Privilege

Also: No Drinking Liberally tomorrow & Red Wine & Blue

Hi, everyone:

First things first.

Several of you were asking if there will be a Drinking Liberally event this week and I have to confess, I was a bit confused myself. The back-of-the-envelop calculations in my head had me thinking every other Tuesday.

But, of course, that’s not the same as every first and third Tuesday.

That would make the next Drinking Liberally event on Tuesday, October 7.

Our attendance count on Saturday was 235.

Red Wine & Blue

There will be a Community Connections event under the Red Wine & Blue banner at 5:30 pm on October 9 at the Chanhassen Library [Map] in the Wilder Room.

Join them as they get ready for the No Kings protest on October 18th. The event will start with an inspirational video on Bernie Sanders’ recent visit to West Virginia and then work on creating No Kings Day protest signs as well as work on a few postcard campaigns.

Family and friends are welcome. A great chance to connect with like minded people in our community. Register here.

Privilege

I had two requests on Saturday.

One of you asked if I could share some resources on the topic of white privilege and other encouraged me to tell more of our stories here; I’ll do the former today and I’m working on the latter.

I can start with a couple of my own stories about white privilege.

As a young man, if someone would’ve told me I was privileged, I would’ve said you’re crazy. I grew up in a lower middle-class family, my clothes were hand-me-downs, our pantry was not always brimming with food, and had to pay for college on my own.

I certainly didn’t feel I had privilege. I was slow to understand the concept. It took some experiences for me to recognize what that meant.

I spent a year and a half of high school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where I saw racism unmasked and unashamed.

A boy I knew, whose father owned a car dealership, told me how his dad chased a black man off his lot one day…for being black. I’ve never been denied service because I am white. That was just one of the milder incidents. There were many more.

In the 1990s, I worked at the corporate headquarters of Dayton Hudson (now Target). Employees were allowed to gather in a large conference room to watch the reading of the verdict of the OJ Simpson trial.

I had one African American colleague among the entire corporate staff. I’ve never had to endure the isolation she must have experienced as the only black person in that room.

One of my closest friends is from Puerto Rico. He and I got together one time for happy hour at a Mexican restaurant in Uptown. I was driving. When we left, just after turning a corner onto Hennepin Avenue, a cop pulled us over.

As I was parked on the side of the road waiting for the officer to come to my door, I heard him direct me through his loudspeaker to step out of the car. So I did.

Immediately after I got out of the car, he very aggressively shouted Get back in the car! Get back in the car! So I did.

He finally came to my door, asked for my insurance and license and then asked me why I’d got out of the car. Because I thought you told me to, I replied.

When the cop went to run my license, I asked my friend if he’d heard the same thing I did. He had.

The cop came back, told me he’d pulled me over for not using a turn signal (I had) and sent me on my way with a warning.

The whole ordeal felt like he was just screwing with us because he saw a Latino-looking man leaving a Mexican restaurant.

One last incident.

I’ve mentioned before that I had organized a weekly touch football game for about twenty years. We played at a public park in Northeast Minneapolis. We routinely had cops drive by.

We played all year round so one Winter day we were out playing as usual until a park police officer stopped by and told us we had to leave. The guys all told me to talk to her.

I’m like why me?!?

You’re white. Duh.

So I did. Apparently the park manager had called the cops on us, despite the fact that 1) it is a public park, meaning we had every right to use it, 2) we’d been playing on that field every week for years, and 3) we were doing absolutely nothing wrong.

I asked the officer to tell me what ordinance, rule, law, etc. we had violated. She would not. She was having none of it. We had to leave.

After I moved to Chaska, my black friends expressed some hesitancy coming out here to visit. They joke that I would have to drive so they wouldn’t get pulled over.

Those are just a few experiences that helped me to understand the privilege that I do indeed possess.

Resources

I highly recommend Do the Work! An Antiracist Activity Book by W. Kamau Bell and Kate Schatz. It’s best to read it with a group because it literally is an activity book.

Racial Equity Tools links to a list of articles about aspects of and concepts related to white privilege.

The Association of Women in Science has an excellent list of anti-racism resources for allies.

GoodReads has a list of books about white privilege (buy them at an independent book store!)

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Writings (e.g., The Souls of Black Folk): Classic works that laid the groundwork for understanding race and oppression in America, including the concept of the “psychological wages of whiteness.”

Leave your suggestions in the comments!