| re: Gene Nelson -- Yes "White Privilege" Benefit | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 01:27 pm EST 03/08/21 | |
| In reply to: re: Gene Nelson -- No "White Privilege" Benefit - BroadwayTonyJ 02:13 am EST 03/08/21 | |
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| Thank you for sharing your story, and I appreciate your point of view. There are definitely ways that the dialogue around privilege fails to consider the needs of people from poor and working class backgrounds (if those are even the right terms anymore), and one of the more nuanced ways of looking at this is to consider relative privilege within economic groupings: so a white working class person from the Rust Belt will in most situations have less opportunities than a Black or Brown person from the upper class, but they will almost certainly have more opportunities than a Black and Brown person who also hails from a poor, working class background. But I fully agree that a lot of our conversation around intersectionality is class-blind in ways that are destructive. And of course, any white person can fail, and any BIPOC person can succeed. When we talk about privilege, we should be talking about groups of people in the aggregate, not specific individuals, and we should not be talking about Privilege as an automatic pathway to success. I think the better metaphor might be having extra time to finish an assignment, or being able to drive in the carpool lane rather than the normal traffic lanes on the highways; small, often unnoticed bonuses that give someone a slight advantage that can add up over time. Someone can have extra time to finish a test and still fail that test, but the extra time certainly doesn't hurt. That's privilege. In the case of Gene Nelson, privilege was that he was able to play the lead in "Oklahoma!", but Asian people weren't able to play the leads in "The King and I", though things got a bit better with "Flower Drum Song". Privilege is a lot about access, and Nelson had more access where BIPOC artists had less access. (Also, did you mean Patrick Adiarte? I just Googled him, and he is neither White nor dead... though he did play the Prince in "King and I", which made him the only Asian performer to have a prominent role in the movie.) In terms of your life, I get the sense that you're from a background where you weren't considered "White" when you were growing up, instead being seen as an Other and receiving a version of the prejudice that this country directs towards BIPOC people, but now the cultural definition of White has grown to include people from your background, and perhaps there's a sense that people are holding your Whiteness against you now in the way that other people held being Polish against you then. That's terrible all around. There is a tendency for some activist to flatten and erase the historical prejudices of this country, and I'm sorry if you're experiencing that. I can see why those experiences would make you think that privilege is a bunch of bunk (especially as some people weaponize it to dismiss the achievements of hard working people), but if we acknowledge the barriers that non-White people have faced in this country, then we also have to acknowledge that other people benefited from those barriers, and that's White privilege. |
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