White Friends, Our Privilege is Currency. It's Time We Spent It.

Yesterday, I came across a TikTok by a creator who goes by the name of @professionalyapper19, speaking eloquently about the murder of Renee Good. She correctly declared, “You can’t be a ‘good white person’ and put your body between those trying to kidnap a brown person or harm a black person. When you do that, you lose your proximity to whiteness, and you lose the benefits that come along with it.”The author of the video reminds us of the truth that America’s renaissance of unabashed racism isn’t a Latino, Black, or immigrant problem; it is a white people with a conscience problem.As we watch Minneapolis and cities throughout this nation relentlessly under siege by a violent, Government-sanctioned campaign of ethnic cleansing designed not to make America safer but to drive out its diversity, we are being challenged to respond with something more than easy empathy.White people on the Left talk a lot about privilege, but we almost always focus on the awareness of our pigment-afforded advantages, the difficulties of people from marginalized communities, and the broken systems we benefit from. And while these are certainly realities worth confronting, we often stop short of naming the cost of undoing such perilous days. We don’t like to admit that pain is always the price tag of change.White friends, privilege is currency. It is a priceless resource that we who possess it can spend on behalf of those who possess less of it. We do this by leveraging our voices and circles of influence. We do this by choosing the path of greater resistance. We do it by stepping out of our comfort and into the trenches of advocacy and activism. We do it by entering spaces where our safety is not guaranteed. We do it by putting our lives in harm’s way because others are imperiled.Renee Good could have done what so many other white people are doing right now. She could have stayed swaddled in the safety her skin provided her. She could have lamented the horrors around her and believed that feeling bad was enough. She could have chosen self-preservation over the lives of her neighbors. She could have remained buffered by privilege.She didn’t. And we can’t.And thankfully, more and more people are not.All over this nation right now, we are seeing white people standing up for strangers, stepping between ICE and those they would abduct, beat, abuse, and send away without due process or just cause. This is the redemptive path forward, and it’s time we all decided to place our feet upon it, pushback, turbulence, and injury be damned. One day soon, the myth of safety will evaporate for all of us, and the sooner we reckon with this, the better. Eventually, we are each going to be faced with some kind of decision. It may not involve braving tear gas or being blinded by rubber bullets or being gunned down in our cars. It may be the opportunity to stand up in a town meeting, to speak up in a neighborhood gathering, to stand in solidarity with someone being mistreated in our presence, or to confront the racism of a friend on social media. But we cannot expect our terrifying national crisis to pass without some kind of personal sacrifice.White friends, in these moments, we are being asked to speak clearly and to live courageously, because when we do, we place ourselves alongside our neighbors who are experiencing dehumanization and discrimination, and we place ourselves across from the bigots who feel they will never be held accountable because they are relying on white silence.To be clear, this outward stance doesn’t erase our privilege or exempt us from our prejudices or remove the blind spots within us that perpetuate inequity. Those are realities we’ll have to continually confront in the small and close and quiet moments of the remainder of our lives. It doesn’t dismantle systemic racism or the institutional inequalities woven into our nation, which we benefit from.But what our loud declarations and explicit actions will do is to let other white people know where we stand: our neighbors, pastors, co-workers, family members, and social media friends. It will place us decidedly on the side of equality and attest that we are willing to help pay for it.We who live with the unearned privilege of being able to go to work, attend classes, pick up our kids at school, lie in the grass at a park, or walk down the street, without fearing the taunts and punches and bullets of racist, inbred, insecure cosplaying super soldiers, have an obligation to put our white skin in the game.Authoritarians don’t get tired of malevolence. They don’t suddenly exhaust their capacity to inflict suffering.They don’t reach a point where they’ve accrued enough power or done enough damage or manufactured enough nightmares.Authoritarians and corrupt regimes only stop when the good people stop them.Fascists don’t leave; they must be driven out.White friends, our privilege is currency. It’s time we spent all of it on something worthy of it: on democracy, equality, and humanity.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe