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  The phrase “white privilege” was popularized in 1988 by Peggy McIntosh, a Wellesley College professor who wanted to define “invisible systems conferring racial dominance on my group.”4 McIntosh came to understand that she benefited from hierarchical assumptions and policies simply because she was white. I would have preferred if instead of “white privilege” she had used the term “white living,” because “privilege” suggested white dominance was tied to economics. Nonetheless, the phrase has stuck. The title of her essay “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies” was a mouthful. McIntosh listed forty- six ways white privilege is enacted. “Number 19: I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial”; “Number 20: I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race”; “Number 27: I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out- of- place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared”; “Number 36: If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.” I’m not clear why McIntosh stopped at 46 except as a way of saying, “You get the picture.” Students were able to add their own examples easily.

  My students and I also studied the work of the white documentary filmmaker Whitney Dow. In the past couple of years, Dow has been part of Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE), which gathered data on more than 850 people, the vast majority of whom identified as white or partly white and the communities in which they lived. He filmed more than a hundred of their oral histories. This work, like McIntosh’s, was another way of thinking about the ordinariness of white hierarchical thinking. I asked Dow what he learned in his conversations with white men. “They are struggling to construct a just narrative for themselves as new information comes in, and they are having to restructure and refashion their own narratives and coming up short,” he said. “I include myself in that,” he added after a moment. “We are seeing the deconstruction of the white-male archetype. The individual actor on the grand stage always had the support of a genocidal government, but this is not the narrative we grew up with. It’s a challenge to adjust.”

  The interviews, collected in INCITE’s initial report, Facing Whiteness, which is accessible on Columbia University’s website, vary greatly in terms of knowledge of American history and experiences. One interviewee declares: “The first slave owner in America was a black man. How many people know that? The slaves that were brought to America were sold to the white man by blacks. So, I don’t feel that we owe them any special privileges other than that anybody else has, any other race.” While this interviewee denies any privilege, another has come to see how his whiteness enables his mobility in America: “I have to accept the reality that because I’m a man, I—whether I was aware of that or not at any specific time—probably had some sort of hand up in a situation.” He added, “The longer I’m in law enforcement and the more aware I am of the world around me, the more I realize that being of Anglo-Saxon descent, being a man and being in a region of America that is somewhat rural, and because it’s rural by default mostly white, means that I definitely get preference.” This interviewee, according to Dow, had been “pretty ostracized because of his progressiveness” in the workplace. While he recognizes his privilege, he still indicates, through his use of words like “probably” and phrases like “because it’s rural by default mostly white,” that he believes white privilege is in play in only certain circumstances. Full comprehension would include the understanding that white privilege comes with expectations of protection and preferences no matter where he lives in the country, what job he has, or how much money he makes.

  How angry could I be at the white man on the plane, the one who glanced at me each time he stood up the way you look at a stone you had tripped on? I understood that the man’s behavior was also his socialization. My own socialization had, in many ways, prepared me for him. I was not overwhelmed by our encounter because my blackness is consent “not to be a single being.”5 This phrase, which finds its origins in the work of the West Indian writer Édouard Glissant but was reintroduced to me in the recent work of the poet and critical theorist Fred Moten, gestures toward the fact that I can refuse the white man’s stereotypes of blackness, even as he interacts with those stereotypes. What I wanted was to know what the white man saw or didn’t see when he walked in front of me at the gate.

  It’s hard to exist and also accept my lack of existence. Frank Wilderson III, chair of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, borrows from Orlando Patterson the sociological term “social death” to explain my there-but-not-there status in a historically antiblack society. The outrage—and if we are generous, the embarrassment that occasioned the white passenger’s comment—was a reaction to the unseen taking up space; space itself is one of the understood privileges of whiteness.

  Before the airlines decided frequent travelers need not stand in line, a benefit now afforded to me, I was waiting in another line for access to another plane in another city as another group of white men approached. When they realized they would have to get behind a dozen or so people already in line, they simply formed their own line next to us. I said to the white man standing in front of me, “Now, that is the height of white male privilege.” He laughed and remained smiling all the way to his seat. He wished me a good flight. We had shared something. I don’t know if it was the same thing for each of us—the same recognition of racialized being in the world—but I could live with that polite form of unintelligibility.

  I found the suited men who refused to fall in line exhilarating and amusing (as well as obnoxious). Watching them was like watching a spontaneous play about white male privilege in one act. I appreciated the drama. One or two of them chuckled at their own audacity. The gate agent did an interesting sort of check-in by merging the newly formed line with the actual line. The people in my line, almost all white and male themselves, were in turn quizzical and accepting. After I watched this scene play out, I filed it away to use as an example in my class. How would my students read this moment? Some would no doubt be enraged by the white female gate agent who let it happen. I would was easier to be angry with her than with the group of men. Because she doesn’t recognize or utilize her institutional power, someone would say. Based on past classes, I could assume the white male students would be quick to distance themselves from the men at the gate; white solidarity has no place in a class that sets out to make visible the default positions of whiteness.

