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12 tweets,
3 min read
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1/ Now, for a thread about #MyWhitePrivilege that is separate from the 3 tweets I already posted regarding encounters with law enforcement. Let's start in the present day and work backwards shall we, so as to see the trajectory of how white privilege works...
2/ So, my wife and I have these two amazing daughters. If I never meet my wife however, they don't exist, obviously. And I only met my wife because I happened to move back to Nashville from New Orleans at the precise time I moved back (August, 1996). Because...
3/ If I move back any earlier or later, the two women who were looking for a roommate (one of whom introduced me to my wife) would have found another roomie, or I would have found a place to live before they needed one, and as such, we wouldn't have met...
4/ But the only reason I was able to move back to Nashville at that exact time was because I had the relative freedom of mobility afforded me by being on the lecture circuit, and not having to have a "real job." (Hell, even THAT was connected to white privilege, but read on)...
5/ ...and the reason I was on the lecture circuit, thus free to make that move was bc I'd built up a reputation doing antiracism work, as an organizer, but especially in the campaigns against David Duke when he ran 4 office in 1990 and 91. Those brought me to national attention..
6/ But how had I gotten the job fighting David Duke? Simple. I knew the guys who had it to offer me. One was a former history professor or mine and the other a grad student and friend from Tulane. But I only knew them because I had gone to Tulane. And how did I end up there?...
7/ Well I ended up there bc despite being broke and getting my financial aid paperwork in late (and thus only get about $8k in aid to cover $20k in cost), my mom was able to get a loan for the other 12k from the bank. But how does a broke person get that loan?...
8/ Well, in my mom's case she was able to get it bc she could take her mom (my grandmother) to the bank w/her and get her to co-sign the loan, putting her house up as collateral. It was the 5th house she had owned w/ my grandfather who'd been dead 6 years by then...
9/ ...and like the previous 4 it was in a neighborhood where its value would continue to appreciate. A "nice" neighborhood from which POC had been entirely excluded, first by law and then by custom and inertia...
10/ So in a very real sense, if we aren't white we don't have that house, my mom can't get that loan for my education, I don't go to Tulane, I don't meet those men, I don't get the job fighting Duke, thereby launching me into this work at a prominent national level, and thus...
11/ By the summer of 1996, rather than being able to just move back to Nashville from wherever I would have been living, I would have been in some other job. Possibly something I would have loved. Possibly a good job. But not doing what I do now, and what I am known for...
12/ Oh, and I wouldn't have therefore been in a position to meet my wife, and in that case our daughters literally do not exist. So when folks wonder "why do you have to make everything in America about race?"...It's because everything is. That's what I mean by #MyWhitePrivilege
