Yesterday, a post appeared on the Huge Facebook page promoting a fat-camp scholarship in Nikki Blonsky’s name. Within minutes, my inbox was collapsing quantum-singularity-style under the mass of so many aghast messages letting me know about it. I haven’t said it recently, and can never say it enough, but oh, my vigilant little pudgemuffins, you are such treasures, and I sincerely appreciate all of you who take a moment to send me fat red alerts about this sort of thing — even when there are lots and lots of you.

The Huge Facebook page, where the offending post can be found, is here. I strongly recommend against reading the comments, unless you are one of those loveable scamps who digs on feeding trolls. Though things began as a fairly even conversation expressing opinions both for and against, the thread predictably spiraled into ridiculousness once word spread and dutiful citizens turned up to inform people that a) being fat is not okay, b) all fat people are fat because they eat too much and are lazy, and c) any fat person’s life who does not meet this criteria does not exist. (Oh, and producer Savannah Dooley is an irresponsible horrible person who wants people to get fat and die, suffocated by their own adipose tissue.)

I’m going to take this in two parts: first, the announcement itself.

Last week, La Blonsky* visited Camp Shane — evidently “the longest running” fat camp in the US — to announce the scholarship that will bear her name. The press release for the scholarship announcement is here, if you want to read it in its entirety. The short version is that applicants will submit essays on why they want to attend, and La Blonsky will read them and choose a winner. I do understand the kneejerk reaction a lot of folks have had — so many of you have been on pins and needles, certain that Huge was going to break your heart, so it makes sense that the response to this would be an emotional one. But let’s break this down a bit first.

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Angst-O-Meter (1-5): 4.5

Previously: We QUESTED. Will and Amber got lost. Will waged a battle with evil dumpster-donut kobolds and emerged victorious. George waged a battle with his inappropriate attraction to Amber and did lose that fight thoroughly. And in the center of it all stood the gravitational axis and emotional center of all this human drama: S’nalt.

It’s morning, and in the laydeez’ cabin, the campers are talking about the impending weigh-in. Ah, well, the good times couldn’t last forever, I suppose. Chloe reminds us: “It’s not about the number, it’s about how you feel.” Forgive me, but if that’s the case, why not skip the weigh-in altogether? A lot of us seem to be all in for a weight-loss-free Fatties-Come-Frolic camp.

Sierra shrieks from the bathroom: there’s a giant bug in the sink. Hey, at least she didn’t start crying. That’s progress. Will sighs exasperatedly and heads to the bathroom with a shoe, ostensibly for bug-smashing purposes. The bug is indeed enormous, like the God of the Cockroaches. It looks a bit like one of those Madagascar hissing cockroaches, which Wikipedia has informed me can be kept as pets, fed on a diet of fresh vegetables and dry dog food. Really? I am both intrigued and revolted.

Will calls them all “pansies” and prepares to bash the Cockroach God good with one of her Chuck Taylors. Becca stops her: she doesn’t want Will to kill it, but rather thinks they should relocate it outside. Chloe wants it dead, and then she wants Will to go find its entire cockroach family and kill them too, and then to mount their tiny cockroach heads on tiny pikes just outside, to underscore the point that bugs don’t want to be coming into this cabin, y’all. This is the zero-tolerance model for dealing with illegal insect immigration.

Will goes with Becca’s more humane relocation plan and uses a cup to escort the bug outside. Will would make such a hot butch. Maybe once she gets to college. Fingers crossed.

Dr. Gina and her Real Hair are leading a meeting of the counselors in the mess hall, and tells them that there will be a weigh-in this week, “but don’t tell your kids.” She doesn’t want them worrying about it. You know, you could just not do it, Dr. Gina! Enter Jillian Michaels: Deep Space Nine, who’s back! Damn, I was hoping she’d eaten a bad Powerbar and would be gone for the duration. Shay’s returning from her family emergency. Her daughter had meningitis. Keep trying, show — a family misfortune is not going to make me sympathize with this character. Everyone but Dr. Gina seems to know that Shay has a daughter, and she has to ask what her kid’s name is. Awkward. (DRINK!)

