Lent Day 12: White Privilege On Display

I'm having an interesting time over on Twitter, where my white privilege is fully on display and being appropriately called out.

I hate it.

I hate my white privilege.

I hate that I can blithely (and with about two minutes of thought) post something that can so expose my limitations and the sea I've been swimming in my whole life, which is to say, the sea of white supremacy, and the fact that, on some level, I still don't get it. 

And I hate being called out, because it is so profoundly uncomfortable.

Context: A guy who posts stuff about music (and who has 807,000 followers) posted a list released by Rolling Stone titled, "Rolling Stone Readers Pick the Best Lead Singers of All Time." 

They were all white men, but that's not what I noticed. I noticed that they were all men.

So, I posted a response, which was a list of almost all white women (the one who is a POC is not widely viewed as a POC--Linda Ronstadt, Mexican dad).

And very quickly, many people responded to it along the lines of "not one Black or brown woman?"

AND THEY ARE RIGHT. 

Left to my own devices, and not thinking terribly deeply about a topic, my response shows how very limited my scope is. Sure, I have tons of Aretha (and Beyonce and Solange Knowles and Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald and Tracy Chapman and Rhiannon Giddens) on my Apple Music account. (<--- VIRTUE SIGNALING)

But I have shown who I am, which is a person whose life experience (including the music I have listened to most) has been shaped by whiteness. 

Here's what matters: Despite my own taste, and what I know I love and value, despite my conviction that we are all steeped in white supremacy and white people are responsible for keeping that knowledge at the forefront of our consciousness... despite all the boxes I like to think I have checked on this topic, I can easily default, when describing excellence, to people who look like me.

I'm not asking for anything in response to this. I think it's important that I be uncomfortable right now. Black and brown people go through life in a world that works pretty hard to make them uncomfortable, not to mention killing and imprisoning them at rates disproportional to their numbers in the population.

I am uncomfortable, and I think it's a good idea for me to be uncomfortable on this topic, until I get it.

I have work to do.