White Privilege

If you title your article, "Dear Fellow White People," chances are it won't be received as graciously as you intended. ESPN writer Kevin Van Valkenburg contributed this essay for The Undefeated. The article is subtitled, "White privilege is a thing. And Rio was the perfect example."

Oh? Is that why Ibtihaj Muhammad (PBUH), who became a Muslim through the Nation of Islam, was barely out-voted by Michael Phelps to be the American flag-bearer?

I doubt Van Valkenburg believes that Phelps was voted flag-bearer just because of his skin tone. Surely he is aware that Phelps' merit, by becoming the most decorated Olympian in history, had something to do with it.

Van Valkenburg spends most of his essay writing about Ryan Lochte being defended by his bros (other white guys like Matt Lauer and Billy Bush) for concocting a story about being robbed after a drunken escapade.

"Try to imagine," Van Valkenburg writes, "what the world’s reaction would be if a black athlete got drunk, urinated in public, destroyed some property, then concocted a story..." You mean, in the absence of any conflicting evidence? The world's reaction would be exactly the same!

Van Valkenburg never tries to identify why Lochte's story was initially accepted. It's the same reason that Lochte has been mercilessly and universally scorned in the aftermath. Lochte's original story was met with credulity because it confirmed some pre-existing biases that we all share. Namely, that Rio is a dangerous place by any standard.

The subsequent contempt that the world has shown Lochte is also a symptom of what happens when our biases are confirmed. Lochte became The Ugly American.

This is a way of admitting that double standards exist. It just seems hackneyed and cliche to cry about them. You would have to spend all your time either pointing them out or defending against them. If you hack out screeds on white privilege, aren't you obligated to occasionally point out cases of female privilege?

Hope Solo entered this Olympics as U.S. Women's Soccer starting goalie, in spite having an active domestic violence case against her. She repaid her team's trust in her by sucking at her job, then blaming her opponents' style of play. If you google her name, you get results like "Hope Solo's behavior not in the spirit of the Olympics."

A sportswriter should be more circumspect about throwing around words like privilege. Aren't black athletes the recipients of privilege also? How many times have white athletes been dismissed as having lesser natural physical ability than their black peers, that they then have to work harder to overcome?

The main problem I have with the casual use of the word, "privilege," is that there are several words that go along with it, words that are silent and implied. Words like, "unearned," and "undeserved." How many black people can you lift up by telling them that the white people they co-exist with, don't face difficult obstacles? Some, perhaps. The vast majority probably just internalize this as a sense of futility and resentment.

I agree with Van Valkenburg that some people get the benefit of the doubt. People make quick, intuitive decisions all the time, often at a subconscious level. Sometimes this is a result of an experience, and sometimes it comes to us innately. And sometimes the standard we use for judging black people comes from black people themselves.