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Tonight’s episode of Huge will feature a scene related to Seventeen Magazine’s “Body Peace Project”, an effort launched in 2007 in collaboration with self-esteem guru Jess Weiner. The main thrust of the project seems to be the Body Peace Treaty, which can be read and electronically signed on Seventeen’s website. Signers of the treaty pledge to:

* Remember that the sun will still rise tomorrow even if I had one too many slices of pizza or an extra scoop of ice cream tonight.
* Stop joining in when my friends compare and trash their own bodies.
* Never allow a dirty look from someone else to influence how I feel about my appearance.
* Quit judging a person solely by how his or her body looks — even if it seems harmless — because I’d never want anyone to do that to me.
* Quiet that negative little voice in my head when it starts to say mean things about my body that I’d never tolerate anyone else saying about me.
* Remind myself that what you see isn’t always what you get on TV and in ads — it takes a lot of airbrushing, dieting, money, and work to look like that.
* Realize that the mirror can reflect only what’s on the surface of me, not who I am inside.

…and so on. You can read the whole thing here. The scene in Huge tonight will apparently involve some characters discussing and signing this pledge, and Hayley Hasselhoff, who plays Amber, will grace the pages of the new issue of the magazine, hitting newsstands tomorrow.

On the surface, it seems like a smart and responsible campaign. Body image issues can lead to all kinds of social problems, eating disorders, and lifelong struggles with low self esteem. These things are bad, and efforts to reach kids before they have fully internalized our culture of body loathing are not simply good ideas, but are absolutely necessary, for the health of future generations. What I cannot get over, however, is that this “Body Peace Treaty” is being pushed by Seventeen, one of the most visible and well-known proponents of the very perfection-seeking culture that produces impossible beauty standards and body hatred in the first place. This is like Joe Camel instructing you on the evils of cigarette smoking while simultaneously selling you cigarettes. It is incomprehensible.

It occurred to me, however, that maybe I’m behind the times. Maybe Seventeen has changed since the days in which it gave me a massive complex about my own prepubescent form. Being the fan of qualitative research that I am, I’ve collected the last six covers of Seventeen for the purposes of assessing how well they support the Body Love Treaty’s self-acceptance message. These covers have not been cherry-picked to make a point — they are the covers from February 2010 through July 2010 inclusive. Just in case my findings are not clear to everyone, I have marked them with an old-timey pointing hand. So let’s see the results.
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I don’t often post outfits during the summer because, frankly, my summer wardrobe is kind of boring. It’s a dress and a pair of shoes. Voilà! That’s pretty much how it goes every day. I took a picture on Friday afternoon anyway. Because it’s been awhile. What you’re seeing above is a Calvin Klein dress — originally $120+, I got it at Ross for $40, and it’s sort of insulting that anyone is expected to pay full price for this thing. It’s not even lined. What’s the $120 for? The label inside? The denim bolero is wicked old and from Lane Bryant. Yes, it is so old that it comes from a time in my life when Lane Bryant was carrying clothing I wanted to wear. The shoes are these oxfords by Report and are somewhat new. Or they would be if I hadn’t been wearing them pretty much every day since I got them.

So there you have it: boring summer outfit. Worry not, my loves, soon fall will descend upon us and I’ll be donning fifteen million layers again.

So I used to do these occasional musical interludes, and in comments to one of the Huge recaps, someone recently suggested I should also have a music blog. I would love this, but blogging being the high-paying and glamorous lifestyle that it is, I have little time to devote to a second blog (if the sarcasm here is not strong enough, I can attempt to reapply it with a hammer).

Instead, and because I am terrible at fluffy posts in general, I intend to take up posting five-track mini-playlists on Fridays. I am using playlist.com for the moment, as I am loath to host these songs on my own server and possibly risk the wrath of the RIAA, even though given my discussion of each track, not to mention my lack of financial gain in employing them, this should fall under fair use. Draconian copyright paranoia FTW. If you have problems with making the playlist work, let me know. I have concerns about its accessibility for folks who use screen readers.

My original playlist for today was far more… depressing. I’ve had a complicated week. Then I made another that leaned more toward the contemplative and semi-obscure. And then I thought, what the hell, let’s do something upbeat! That is where I stand as of this morning, so that is what you’re getting.

This is going to go well, I can already feel it.

