When I was a teenager growing up in Oshawa, I didn't really think of myself as overly privileged. I was, but I didn't really know that I was. My mom, living as a single mother, worked her ass off as a teacher to make sure we had the things we needed, and often the things we wanted. We were an odd family because people didn't normally divorce in 1982, but other than that, we were primarily a pretty standard middle-class family at the time.
Lots of people had more than we did, but we were comfortable. What I didn't realise was that this was not a privilege.
Over the last week, I've been thinking a lot about my various interactions with the police during my youth. I once had a cop catch me J-waking and he gave us a little scare, but we didn't even come out of it with a ticket.
The one that sticks the most, though, is that a friend and I were stopped by police in South Oshawa (there was a recording studio down there where my guitar teacher was working). The cruiser pulled right up on the sidewalk to cut us off. He made us empty our pockets onto the hood of his car and we got a lecture about the firecrackers we had (which were not legal at the time) and he confiscated them.
Apparently, we'd matched a description wearing the standard metal-head uniform of the day, and he was just making sure we weren't the suspects for whom he was looking. It was all fairly polite, cordial, and honestly, not that big a deal, except that he took my firecrackers.
What he didn't do was arrest me for having contraband. He didn't handcuff me. He didn't pull a gun, or put me on the ground, or hold me down by a knee to my throat. It wouldn't have even occurred to either of us that such actions would have even been possible.
All he did was take my firecrackers and tell us to stay out of trouble before he drove off.
THAT is what White Privilege is all about. Had we been two black teenagers with contraband I now know that the experience would have been very different indeed. Back then I had no way of knowing how vastly different my experiences of the police were vs those of People of Colour.
This is why I get angry when people respond with hostility to the words "White Privilege." Maybe you don't feel all that privileged. Maybe your family struggled. Maybe things weren't easy. What you don't know is how much harder, exponentially harder, it would have been if you hadn't been white.
I've been thinking a lot about that inequity, so much so that the words of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as the US Constitution, seem utterly hollow, utterly worthless, because if anything we DON'T have the equity, equality, and universal respect for each other that those documents claim are cornerstones of our respective nations.
We're not equal under the law, or in society, so it is vital for all of us to become allies of human equity. The Internet Age has given a voice to those who have traditionally been without one. Everyone has a TV studio in their pockets now and free forums by which to share those videos. You cannot claim ignorance. So you have to either declare yourself an ally, or continue to be part of the problem.