White Privilege, White Supremacy, Whiteness — Whose Burden?
- Jennifer Bright
- Jun 5, 2025
- 4 min read
It’s been some time since I’ve posted here and, as the 5th anniversary of the death of George Floyd has arrived, I feel compelled to share some further reflections.
As part of the dismantling of a system built on a mendacious, fallacious and pernicious ideology — one fabricated to justify the trade in free human labour — I want to explore some understandings of the term ‘white privilege’ and to ask whose responsibility it is to redress the imbalances and inequalities that exist between racialised groups. (For those who might not have read my previous blogs, I use the term ‘racialised’ rather than ‘racial’ to indicate that, while racism is real and potentially deadly in its effects, ‘race’ itself is not real, but that groups have nevertheless been racialised as a conscious ploy. I also capitalise Black, White, Brown for a similar reason — to signal that, while these have a tenuous association with skin colour, they are not actually colours but political and social categories. For a full discussion of this topic, see my previous blog ‘Why I don’t talk about race’.)
When I first drafted this piece, close to the death of George Floyd, white privilege was being spoken of in accusatory tones levelled at individuals racialised as White. This never made much sense to me as it was clear that many of those labelled White are sometimes far less economically or educationally privileged than many of those racialised as Black. So what did the term actually mean? When exploring further, I heard some say that the privilege those racialised as White enjoy is the privilege to learn about what it means to live as someone racialised as Black rather than to have to live it themselves. For me, this was a little more meaningful especially within the context of the death of George Floyd and the apparent lack of value his life was given, and the implications that had for the value of Black lives in general. I went down the dark and ugly rabbit hole to discover if similar events had happened before and yes, while not identical, there were myriad bewildering and hate-inducing instances, some of which I’ll need to make brief reference to in my next blog.
Yet, even within this context, I found that explanation unsatisfactory as it suggests a universal experience of what it is to live as someone racialised as Black, completely ignoring the intersection of gender, class, education, nationality and other variables in affecting perception and the lived experience (as demonstrated by the stories recounted by Angela Davis and Gina Yashere in my previous blog ‘The Legacy of George Floyd’). More than that, it encourages a victim mentality which is not an empowering state in which to travel through life.
More meaningful to me is the term ‘whiteness’ which now seems to be the term of choice. The concept of ‘whiteness’ takes the phenomenon of white supremacy out of the realm of the individual and places the attention where it belongs: on the political ideology underpinning racialised hierarchies in which ‘whiteness’ is at the top; it is supreme. Whiteness becomes the default, an all-pervading dominant consciousness, even while consciously knowing that there is no intrinsic merit or value in Whiteness any more than there is in Blackness. The value, the status, is culturally assigned and reinforced through our political, cultural and social systems.
By refusing to lay blame for inequalities at the door of our neighbour and recognising instead the systemic mechanisms that keep us all dancing to a tune called Divide and Rule, we step outside the game that has been created for us and we gain an opportunity to see more clearly what can be done to effect change.
Sometimes it’s said: “We didn’t cause the problem, therefore it’s not our job to solve it”. Such a stance removes any opportunity to influence change; it erases from the mind the possibility and the power to act in service to one’s own and others’ liberation. I contend that the responsibility for change, if that is what we want, is the job of all of us. None of us is off the hook.
However, in a racialised world in which for the last several centuries people categorised as Black have been systematically victimised and brutalised (along with women and the poor of other racialised groups), it is enormously important to have people of all groups speak up and stand together and yes, because in the current hierarchy Whiteness does carry privilege, voices of those racialised as White are vital in denouncing the propaganda that whiteness is superior — whether that is a matter of quietly living life and modelling that truth or of taking a more vocal or active role. Educating ourselves and taking the action we’re each called to, will contribute to change — if ‘only’ at an individual or local level to begin with. Those changes multiplied across individuals and neighbourhoods however, can have a significant impact on the wider society. We are more important and powerful than we might think. (Delving into our ability to effect change will be one of the topics in the next series of blogs.)
I will continue to write with the intention of building a community where none of us need to feel ashamed of how we’ve thought, or for the privilege or lack of it that we’ve experienced. Shame and guilt keep us shackled to the past. It’s time to free ourselves — one person, one thought, one change in perspective at a time.
In my next blog I take a slight detour and share a moment of insight that shed light on the phenomenon of being treated as guilty for what is sometimes called ‘living while Black’. It will serve all of us, I think, to understand what at least some of the mechanisms at play are so that we might consciously choose otherwise.