1. “Beat Control” // Tilly and the Wall. I dig Tilly the most. This song is actually quite different from much of their other music, though their usual earworm-y qualities are intact, as is their perpetual adolescence. “All these people talking ’bout you now, they don’t make no difference, no.”
2. “Mr. Blue Sky” // Electric Light Orchestra. ELO is the shit. Seriously. They can do no wrong. “Mr. Blue Sky” is a particularly epic and upbeat selection. If you hate this song, I worry about the state of your immortal soul.
3. “Help I’m Alive” // Metric. I came late to the Metric party, and only started paying attention with their most recent album, Fantasies. This particular cut makes me think of zombies. Specifically someone escaping from zombies, which I guess makes it optimistic.
4. “Don’t Stop Me Now” // Queen. Speaking of zombies! I just remembered this song is used to brilliant effect in Shaun of the Dead, though I swear I wasn’t consciously thinking of that when I added it. I added it because Queen makes everything better. (Even zombies.) “I wanna make a supersonic man out of you!”
5. “Caravan Girl” // Goldfrapp. I was listening to Seventh Tree, a near-perfect album in my opinion, for weeks before I really heard this song. It was all “Happiness” and “A&E”, and then suddenly I couldn’t get this song out of my head. A great driving track.

In between episodes, the journal entries of some of our campers appear, as if by magic, on the official Huge website. I’ve heard from a few commenters recently that these entries are written by Miz Dooley herself, and if that’s true, I suppose we can consider them canonical, if we have yet reached the point where Huge merits a canon. Is there fanfiction yet? I’m getting a fair number of Google hits from folks seeking fic, mostly “george and amber”, but as I do not read fanfiction myself I don’t know how one would go about looking for it. “Huge” being a common word, Google isn’t much of a help.

This week’s entry comes from Will, written during the Phantasma viewing. Most of it has to do with Will’s realization that Ian hadn’t read her journal, and that nothing he’d said or done since was an encoded message to her about… about feelings she might have hoped he’d been trying to share. There’s a bit about how Will once wished she could look like Amber, but no longer. And then it comes to:

“At least he didn’t read it. At least I have that. Let him think I like someone else. Or that I don’t like anyone. I’ll be his friend. Nothing’s changed. I can’t just stop hanging out with him. Maybe I could have before, but it’s too late now, I’m in too deep. I just want to be near him. No matter how bad it hurts sometimes.”

Reading this, I felt a tiny shock of recognition, palpable but thready, distant, familiar. In the dining room of the home I share with my husband, there is a cedar chest that came from my grandmother’s house, which my father kindly and at great expense shipped to me from Florida many years ago, with the writing desk that had been in my childhood bedroom for as long as I can remember. The cedar chest is piled high with books, like every other surface, but inside it holds journals and diaries going back twenty-five years, tinging them all with a musty smell which makes them seem older than they are, although they are, indeed, getting older all the time. I read that paragraph above, and then numbly, almost involuntarily, went to the cedar chest to open it, to make certain that my journals were still there.

My age has been a recurring theme in these recaps: my distance from my teenage years, my inappropriate crushing(s) on various cast members. I remember the things — songs, books, movies — that spoke to me then and none of them spoke to me as clearly as Will does here, because Will bears a marker that I bore too, one that had shaped my entire perception of myself for all of the life that I could remember, at that point. Sure, Will is a little butch, a little aggressive, a little too smart for her own good, and these were all parts of me then — but Will is also fat, and fat is an amplifer for everything else that seems to be wrong with you. If you are broken, it is because you are fat, and if you are fat, it must be because you are broken; welcome to this maze with no exit, no hope of redemption.

I continue to be surprised by how sweet the adolescent angst of the kids of Camp Victory seems to me now, seen from this vantage point, far up on a hill looking down on the battlefield. Seen in totality it is epic, immense, even beautiful. Seen in microcosm, as with Will’s journal entry, it is devastating and brutal, the difference between the political outcome of a great battle in an unending war, versus the acute pain of an individual who is losing their fight, or whose fight has already been lost. And even this, even this I can watch with a sadistic fondness: You won’t always feel so much, I tell her, in my head, as I tell my teenage self, who still stomps around bitterly in the background noise of my mind from time to time. Is it my age that makes all this seem so tender and innocent and blurry around the edges? I remember the angst, but years have made even the angst palatably savory. I wrote some time ago, in my advice to sixteen-year-olds, about the numbness that age can bring –

“You will, slowly, cease to feel everything so acutely. Pain will hurt less, but joy will be more fleeting. Injustices that once seemed outrageous and blinding will fade into the grey background noise of life. Some of you will be relieved to leave this behind; some of you will fight ferociously to chase after your enthusiasm and your rage and to not let it slip out of view over the horizon.”

