On black romance and white privilege

I finally got around to reading SB Sarah’s latest column on the segregation of black romance. I found the comments interesting, but figured I would just make a post over here rather than leave my own massive comment since I’m not sure how good I will be at making sense.

I really can’t speak too much about AA romances since I don’t know of all that many authors who write them. I’ve got something by Beverly Jenkins TBR, and I think I’ve got a couple of Brenda Jackson books as well. But honestly, I am one of those readers who truly would not care about the race of her protagonists as long as I got a good story out of it. But what did interest me in the comments of the SB site was the discussion about white privilege since I’ve been thinking about it lately.

This last semester, I’ve been taking a Global Women’s Studies class. The class was problematic for a variety of reasons, but one of the complaints I heard a lot (since it came from my sister, who also took the class) was that we attend a primarily white community college. In fact, my sister and I, being commuters from the larger university town, have our own prejudices about the school we go to, which is that most of its students are affluent but lazy. So we wondered why we were learning about global women’s issues when we didn’t talk much about our own issues as white women.

I realized when I read some of the homework from the last week of class exactly why that was. It occurred to me that feeling like we were marginalized because our issues as white women weren’t addressed in that class is a bit like those conservative talk show pundits bemoaning the fact that affirmative action discriminates against white men. Puh-lease. How can we possibly have any right to complain about discrimination if we’re the dominant culture?

Anyway, this point got driven home to me when I read two articles. The first was about the support black upwardly mobile women got from their families/friends vs. the same support white women got. I don’t really recall too much of what the article said specifically, except that I found myself thinking, “Well, duh. I could have saved you millions of dollars of grant money to tell you the same thing.” And then, the second article about white employers and their attitudes toward black women elicited the same reaction. And then I realized just how ingrained my white privilege is. Because if I’m not surprised by the reactions of those white employers, doesn’t that mean I should reevaluate my own beliefs?

I think that privilege in general is something that we all experience in some way shape or form whether we want to admit it or not, and acknowledging that yes, we are the dominant ethnic group/sexual orientation/what have you so we should especially be aware of how things work for people who are not so privileged is the first step toward dispelling some of those privileges. And I think we akll have privilege even if we don’t realize it. My mom was asking me the other night if I thought we would ever live in a world without prejudice and honestly, I don’t think we will. I think it’s human nature to emphasize our differences and I think it’s also human nature to see ourselves as marginalized even if we, well, maybe aren’t so much,. I mean, if people can get into snits because other people judge their reading tastes, of all the insignificant little details there are to notice about a person, then what hope is there for more engrained prejudices?

I really hope this made sense. I’m off to begin writing a major paper, so my brain will probably slowly begin to leak out my ears.