Privilege Is Without
You might have heard, or read really, at some point, me saying the phrase whiteness is a fog. The idea is that ‘white’ is not, in and of itself, a cultural form, an identity, but rather it is a system of acceptance outside yourself that permeates culture. The fog gets into all the cracks and presses against all the surfaces, but it isn’t, in and of itself, defined by something internal.
I am, after all, white. The system looks at me and goes ‘oh, this guy qualifies for the standard currently.’ Of course, it’s entirely possible for that to be withdrawn. Find the right weirdo and they might (say) falsely claim I’m Jewish and suddenly that whiteness can be withdrawn from me. It’s a complex system that rolls around in its day to day. Go back two hundred years and I wouldn’t get counted. The system is not tracking some inherent, actual, real like chemical detail or compositional detail about me. It is something people socially observe and attribute to me. Some of those attributions are pretty easy but sometimes they’re not.