  As the professor, I felt this was a narrative that could help me gauge the level of recognition of white privilege in the class, because other white people were also inconvenienced by the actions of this group of men. The students wouldn’t be distracted by society’s “abuse of minorities” because everyone seemed inconvenienced. Some students, though, would want to see the moment as gendered, not racialized. I would ask them if they could imagine a group of black men pulling off this action without the white men in my line responding or the gate agent questioning the men even if they were within their rights.

  As I became more and more frustrated with myself for avoiding asking my question, I wondered if presumed segregation in one’s white life should have been number 47 on McIntosh’s list. Just do it, I told myself. Just ask a random white guy how he feels about his privilege.

  On my next flight, I came close. I was a black woman in the company of mostly white men, in seats that allowed for both proximity and separate spaces. The flight attendant brought drinks to everyone around me but repeatedly forgot my orange juice. Telling myself orange juice is sugar and she might be doing my post-cancer body a favor, I just nodded when she apologized for the second time. The third time she walked by without the juice, the white man sitting next to me said to her, “This is incredible. You have brought me two drinks in the time you have
forgotten to bring her one.”

  She returned immediately with the juice.

  I thanked him. He said, “She isn’t suited to her job.” I didn’t respond, “She didn’t forget your drinks. She didn’t forget you. You are seated next to no one in this no place.” Instead, I said, “She just likes you more.” He perhaps thought I was speaking about him in particular and blushed. Did he understand I was joking about being white in the world? It didn’t seem so. The red crept up his neck into his cheeks, and he looked shy and pleased at the same time. He brought both hands up to his face as if to hold in the heat of this embarrassing pleasure.

  “Coming or going?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “I’m returning from Johannesburg.”

  “Really?” he said. “I was just in Cape Town.”

  Hence your advocacy, I thought ungenerously.

  Why was that thought in my head? I myself am overdetermined by my race. Is that avoidable? Is that a problem? Had I made the problem or was I given the problem? I think of Nelson Mandela’s blood pressure (BP) rising to 170 over 100 on a day he purportedly met with Frederik Willem de Klerk. Hearsay or fact? Who knows.

  As I looked at the man in seat 2B, I wondered if my historical positioning was turning his humanity into evidence of white male dominance. Are white men overdetermined by their skin color in my eyes? Are they being forced, as my friend suggested, to absorb the problems of the world?

  On the long flight, I didn’t bring up white male privilege, jokes or otherwise, again. Instead we wandered around our recent memories of South Africa and discussed the resort where he stayed and the safari I took. I didn’t bring up Soweto or the Apartheid Museum that I visited in Johannesburg or the lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, which the Apartheid Museum reminded me of. I wanted my fellow traveler to begin a conversation about his whiteness this time. For once. I wanted him to think about his whiteness, especially because he had just left South Africa, a country that suffered, as James Baldwin said, “from the same delusion the Americans suffer from—it too thought it was a white country.” But I imagined he felt the less said about race relations in the United States or South Africa, the more possible it was for us to be interlocutors. That was my fantasy, in any case.

  Back home, when I mentioned these encounters to my white husband, he was amused. “They’re just defensive,” he said. “White fragility,” he added, with a laugh. This white man who has spent the past twenty-five years in the world alongside me believes he understands and recognizes his own privilege. Certainly he knows the right terminology to use, even when these agreed-upon terms prevent us from stumbling into moments of real recognition. These phrases—white fragility, white defensiveness, white appropriation—have a habit of standing in for the complicated mess of a true conversation. At that moment, he wanted to discuss our current president instead. “That,” he said, “is a clear case of indignation and rage in the face of privilege writ large. Real power. Real consequences.” He was not wrong, of course, but he joined all the “woke” white men who set their privilege outside themselves—as in, I know better than to be ignorant or defensive about my status in our world. Never mind that that capacity to set himself outside the pattern of white male dominance is the privilege. There’s no outrunning the kingdom, the power, and the glory.

  I finally got up my nerve to ask a stranger directly about white privilege as I was sitting next to him at the gate. He had initiated our conversation, because he was frustrated about yet another delay. We shared that frustration together. Eventually he asked what I did, and I told him that I write and teach. “Where do you teach?” he asked. “Yale,” I answered. He told me his son wanted to go there but hadn’t been accepted during the early-application process. “It’s tough when you can’t play the diversity card,” he added.

