Confronting white privilege: can today's politics shift the balance?

The day after the New Hampshire primary, before which the pundit class had widely and incorrectly predicted that Barack Obama would win, I asked Tara Harris, my assistant, her view on what had happened.

Without looking up from her newspaper, she explained that all the white folks who had told the pollsters they would vote for Sen. Obama did what they really wanted to do when they got into the voting booth. "In secret," she said, "they were able to give rein to their prejudices and vote against him."

Tara is a 30-something black woman with a degree in history and a curmudgeonly practicality about politics and much else. Whether her theory of that moment about voting holds--and it seems not to have held elsewhere--is not the point. The point is that I asked a question to which the answer for her was a given, a fact of life, something that would have been too apparent for discussion, say, among her family members. It was a small matter, to be sure. But it also was indicative of those insistent, if seemingly inconsequential, distinctions between blacks and whites that, when all locked together as part of the larger puzzle, reveal a difference that exists somewhere between one's skin color and one's essential nature.

The question itself, some would suggest, is an example of the condition (there are those who would call it sin) of "white privilege," the condition that affords whites in a racist culture a certain aloofness to racial realities as well as untold privileges merely because they are white. The condition is like the positive of an old photographic negative. If whiteness confers privilege, blackness confers unending disadvantage.

"Being white," writes Laurie M. Cassidy, "is having the privilege of functioning in society blind to the system into which one is born and from which one benefits."

Ms. Cassidy, assistant professor of religion at Marywood University in Scranton, Pa., along with Alex Mikulich, assistant professor of religion at St. Joseph College in Hartford, Conn., edited the volume Interrupting White Privilege: Catholic Theologians Break the Silence, in which a group of U.S. Catholic theologians take up the challenge originally posed by Fr. Richard McBrien to colleagues in the Catholic Theological Society of America to assess the effects of white privilege.

Jon Nilson of Loyola University Chicago, describing the history of the project, wrote that the effort was spearheaded by Joseph Nearon, who recalls that when he was approached by Fr. McBrien, "We decided that for the CTSA to address the question of black theology, we needed someone who was 1) black, 2) Catholic, 3) a theologian. I noted that 'the field is fairly limited' and McBrien immediately responded 'To my knowledge, you are the field.'"

Mr. Nearon's conclusion in his first presentation on black theology, a revelation to him since it had "played no role in his religious life or theological career," was that Catholic theology is racist. "If this fact can be blamed on the cultural situation, if it is more the result of omission and inattention than commission, it is still a fact," he told his fellow theologians. He said he was pointing out the fact "not to condemn but to awaken."

If racism is America's "original sin," then white privilege is both the wages of that sin and the avenue through which it is perpetuated. Taking down the "colored only" signs is satisfying the law; confronting white privilege is getting at the heart of the matter.

It is coincidental that the volume of essays, published in 2007, should seem so timely, given the political moment that is being stirred beyond anyone's expectations by a candidate running as a black man but whose white mother immediately makes the picture more complex. Can it be that this black man is, as he was referred to by the head of the National Association of Evangelicals, the post-race candidate? Have we reached that point? And what does that make of white privilege?

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The insidious part of white privilege is that those who are advantaged, of course, think their station in life normative, not privileged, so that racism is the aberration to be worked on.

Being white, then, can be viewed as "colorless" and whites can see their own lives as "racially neutral." "This ignorance may manifest itself in white consciousness as a greater awareness of racial oppression shaping black experience rather than of the privilege shaping one's own life," writes Ms. Cassidy.

Fr. Charles Curran, a moral theologian teaching at Southern Methodist University, said in his contribution to the collection of essays, that it is only recently that he realized "the extent and power of white privilege and my participation in it."

In working on the society's project on white privilege, he writes, he realized his support for minority theologians was problematic because "'I' was the subject; 'they' were the object. 'I' was graciously doing what I could to help and support 'them.'"