An open letter to white men in America

Has anyone else read this letter...I'm only half white so...But I disagree with a lot of what the author says:

Quote: Dear White Men,

You are persons of privilege.
You didn't earn it. More than likely aren't yet prepared to either admit to it or lose it. This letter, written by one of you, is offered to invite you on a journey of insight, honesty, hard truth and just living. Quote:

Most of the people I work with, mostly white, work very hard for the money they earn. The oil industry is not for the lazy, this I can tell you.

Quote: Privilege can be hard to see, mostly because of what doesn't happen to us when we have it.
One of the four reasons James Cone offers in his landmark essay "Theology's Great Sin: Silence in the Face of White Supremacy" for why men of privilege remain silent in the face of so much racial injustice is: "They don't have to speak."
We aren't getting arrested at four times our population rate.
We aren't being followed when walking through a department store wearing a sweat shirt with a hood. Quote

I work part-time for a sporting goods store. We're prone to following any teenager in the store wearing hoodies, baggy pants...It's a fact of life that in retail people steal...We don't look at color...We look at actions...And most of our clientele is white.

Quote: Real estate agencies didn't write codes, rules and laws that kept us out of the high rent districts and middle class neighborhoods.
Property values don't go down when more than 10 percent of our neighborhood is saturated with people of our race.
Our children aren't sitting in classrooms with teachers who are likely not to have even a minor degree in the courses they are teaching.
Young white men are not being gunned down by black police officers in epidemic numbers.
Our churches aren't being burned to the ground, nor or our church members in danger of being gunned down in prayer meetings.
We are not saying to ourselves as part of a white man's code of conduct that when a police car drives by us without pulling us over even though we are exceeding the speed limit something like: "Well, once again I didn't get pulled over because I'm white."
We are not saying to ourselves when our child didn't get her college application rejected with a questionable GPA something like: "Well, thank God she's white and that her mother graduated from that school 25 years ago."
We are not saying to ourselves when the prosecutor reduces our son's charges from aggravated assault to loitering and sets him free with a small fine and time served: "Wow, that white prosecutor made sure my white son got a break that the black man who got convicted of that crime last week didn't get."

The journey to seeing and understanding the pernicious consequences of privilege includes the harder work of seeing what isn't there to be seen.
I have started practicing this as a discipline.
When I walk into a convenience store to get a receipt for my gas and the young woman at the counter greets me with a smile and a kind word, I tell myself "She felt comfortable doing that because I'm white."
When I see a highway patrolman pass me by while I'm exceeding the speed limit or, as actually happened two weeks ago, I get pulled over for that and let off without a ticket, I say to myself: "That happened because I'm white." Quote

Was it because you were white or because you were polite? Said yes sir and no sir!

Quote: As I drive through the many border checkpoints we have set up here in the Southwest along the Mexican border, and as I roll down my window and make my stop at the guard gate, and as the border patrol agent simply glances at my face before waging me on with a perfunctory "have a good day," I say to myself: "That is the result of my being white."
I don't know in the end if any of those were in fact true statements. That isn't the point of this exercise. The point is to create a consciousness from which I can no longer let myself escape.
I want to be clear about something. This solves nothing. I can notice, and still be happy and content with the privilege I am afforded.
I want to be clear about something else. Whatever solutions are going to come that we ourselves will offer the agency of our privilege for aren't coming without this basic awareness.
When I taught White Privilege studies to a class of Masters of Divinity students at Eden Theological Seminary, the assignment I left the students with every day was this: "Tell me what you see." There is a passage in my sacred texts that reads: "Let those who have eyes to see, see." There is so much more to be seen than what white men will let there eyes take notice of.

I invite the white men of America with me on this journey of discovery. Ask those who don't share your privilege to tell you what they see. It may not have escaped your attention that whether we are talking about Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, what whites see and what blacks see are not the same thing. There is a reason for that. Privilege comes at a price -- and the price is the loss of a vision that admits facts that make accepting the privilege uncomfortable.
Therefore, I extend an invitation to a seeing that engenders the kind of discomfort with privilege that creates the space necessary for real justice to emerge. Don't worry about carrying the burden of solving this pervasive injustice: for good reason, you and I won't be entrusted with that work. But only when we see what others are more than happy to show us about ourselves will we be open then to hearing what they have to teach us about what will be required for true equality to emerge.
The acceptance of this invitation, and the resulting years of work it will take us all to open our eyes to that we have been conditioned to ignore for the sake of our privilege, is the first step in the proverbial journey of a thousand miles. White men in America, I invite you to walk this road with me. Quote:

As a native American, I have more reason than any other race to hate the white man...But here's the thing, I cannot blame current people for what happened in history. The child is not to blame for his father's sins and the sooner people remember that then the sooner this country can begin to heal. Is there still racism in America? Yes...Are we better off blaming everything on everyone else or do we start taking personal responsibility for our own actions?

 

Anyone who accepts white privilege as valid is a racist. Any white man who feels white guilt is a closet racist.

 

And I hate and have ZERO respect for the racist progressives that adhere to that nonsense... Hell, I have zero respect for progressives anyway...

