White Skin Privilege

Photo by Backbone Campaign | CC BY 2.0

White privilege is a thing. It’s just not the same thing the corporate Democrats use to boss us around with. The concept of white privilege was not invented by some liberal university professors.  In fact, the concept of white privilege was created by a white man: a radical activist and historian who barely attended college.

Writing for the John Brown Commemoration Committee in 1965,  Theodore Allen innovated the discourse on white skin privilege. In 1967 he co-authored “White Blindspot” and in 1969 published “Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?”

According to Jeffrey B. Perry:

Allen’s work influenced the Students for a Democratic Society and sectors of the “new left” and it paved the way for the “white privilege” “race as social construct” and “whiteness studies”academic fields.[1]

In our deep past, white privileges were granted by a “presumption of liberty” to white people that was simultaneously denied Blacks.

We can track that presumption of liberty straight to today’s “presumption of innocence” that we are all supposed to enjoy but are all too often denied Natives, Blacks, other people of color, poor people and those that do not conform to gender or sexual social norms. The vast militarized penal system all to often deprives people of color the “presumption of liberty:” the right to be innocent until proven guilty and to enjoy the equal protection of the law as demanded by the…

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