On continuing to unpack white privilege

I’ve been reading a lot of different things around the internet that have me thinking about white privilege. It occurs to me that I can use myself as an instructive example of how quiet and insidious white privilege can be.

I had just loaded a bunch of new avatars from the 1800s for folks to use as their icons on my site. In one of those moments of “Oh, hello, I’m racist” which I continue to have in my life, I realized that with the exception of some images from India, all the other human icons were white.

This isn’t surprising when you consider that I was mostly pulling them from photos of family, or historic ads, or film stars that I like. Nor, truly, is it surprising that I didn’t notice. It’s a fine example of quiet racism.

I didn’t notice that all the icons look like me because I’m used to it in film and media and just being out in the world.  It’s part of the white privilege package and although I’m aware that it exists, it doesn’t stop me from being stupid.

Oh, but wait, there’s more.

So I decided that I should fix that and add some Regency period non-Europeans. Heh. Yeah…  This is about as easy as one might think it is.  I remembered reading about Olaudah Equiano and  Ira Aldridge when I was researching the period so I knew that there were images of non-Europeans in the early 1800s.  It was just a matter of finding them.  I hadn’t thought through was what the art would say about perceptions both mine and of the time period.

See, I could find very “respectable” portraits of people of African descent, dressed in white fashions. Or I could find caricatures of black people. In other words, when I looked at the art from the period people had either been “normalized” to look like me or they were rendered comically.  I want to be clear that when I use the word “normal” what I mean is that the dominant culture is setting the standards and not that there is such thing as normal.

Then there were things that I wasn’t sure. Was I looking at a faithful rendition of someone in their native garb or was I looking at a European painters’ exoticized representation of someone?

What does it say that I can’t tell?

So I was in the midst of looking at these and found Sarah Baartman.  In 1810 Sarah, a twenty-year old Khoikhoi woman, was persuaded by Dr. William Dunlop to go to England with him. He put her on display as a sexual curiosity, as an example of how “over-sexed” Africans were.

After she was taken to Paris and abandoned there, after she was forced into prostitution just to survive, after she died in 1816, the Musee de l’Homme removed her skeleton, her vagina, her brain, and made a plaster cast of her body. Then they displayed her.

So, because she didn’t look like what the dominant white society regarded as normal they felt free to treat her as less than human.  There are plenty of records of what she looked like. Lots and lots of contemporary art of her. No, wait– lots of cartoons making fun of her. Because to the European men and women of the time she violated their sense of normalcy and was thus appropriate to view as a curiosity rather than a person.

But their idea of normal was based on themselves.

Just like my idea of “normal” is based on me and that is why I could go for years without noticing the sheer whiteness of the human avatars I’d offered. So what I’m left with is realizing that the difference between me and the folks in 1800s is largely a matter of degrees. It’s all part of the package that people refer to as white privilege. The privilege comes from thinking that my experience is “normal.”

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