Why we whites need to admit to our privilege

A friend in Ireland was complaining about foreigners. She’d been in a shop when the owner told her to watch her purse, because there were “foreign” folk about.

“I’m foreign,” I reminded her.

“Africans!” she said.

“But I’m from Africa,” I said.

“But you’re different,” she said.

I am. I’m white. No one sees me and thinks “thief”; no one questions my motives or intelligence or right to be there before I’ve even opened my mouth.

Sometimes I think I should become a criminal mastermind because I appear so utterly anodyne, so middle class, so inoffensive. So white.

Perhaps, my white people, we need to talk about this, about the undeniable fact of our whiteness, and the uncomfortable truth that our skin tone brings with it certain basic advantages, whether we care to admit it or not.

Our lives, however liberal, kind and blameless, are built on the foundations of what went before.

“White privilege” is simply an acknowledgment of this basic, irrefutable fact. So let’s own it.

I’ll go first: My parents migrated to South Africa in the 1970s but theirs is not the typical global immigrant story.

Because they were white they were automatically set near the top of the pile; because I was white I went to “nice” government schools; I got a good education; and a leg up the ladder for no reason other than the skin I was in.

And just as I benefited, so too my millennial children benefited from being born into privilege, born already ahead.

To say otherwise is to say princes don’t benefit from being born to kings.

Yes, skin is not a choice, but it behoves white people to admit the truth of it, just as we would acknowledge that wealth, health, literate parents, or even a roof over our heads confers an unearned advantage at birth.

This does not mean white people don’t know pain, sorrow or hardship; it does not mean whites don’t struggle, or work hard.

A certain amount of anger is now directed towards white people – though surely nobody understands the injustice of being judged by skin colour more than black people – but when a country was built on pitting colour against colour, there remains a legacy and we can no more escape this than we can shed our own white flesh, and walk away.