  Was he thinking out loud? Were the words just slipping out before he could catch them? Was this the innocence of white privilege? Was he yanking my chain? Was he snapping the white-privilege flag in my face? Should I have asked him why he had the expectation that his son should be admitted early, without delay, without pause, without waiting? Should I have asked how he knew a person of color “took” his son’s seat and not another white son of one of these many white men sitting around us?

  I was perhaps holding my breath. I decided to just breathe.

  “The Asians are flooding the Ivy Leagues,” he added after a moment. Perhaps the clarification was intended to make it clear that he wasn’t speaking right now about his fantasies regarding black people and affirmative action. He had remembered something. He had recalled who was sitting next to him.

  Then I did it. I asked. “I’ve been thinking about white male privilege, and I wonder if you think about yours or your son’s?” It almost seemed to be a non sequitur, but he rolled with it.

  “Not me,” he said. “I’ve worked hard for everything I have.”

  What was it that Justice Brett Kavanaugh said at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing? “I got into Yale Law School. That’s the number one law school in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college.” He apparently believed this despite the fact that his grandfather went to Yale. I couldn’t tell by looking at this man I was sitting next to, but I wondered if he was an ethnic white rather than a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, in Whiteness of a Different Color, describes the twentieth century’s reconsolidating of the nineteenth century’s “Celts, Hebrews, Teutons, Mediterraneans and Slavs.”6 By the 1940s, according to David Roediger, “given patterns of intermarriage across ethnicity and Cold War imperatives,” whites stopped dividing hierarchically within whiteness and begin identifying as socially constructed Caucasians.

  I said to the man, “What if I said I wasn’t referring to generations of economic wealth, to Mayflower wealth and connections?” I was speaking instead of simply living. I asked if he gets flagged by TSA. “Not usually,” he said.7 “I have Global Entry.”

  “So do I,” I said, “but I still get stopped.” The “randomness” of racial profiling is a phenomenon I could talk about forever, but I stopped myself that day. “Are you able to move in and out of public spaces without being questioned as to why you are there?” I asked. “Do people rush forward asking how they can help you?” I knew the answer to my questions, but I asked them anyway, because I wanted to slow down a dynamic he benefited from.

  He said he saw my point. I wanted to say, “It’s not my point, it’s our reality,” but the declarative nature of the sentence felt sharp on my tongue. I wanted to keep talking with this man, and I knew my race and gender meant he was wary of me and my questions—questions that might lead to the word “racist” or “sexist.” If only skin color didn’t have such predictive power.

  I didn’t want our different historical positioning to drown our already shipwrecked chat. I wanted to learn something that surprised me about this stranger, something I couldn’t have known beforehand. Then it hit me. There wasn’t enough time to develop trust, but everyone likes a listener. “Coming or going?” is the traveler’s neutral, nonprying question. So now I asked him. He was heading home.

  The word “home” turned him back to his son. He said his son’s best friend was Asian and had been admitted to Yale on early action or early decision or early admissions.8 Neither of us knew the terminology. I wondered how he comforted his son. Had he used “the diversity card” as he had with me? I didn’t want to discuss college admissions policy anymore. I wanted our conversation to go down any other road, but I had somehow become a representative of Yale, not a stranger sitting next to another stranger.

  I reminded myself that I was there only to listen. Just listen. The man was deeply earnest and obviously felt helpless about the uncertainty of his son’s future. But it couldn’t be too dismal if Yale was still an option. Don’t think, I reminded myself. Know what it is to parent. Know what it is to love. Know what it is to be white. Know what it is to expect what white
people could have whether or not luck or economics allow you to have it. Know what it is to resent. Is that unfair? Resentment has no home here. Know what it is to be white. Is that ungenerous? I don’t know. Don’t think.

  I didn’t ask this white man why he thought his son was any more entitled to a place at Yale than his son’s Asian friend. I didn’t want him to feel he needed to defend his son’s worth or his son’s intelligence to me. I wanted his son to thrive. I did. Were his son to arrive in my class, I would help him do his best. The more he achieved at Yale, the more pleased I would be for both of us. If his son told the class he got into Yale because many of his white teachers from kindergarten on exaggerated his intelligence, I would interrupt him, as I have done in the past, and say, “No, you got into Yale and you have the capacity to understand that many factors contributed to your acceptance.”

  College admissions processes can’t be discussed in definitive ways; they’re full of gray areas, and those gray areas are often white-leaning, even as plenty of whites are denied entrance. We know that. I was suddenly reluctant to have a conversation about white-perceived spaces and entitlement or, God forbid, affirmative action, which would of course flood the space between us with black and brown people, me included. I said instead, “Wherever your son goes will work out, and in five years none of this will matter.” It was in this moment that I recognized my exhaustion. And then came the realization that we were, in fact, in the midst of a discussion about the perceived loss of white male privilege, which in other words is simply a white life in which no one died. Was I implicated in his loss? Did he think so?