Educating white people about white privilege (or convincing them its a real cultural phenomenon) can be a truly monumental task. By design, whiteness has been made invisible; whiteness has been normalized and naturalized to be the baseline of human existence in the United States. Specifically, white men are the model of average. Women are gendered deviations from the norm and people of color are raced deviations from the norm. To see that which is invisible is supposed to be impossible and unnecessary.
Enter John Scalzi, author of the antifascist blog, Whatever, with a really incredible analogy to explain white male privilege to white men: Video games. For anyone who has played just about any computer game over the last ten or twenty years has had the option of choosing the difficulty level at which they will play as soon as they start up the game. From there, Scalzi outlines succinctly and incredibly effectively how white privilege plays out as the easiest difficulty setting, and what it means to be assigned a harder setting (by being born female, identifying as a woman, being a person of color, etc.).
White privilege is real, despite many white people, and white men, not personally feeling as though they are privileged, experiencing benefits, or even living a not-shitty life. Scalzi addresses those realities as well, and builds on some of the responses/critiques/questions he received in response to the post through a series of followup articles (which you should definitely read as well).
Read the full post via Whatever, and make sure to share with your friends, family, and colleagues who are white men struggling to accept or understand the concept of white men’s privilege.
– Brett Goldberg
