White privilege is an institutional (rather than personal) set of benefits granted to those of us who, by race, resemble the people who dominate the powerful positions in our institutions. One of the primary privileges is that of having greater access to power and resources than people of color do; in other words, purely on the basis of our skin color doors are open to us that are not open to other people. Francis E. Kendall, Ph.D., © 2002
Recognizing our own biases is critical. We all have them even though they are the water we swim in and don’t see until we look.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” ~ David Foster Wallace
The topic of White Privilege can be a mine field until it becomes clear that this is a systemic issue not about making a judgment on the personal level. This article EXPLAINING WHITE PRIVILEGE TO A BROKE WHITE PERSON by Gina Crosley-Corcoran was written from an American perspective but it helps to make the invisible visible. It also references Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 now-famous piece, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”
From
Settler Fragility: Why Settler Privilege Is So Hard to Talk About
Like white fragility, settler fragility is the inability to talk about unearned privilege—in this case, the privilege of living on lands that were taken in the name of democracy through profound violence and injustice. Like white privilege, white supremacy is also at the root of settler fragility. The difference is that foreign invasion, dispossession of Indigenous lands, and genocide were based on (white) European religious and cultural supremacy as encoded in the doctrine of discovery, not racial supremacy. ~Dina Gilio-Whitaker
We are all at different points on our journey towards justice, this article talks about “Robin DiAngelo’s brilliant 2018 manifesto on white fragility was a much-needed truth bomb at a time when it’s more clear than ever that we are light years away from the “post-racial state.” Perhaps most important about the book was its clarity that racism is systemic and structural, that no white people are immune from it, and that their fragility about it is based on a belief that they are being judged as bad people (the good-bad binary).”