White Privilege Is About ‘What Doesn’t Happen To You,’ Says Pastor

White privilege is either fact or fiction, depending on whom you’re talking to.

In a country where so much of the wealth is owned by so little of the population, it’s hard for most white people to recognize the privilege in their own situation if they’re living paycheck to paycheck. But speak to a black family victimized by racial profiling and harsher prison sentences for the same crimes as white offenders, and you’ll have another point of view entirely.

In a recent piece on the Huffington Post entitled, “An Open Letter to the White Men of America,” United Church of Christ President and author Rev. Dr. John C. Dorhauer, a white man himself, made the case that white privilege is all too real, and it’s what you don’t experience that makes it so.

“Privilege can be hard to see, mostly because of what doesn’t happen to us when we have it,” he writes. “One of the four reasons James Cone offers in his landmark essay ‘Theology’s Great Sin: Silence in the Face of White Supremacy’ for why men of privilege remain silent in the face of so much racial injustice is ‘They don’t have to speak.'”

“We aren’t getting arrested at four times our population rate…. We aren’t being followed when walking through a department store wearing a sweat shirt with a hood…. Real estate agencies didn’t write codes, rules and laws that kept us out of the high rent districts and middle class neighborhoods…. Property values don’t go down when more than 10 percent of our neighborhood is saturated with people of our race…. Our children aren’t sitting in classrooms with teachers who are likely not to have even a minor degree in the courses they are teaching…. Young white men are not being gunned down by black police officers in epidemic numbers.”

Appearing on the left-leaning site Huffington Post, one wouldn’t expect as much pushback as this letter is currently getting. Particularly the last point of young white men “are not being gunned down by black police officers in epidemic numbers.”

Dorhauer does not offer any hard data to support any of the examples that he gives here, and this set one commenter off.

“And neither are young black men being gunned down by white officers in epidemic numbers,” James Eldridge responded. “Hysterical comments do not reflect logical thinking.”

“Truth is,” added reader Scott Baker, “more white people are killed by police officers than any other race. Keep spinning the crap.”

(PolitiFact notes that this statistic is true. Over the span of about a decade, there were twice as many white people killed by police than black people, but with white people 63 percent of the population compared to black people at 12 percent, that is to be expected.)

What do you think about white privilege, readers? Does it exist? Sound off in the comments section.

[Image via Twitter]