.

 

My parents died due to typical American chronic diseases when I was 16.  I had no siblings, and never went to live with another family member.  I inherited my parents' furniture and their zero dollars, and before my 17th birthday went away to a college where I had a freshman scholarship.  During one memorable year I had 7 simultaneous tiny part-time jobs.  I basically lived a trial-and-error life (emphasizing error) without supervision for many years.  Eventually I earned some Master's degrees, credentialed in a couple of professions and way later made my commitments to public health work and nonprofit activism.

 

Throughout my early adulthood I cultivated a distinct narrative about all this, that I had been a model of rugged resourceful self-reliant individualism, against all odds pulling myself by the bootstraps up out of poverty and orphanhood, and surprisingly making something of myself....  all the clichés of mainstream U.S. cultural mythology.

 

My self-talk narrative changed dramatically after a while.  I concluded that if I had set out to live exactly the life I did live, making the choices I did make, but with a black skin, I would have been dead long before I did any public health or nonprofit work.  I realized that I, the penniless orphan slinking into a daunting world, brought with me some invaluable assets....  white privilege, with an extra bonus add-on of male privilege.  For a long time I had not contemplated what a parallel-Universe version of myself would have gone through without these.

 

As a teenager I shoplifted some books.  Nothing happened.  We are aware of a few African Americans who ended up dead just after shoplifting, and certainly more than a few whose violent fates were precipitated by some other incidents where the material stakes amounted to the $10-$20-$30 range.  My exposure of this kind was brief, but there's much more....

 

I once had used a knife to cut up a grapefruit that I ate in New Haven train station, and was about to wipe the knife and put it away, when a police officer asked me why I was blatantly holding a knife in a public place.  We are aware of black men being shot by police due to holding an object that was for one reason or another construed to be a weapon, even when there was no indication that the person was approaching or threatening anyone else.  The courtesy of being asked the question about a knife before intervention might not be extended in every such case.

While driving my post-college $75 first car, I was stopped for speeding.  Unacquainted with this, I had awkwardly produced only my driver’s license for the patrol officer.  He gruffly demanded the car's registration as well, and I felt an anxious "oops" moment, and I abruptly reached for the glove compartment where I knew it sat.  The officer made a deafening yell, and I whirled my head around to give him a sheepish and stunned look.  I saw his red face and very tensed body language.  He recognized that I was clueless about his reaction, so he explained to me that when I would make a sudden sharp movement toward some place in the car where I might be storing a gun, his training was to assume that I was about to shoot him, and he would have to strike first.  He warned me never to do that again.   In retrospect, based on research about police officers’ (or other subjects’) relative likelihood to perceive comparable actions by white or black men as lethally threatening21, I would judge that if I had been a young black man in that moment, my percentage chances of getting shot would have been quite far above zero.  The roster of unarmed African Americans being shot during highway traffic stops, does grow year by year.

 

The above situations involved isolated exposure for me, but another was sprawling by comparison.  Before my 24th birthday I had hitchhiked a cumulative total of 25,000 to 30,000 miles as a carless person determined to explore, almost all these miles being alone, covering 35 or 40 continental U.S. states plus Quebec and Ontario.  Perhaps that encompassed 600 rides?  The longest single wait I ever had was about 5 hours, and surely my total waiting-time was over 1,000 hours.  I was confronted by highway-patrol / state-trooper personnel about 8 times, within which I was ordered to walk off the highway and never come back, or directed to go to a DIFFERENT place-to-stand that wouldn't bother them so much, or urged to be careful because this could be dangerous, or simply left there without comment after my ID card contents didn't arouse crime-flight suspicion.  I was never arrested or ticketed, even by the trooper who told me that "Bob LeRoy" came up as a convicted felon in the Kansas State Police Database!  I was never harmed during my odysseys, though one motorist turned onto the shoulder and accelerated directly at me, forcing me to leap off the road, and one pickup driver made a clumsy attempt to grab at me before I exited.  I traveled with backpack and tent, and though I obviously pitched tent and slept in numerous totally-unauthorized places, I was never arrested or attacked or menaced due to my intrusions (police did twice tell me to pick up tent and go somewhere else).  Poison Oak was my worst outcome.  3 times, people who picked me up gave me a place to stay in their homes, and 2 other times, I exchanged addresses with a driver and had a resultant friendship for years.

 

So, what would have been the experience of a lone young black man visible for over 1,000 hours hitchhiking throughout 35 or 40 states and camping illegally many nights?  (In the first place, perhaps it would have required 2,000 or 4,000 hours of waiting to find willing drivers to cover the same distance, or I would have had to give up altogether in many cases.)  It is incomprehensible to me that I would have escaped harm, and (without objective evidence) I would quote significant odds that I would have died thereby before the age of 24.

 

[It's a separate issue that a lone woman also obviously could not have hitchhiked to the extent I did without eventually encountering violent assault or death.]

 

I have always pretty much assumed that if I just circulate through society without intending, or at all signaling, that I was going to intimidate or harm anyone else, I would myself generally speaking remain safe.  Starting with teenage years, I had walked streets alone in numerous localities, even at night, even taking short-cuts off the beaten paths, all through this never feeling fear, never imagining that I might arouse anyone's suspicion or hostility.  I much later came to regard this "fearlessness" as a privileged state of mind dependent upon my visual identity of whiteness. (My appearance of maleness would also separately spare me the anxiety and dread a female would likely feel about possible sexual assault if moving about totally alone without restraint.)

In the case of African American males in this society, from barely-teen years onward, they, or certainly their family members with regard to them, likely endure quite a bit of fear about what traumatic incident might arise out of nowhere to threaten their life or safety....  due to reactions of others triggered by their blackness.  A long-time cultural fixture in black families has been parents giving "the talk" to their coming-of-age sons, about what to do if there were ever an interaction with a police officer, to avoid needlessly being deemed an offender or a danger, and above all else to stay alive....  overcompensating in the direction of cooperativeness and politeness, suppressing any urge to challenge unfair or insulting or hostile treatment, showing hands and body that are obviously not poised to take any threatening action.  My parents while they were alive would have never had any need to give me "the talk".  My life story might look to some like it had some major doses of deprivation and risk along the way, but I would now interpret that my pathways were fairly safe, and that I accumulated strikingly little trauma over the course of time.