What White Privilege Steals From Us

Privilege always comes at somebody else’s expense

Why does this white lady get to profit from our cooking while we live under passport apartheid?

Nanjala Nyabola writes about seeing a white boss belittle a Haitian teacher — “I hate it because I sense that my empowerment as a foreign woman is expected to come at the cost of this man’s dignity. He cannot stand at full metaphorical height: he must slouch a little forward in order to make everyone just a little more comfortable. Privilege like this always comes at somebody else’s expense.”

I think about this often. What’s the harm of white privilege? What’s the harm in white people working in NGOs? What’s the harm in white people writing a Sri Lankan cookbook? In the abstract it seems harmless, but we don’t live in the abstract do we? Nyabola made me really think about who gets the bill. In the real world of unreal borders, white privilege is keeping billions of us down.

I won’t discuss the abstract. Here’s a photograph.

A Recipe For White Privilege

An image from the Emily Dobbs mangled cookbook of Sri Lankan food

This is a white girl in a Sri Lankan market, under passport apartheid. She can learn some of the food on vacation, fly back to London, and sell it. Meanwhile the…