i am ethnically belarusian and moved to australia in my early teens. my family is so incredibly overtly racist that even as a kid living among exclusively white people with no experience with anyone who wasn’t white, i still thought it was gross as fuck. what i found weird about other white people in australia is that they would never say the shit my old folks did, but the general sentiment was exactly the same. they wouldn’t call black kids slurs like my mother did, but they’d whisper to my friends about them “looking ghetto”. they wouldn’t explicitly denounce rap as “[slur] music” like my father would, but they’d say something about it being “braindead” and “not a good influence on us [the kids]”. they would say that they were inclusive and “didn’t see color”; it’s just a coincidence that whenever a non-white kid came over, they’d lock their valuables away, something they never did when a kid was white.

both my family and my friends’ parents were racist. the difference was that their racism came in different forms. my grandmother would scream obscenities at the afghani girl that lived in our building because she thought she was a terrorist. my friends’ parents would eye the hispanic workers at our local diner joint because “he might steal [my] purse”. my brother would do the nazi salute with his white buddies in front of me and my friends because “it’s funny to make [them] mad”, but my white friends would call black girls “ratchet” behind their backs when they never even interacted with them.

some of it can boil down to classism. i was one of the few poor white kids in my neighborhood; everyone else was decently well off. poverty was always associated with the “brown migrants” within the white community that i interacted with. as a poor white person, i was pitied and given whatever my friends’ families could spare. that treatment never extended towards my non-white friends. there was this tangible sense of them being “the other” and “dangerous”, their culture called “violent” and “deplorable”. they especially talked shit about aboriginal people, how the DEI-adjacent programs we have here in australia to help them out were “stealing white people’s spots”. whiteness almost always meant you were wealthy, and poverty was seen as “dirty”. guess who the majority of people in poverty are.

but what also needs to be considered is the society itself that white people are born into. most of the anglosphere has white people as a historical demographical majority, and the general attitudes towards racial and ethnic minorities are being passed down from generation to generation. my friends’ parents would always talk about the 80s and 90s as this magical period of time where “no one saw race” and “all were equal”. but back then, you wouldn’t have more than a few non-white people in a classroom or in a workplace. the same attitudes towards non-white people were still there, but because there were barely any non-white people to direct those attitudes towards, it seemed as if everyone lived in harmony. it’s no surprise that once the demographics shifted, all of a sudden the poor “white countries” are being “invaded” by “violent migrants” and “terrorists”. when whiteness is expected as a default and considered the norm, any outlier is seen as dangerous.

white people, up until today, never really had to address the internalized racism that their ancestors passed down onto them. they never had to confront their bigotry as often as they do nowadays. they might say that they’re not racist, but those same age-old attitudes that their parents and grandparents had are still within them. they might not be as outwardly racist as some certain folks are, but when push comes to shove and they have to pick a side, white people, and particularly white liberals, will always side with the racists. because confronting their internalized racism means getting uncomfortable and admitting that you’ve said and done wrong. it means admitting that you do see color, and have always seen color, but were unwilling to accept it. it means asking yourself, “why have i said the things i’ve said and the jokes i’ve made?”. white society has persistently conjured up negative stereotypes about racial minorities to further white supremacy and the old status quo, and just because it was signed off some years ago doesn’t mean that the remnants of those attitudes don’t remain in white people.

white supremacy has been taboo for maybe a few decades. the civil rights act hasn’t been passed that long ago. your grandparents have lived through segregated fountains and public toilets. it isn’t something that just vanished once a slip of paper was signed. a lot of white folk i’ve talked to say that white privilege isn’t a thing because “white people struggle too”, and that is a fundamental and sometimes intentional misrepresentation of the issue. the effects of white supremacy and its result of white privilege doesn’t mean that, if you’re white, your life won’t suck. it probably will, because that’s what capitalism needs to sustain itself. the core difference that white privilege makes in your life is that your life will have 100 reasons why it sucks and race won’t be one of them. you won’t be the one who makes the white women clutch their purses simply by walking by. you won’t be the one to be called slurs by a car full of drunk frat boys. you won’t be the one who has to find safe malls to go to just to avoid the rabidly racist bunch of folks that hate you for not looking the way they do. yes, your life will suck, but the color of your skin won’t be one of the reasons why.

tangent over, i’m off to get hot cocoa.

never heard of the book but now i’m definitely reading it, thanks for the rec! :]