White Male Privilege

I’ve been sick for a few days, but I’ve had to come back into my high school for various reasons. To avoid sniffling and prolonging my sickness (as well as tearing apart my nose with the cheap, school-provided tissues), I brought my own box of Kleenex. On my most recent visit to my school, I was sitting in the library with my friend, my box of tissues beside me. Suddenly, my white man spidey senses go off as this underclassman walks closer and closer to me. My headphones are on, and music is playing just loud enough that external disturbances cannot be heard. Then, as I look up at this underclassmen, he takes two tissues from my tissue box. We had made direct eye contact. If he had asked for my permission, he had not ensured that I heard and responded affirmatively. He just walked up and took two of my soft tissues.

This may seem trivial, and admittedly, I will probably forget about this infraction just as soon as my inspiration for this post fades away. With all of that taken into account, I do believe this is a microcosm of the effects of white male confidence. Allow me to make this clear, my box of tissues looks nothing like the school-issued boxes. My box is no farther than a couple of inches from me. There is no way that he simply thought it was one of the boxes of tissue that anyone can take for free. And yet . . .

White men, primarily straight and cis ones, have unrivaled confidence. They can just take and take and be offended if we say that we never gave them permission. This dates back to Christopher Columbus and the Age of Imperialism. White people literally thought the world was theirs to take. They thought it was their duty to subjugate and “civilize” any native peoples unlucky enough to find themselves conquered. Rudyard Kipling said it best (worst?) when he wrote in “The White Man’s Burden,” “Take up the White Man’s burden— / Send forth the best ye breed— / Go send your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need / To wait in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild— / Your new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child.” If it’s the white man’s burden, then they have to do it, right?

Even separating race from the equation (as integral as it is), white men will do this to any woman. This is evidenced in the People of the State of California v. Brock Allen Turner case. This man saw an utterly defenseless woman and decided that he had the right to violate her. Because she was drunk enough not to remember the details leading to the incident, he thought he had the right to rewrite the past to fit his desired narrative. He tried to take and take and take from her because he comes from people who rape and pillage and destroy with impunity (Christopher Columbus was even lauded in history books). People were outraged when this happened (rightfully so), but I have to ask why we were surprised. Brock Turner came from a good family, went to good schools, and was a good athlete, so no one told him no. His life was just a bunch of open doors, so how could he even fathom that someone would reject him or worse yet that there would be consequences for his actions? I don’t want this to come across as defending Turner at all. He is the scum of the earth and deserves whatever pain the public outrage about his crime gives him. I just want us to stop teaching girls to test for date rape drugs and have a buddy system when partying and start teaching our boys that they need consent.

As a 5’2” bisexual, black woman who is decidedly introverted, I would never have done what that underclassman did. I would probably sniffle until I couldn’t hold it in anymore. Then, I might have walked up to the senior, and politely asked if I could have a tissue. I do not have any of the confidence that white men have. I have spent most of my life finding ways to take up less space to give my space to those that have already dominated for centuries. I’m slowly teaching myself how to undo this, but it’s hard. Most of the time, I put on a mask of confidence that always feels like it doesn’t quite fit. Even as I write this, I have the urge to say that I don’t think that all white men are bad because I am always equivocating. I want to be liked (as so many people of color do) by my oppressors and suppressors. I don’t know solutions, but I do have many questions. Maybe someday we will be able to distribute white male confidence equally among the rest of the world and finally have an egalitarian society.