*This is your weekly installment of WTF is going on because, these days, a lot can happen in a week… *
Last week Piers Morgan gave his usual puffed up performance of outrage on national television. This time it was targeted at Munroe Bergdorf, who found herself at the centre of an international furore because she had written a post about white privilege. Morgan blasted that he was ‘deeply offended’ by the insinuation that he, as a white man, was in anyway implicated in upholding structural racism.
The term ‘white privilege’ is not new, but it is becoming increasingly more mainstream. For years they have been discussed in academic discourse and are generally accepted as sociological concepts but, it seems, when used outside of academia the terms jar and provoke the sort of identity politics battles that keep Piers Morgan in a job as some sort of self-appointed common sense defender.
During the course of his conversation with Bergdorf, Morgan even went as far as to accuse her of ‘playing the victim’. This is a common strategy of privileged people who feel threatened when their position, and entitlement to it, is challenged. See also: Donald Trump. The irony is that the privileged white male who accuses someone else of being divisive is, in fact, deflecting away from the very fact that they have got to where they have by benefiting from a society which has always been divided, whether along race, sex or gender lines. By asserting his own victimhood to Bergdorf and taking her comments as a personal attack, Morgan undermined the history of racism and oppression which still shapes our society today: the majority of people in positions of power are still a) white b) male and c) privately educated.
As Reni Eddo-Lodge, author of Why I’m No Longer Speaking To White People About Race writes ‘neutral is white. The default is white…How can I define white privilege? It’s so difficult to describe an absence. And white privilege is an absence of the consequences of racism. An absence of structural discrimination, an absence of your race being viewed as a problem first and foremost…’
Only those who feel insecure about their position, like Morgan, should take this personally or be ‘deeply offended’ by it. It can be no coincidence that the majority of people who are affronted by this argument or by identity politics as a whole seem to be…well…white men. Donald Trump has got to be the most egregious example of this, he won an election by playing a deeply divisive game of identity politics, appealing only to a group of people who looked like him. To deny that is to confess that you too consider white to be what Eddo-Lodge calls ‘the default’.
Now, more than ever, the phrase ‘check your privilege’ resonates. I am a woman, which means I have encountered sexist discrimination on more than one occasion but I am white, and I have never doubted the privilege that comes with that. More and more I find myself wondering what being a good ally looks like at a time when we read about Neo Nazis in Charlottesville or are subjected to the fact that a man like Piers Morgan, who is as anti-feminist as he is regressive when it comes to conversations about race, still have huge platforms on which to air their own wounded egos.
Tobi Oredein, the founder of Black Ballad, tells me ‘if you can be a good ally it means not taking everything personally. Often, as a black woman, when I talk to white people about the things I’m going through or say the feminist movement isn’t fair to women of colour they feel I am personally attacking them. If we can’t have that conversation, then we aren’t going to get anywhere.’
The problem with the reductive and combative arguments we see on TV, like the one with Morgan on one side and Bergdorf on the other, is that the traditional rules of debating apply: there is a proposed motion, two sides will argue it out and, in the end, one will be right and one will be wrong. Necessarily, this means that there will be a winner and a loser. The truth is that there is already a winner and a loser, the notion of ‘white privilege’ is not up for debate. The conversation should be about where we go from here and how we fix our society.
‘When I do open up to people about some negative experiences I’ve had on the basis of my colour and my skin a lot of white people have a tendency to question that and be like “are you sure that happened?”’ Saraswati tells me. She is 26 years old and her family are South Asian. ‘So’ she says, ‘I always really appreciate it when I tell a white person these things and they’re willing to listen and say something as simple as “that’s really shit” and I think it's important to have allies outside the oppressed group because I just don’t think you can make as many strides unless we’re all working together.’
Think about it in terms of sexism. I cannot count the number of times that a man has explained sexism or feminism to me while I stare blankly at him in silence. Nor will I forget the time I watched a privately educated senior male colleague throw a tantrum during a conversation about gender diversity at our company saying ‘WHAT…should I just quit my job? Is that what you want?’. Today, only those who do not suffer because of it question sexism. The same is true of the arguments we are currently watching unfold around race.
‘I’d really like it if people just started accepting white privilege as a thing’, Saraswati added, ‘I think quite a lot of people react quite strongly and negatively to the term because they feel it implies that because you’re white you have no problems. That’s not what it means, it means that white people have experienced a different privilege to brown people. It’s about believing that discrimination happens and wanting to fix it, even though it doesn’t happen to you.’
And, there’s no doubt that it does happen. As much as we have a gender pay gap in this country we have a class pay gap and a race pay gap. They just don’t make the headlines as often. That’s no surprise, though, British journalism is 94% white and 55% male.
‘In the simplest terms’ Tobi says, ‘if I’m driving with my boyfriend we expect to be stopped but a white person doesn’t expect that, you expect to be protected.’ ‘Allies listen’ Tobi adds, ‘they’re not trying to be the loudest voice in the conversation. Don’t shout over us when we’re talking, let us explain and speak about the issues we are facing. Recently, a white person interrupted me and began to explain colorism to me. I don’t need it explained to me because I live it every day.’
Donald Trump got to where he is today by fighting an election campaign in which he cast white men, like himself, as a marginalised group while he stood on a podium raging against women ‘witches’ like Hillary Clinton, LGBT people and ‘Muslims’. So it’s no surprise that it’s still acceptable for a man like Piers Morgan to say he is somehow a victim of reverse racism because someone has spoken honestly about how prejudice and privilege collude to maintain the inequality that he himself benefits from.
It’s never going to be comfortable to acknowledge that you have benefited from a society’s inherent prejudices while other people have lost out but the process of progress has never been comfortable. Just because something doesn’t affect you negatively, doesn’t mean you haven’t benefited from it in some way. Denying the existence of difference and how it shapes our lives will only exacerbate the things which already work to divide us. Checking your privilege means you have to actually listen to what people are saying and give them the space to be heard, not take to social media to shout loudly about how wokeyou are because it's good for your personal brand.
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Follow Vicky on Twitter @Victoria_Spratt
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.