If someone presented me witih that letter personally I would light it on fire and throw it at them...

If anyone is "privileged" it's non-white straight male Christians in this society...

 

Just a little extra information for everyone. The government has small business loan programs for minorities...Everyone qualifies as long as they are not white males. All women, all non white men qualify...So why is this not discrimination against the white male?

 

White Progressives need to check their white privilege. All white progressives are racist...it started with the founder of the Progressive Movement...President Woodrow Wilson, who bitterly hated African Americans. The income and assets of white progressives must be redistributed to African Americans as reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, Progressivism, and the Great Society. In a generation there won't be many white progressives left.

 

There is a culture of contempt for coloured people prevalent in America. I only spent two months in the US but anti-black attitudes fuelled by the legacy of slavery affected me deeply and I had problems with dealing with coloured people in other countries such as Australia and Britain later on perhaps because I exhibited a superior attitude towards blacks and aborigines like white Americans do. I think the Japanese have more reasons to hate Americans after two nuclear bombs than other nationalities but they have overcome racial hatred existed between the two countries during the second world war and it's generally unhealthy to dwell on the past.

 

Kinda getting sick of the race deal.

 

I don't follow your post. If Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive, hated Black people, why did he start a movement that would help Blacks?

 

You bring up an interesting point, ThirdTerm. My son once asked me, "Mom, why do White people hate Black people so much? If anything we should be the ones hating them for all they've done to us". He was only a teenager when he asked this question. Kids are very smart.

 

For what? Giving them welfare, section 8 housing, Obama phones? Without Whites you'd be back in the stone age in 10 years.

 

Woodrow Wilson had no intention of starting a movement to help African Americans. His objective was to move past the bounds of constitutionalism so that the putative intellectual elite could impose nostrums for managing the herd of lesser beings he perceived to be the white working and middle classes.

 

Wilson is widely and correctly remembered — and represented in our history books — as a progressive Democrat who introduced many liberal reforms at home and fought for the extension of democratic liberties and human rights abroad. But on the issue of race his legacy was, in fact, regressive and has been largely forgotten. Born in Virginia and raised in Georgia and South Carolina, Wilson was a loyal son of the old South who regretted the outcome of the Civil War. He used his high office to reverse some of its consequences. When he entered the White House a hundred years ago today, Washington was a rigidly segregated town — except for federal government agencies. They had been integrated during the post-war Reconstruction period, enabling African-Americans to obtain federal jobs and work side by side with whites in government agencies. Wilson promptly authorized members of his cabinet to reverse this long-standing policy of racial integration in the federal civil service. Cabinet heads — such as his son-in-law, Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo of Tennessee – re-segregated facilities such as restrooms and cafeterias in their buildings. In some federal offices, screens were set up to separate white and black workers. African-Americans found it difficult to secure high-level civil service positions, which some had held under previous Republican administrations.

http://www.bu.edu/professorvoices/2013/03/04/the-long-forgotten-racial-attitudes-and-policies-of-woodrow-wilson/

 

I had heard Wilson was a virulent racist. I also heard he was the President who allowed the Federal Reserve and the income tax laws to come into the country. I would dislike him just for those 2 things, let alone the fact he was a racist.

 

I am 100% lilly white and I agree with most of the letter. It doesn't make me feel especially angry or guilty, its a description of two different ways of experiencing American culture.

It doesn't mention the pitying superiority or barely disguised contempt of the people doling out privileges or consolations though.

Respect comes hard and sometimes never, but its foolish to think of it as something we feel for victims.

 

Just because Wilson considered blacks to be subhuman and inferior does not necessarily mean that he hated them.

I adopted a dog that I found on my porch a couple weeks ago, he's obviously subhuman, but that doesn't mean that I hate him. On the contrary, I think he's adorable.

 

Black people are discriminated against, but "white privilege" is a lie and a racial attack on white people.

The only people that suffer from this "white privilege" tactic are impoverished whites, who are even more discriminated against than blacks.

There will always be black people who want to live among whites and whites who want to live among blacks. Those that don't, shouldn't be forced to. Unless they are irish. I believe that any working class irish areas should be sites for the settlement of Somalian refugees.

That's only right and just.

 

Explain why you believe working class Irish areas should be sites for Somalian refugee settlements, if you don't mind.

 

I wonder if the dog thinks you are subhuman?

 

No that's wrong. White privilege is not an actual privilege. It's a term that's meant to describe the differences a person with white skin may encounter in this country compared to a person of color. It is not something a white person should feel guilty about just because they are white. It's a term that was made up because there are white people who don't think racism exists anymore just because we got rid of slavery and segregation.

 

Well, they have to go somewhere. Surely you are not suggesting they stay in Somalia? Seems racist.

 

It's "not an actual privilege, yet you are redistributing it just the same.

The far left works miracles through coercion. If they can redistribute good looks they can redistribute skin colour.

 

I thought your suggestion was pretty random and that maybe there was some history between the two countries.

 

Redistributing what exactly? I have no idea what you mean here.

 

No kidding that white privilege does not exist. Its only in the minds of people who are racist. And I don't mean just white people either.

 

You're asking the question after ive given the answer. What are you, a satanic record?