White Privilege in a RAV4

Since the beginning of the semester, I have not had a sticker on my car that says I am a Rhodes student and can park on campus. However, every time I drive past campus safety in my silver RAV4, I am not stopped; they barely glance my way before giving me a friendly smile and wave that is taken as permission to enter. Every time this happens, I always remark to whomever is in the car with me that it is because of the color of my skin that I am not stopped. I have had friends counter by saying that it is more because I look young and college-aged or because it is cold outside and the officer does not want to step out of their warm gatehouse or even because the officer is lazy, which is often a racially fueled comment in itself.  

I think that to most of my peers reading this post, this will be an obvious form of white privilege and I do not disagree. If I were black, even if I still looked young, there is a significantly higher probability that the officer would have stopped me, regardless of the outside temperature or how motivated they were feeling. As we discussed in class, the real question is to ask myself if I am willing to give up that privilege.

In theory, yes, of course I am willing to take the 5 extra seconds to stop and roll down my window and explain that I got a new car over break, but in practice, I might be late for class or convince myself that the officer simply recognizes me from around campus (and the latter could potentially, though not likely, be true). Simply put, even the smaller privileges can be hard to give up and it also gets complicated when you think that just because you give up this one thing, does not mean that it gets better for someone else.

However, I think the bigger problem that our society faces is getting others to realize that both white and male privilege are very real. As this cartoon from The New Yorker shows, those who experience the privilege are often in denial. They benefit from the system and cannot see the larger picture of how this hierarchy came to be nor how our privilege only exists at the expense of others (see first cartoon). Although I do think we should continue to give up our privileges, I think it should be to educate those around us on how they have become numb to the ways in which people of color are treated in our world. And even though I will not be able to use the car example to expose inequality anymore (I just got a sticker from Rhodes Express), I have made a promise to myself to recognize and challenge privilege whenever I notice it.