I am forever chasing, and I can relate to their misery with the luxury of hindsight, of knowing it will all turn out okay for me, because it always has. There is validation in Huge, for those who have or who continue to struggle with uncertainty, insecurity, hopelessness, fear — a validation you will not find anywhere else right now. C. S. Lewis once said: “We read to know we are not alone.” This is why I watch this show; this is probably why you watch this show, and read these recaps, and this blog, and any other blogs you read, et cetera, et cetera. For company. For comradeship. For commiseration.

Previously: Twilight took a beating, Wayne built a fence, and Chloe/Trent shippers were satisfied.

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Update: Lane Bryant has apologized.

So! Earlier today, it seems someone at the Lane Bryant Marketing Gulag fell asleep at the switch. Maybe they were hungover following a raucous night of obnoxious-print-draped debauchery. Maybe they were delirious from the smell of the chemicals out of which their clothing is made. Whatever the reason, someone thought it was a good idea to tweet the following, which I have taken the liberty of screencapping:

Whence does the link go, my dears? It goes to the Cafe Press store of Natalie Perkins, also known as the fancy lady behind Definatalie.com. Specifically the link goes to a t-shirt on which one of Natalie’s designs is printed, a cheeky little talk-bubble asking “Does my fat arse look fat in this?” (Myself, I went for the gym bag emblazoned with “fat” on one side — it arrived today and I look forward to carrying it around my local L.A. Fitness with an obnoxious degree of self-importance.)

The sum total being that giant apparel-vomiting corporate manufacturer Lane Bryant — and let’s be straight here, Lane Bryant’s Twitter feed is representing the public face of the company, for better or worse — thought it was totally acceptable to rag on an independent plus-sized artist and blogger who lives in bloody buggery Australia for making a t-shirt that they deem “unnecessary”.

As a result of this misstep, Lane Bryant’s taken a pretty sound beating on Twitter today. They responded to a few at first, and then quickly developed selective hearing on the subject (HAY LOOK GUYS A DRESS WITH A ZIPPER!*). I am left to wonder if they’re listening.

Back in the day, the original Fatshionista LiveJournal Community — for which I was a member of the incredible and tireless mod team for nearly five years before taking a leave of absence a couple months ago — was a common outlet for folks looking to vent about lousy customer service or unfair company policies in the plus-size fashion world. What it could also do was act as a staging area for folks to mobilize and organize responses to these issues. Old Navy was yanking plus sizes out of stores, and the Fatshionista army was there to demand free return shipping (which was later taken away, but still). Torrid used really bizarre and ethnically-offensive item descriptions, and after many outraged emails, not only were the descriptions changed, but an apology was issued. The plus size tights at We Love Colors? Used to suck. Lo, did they suck mightily. The Fats LJ community was instrumental in helping them not to suck so much anymore. These are just a few examples off the top of my head.

I’m not personally real big into consumer advocacy. I respect and admire the folks who are motivated to do it, but it’s just not my bag. So I’ve always been amazed when the workings of a bunch of angry fat customers on a LiveJournal community could actually change things. It reminds me, as it should remind us all, that even though we may be fighting tremendous cultural forces, there are people who have our backs, maybe even people we don’t know, but who share our hopes for a world where all bodies are respected and appreciated.

I’m not going to suggest we boycott Lane Bryant. It’s a sad and sorry state of affairs, but for many people living in large swathes of the US, Lane Bryant is IT. You can’t tell folks to boycott the only store that carries clothing that fits them. Lane Bryant knows this, to an extent — and certainly, fat people who aren’t self-loathing may actually demand clothing from them that is of better quality and more, well, fashionable. But you know, it’s not such a radical idea that a plus-size clothing store should want to promote itself as a place where plus-size-wearing people can go to feel good about themselves. It’s not so unthinkable that such an environment would be good for business. And it seems to go without saying that dissing a prominent plus-size blogger and thereby alienating many of that store’s customers — hilariously, many of their most vocal customers at that! — is not the wisest way of going about it.

But you have a voice. As a customer, you have a right, if not a responsibility, to stand up and speak out when a company you patronize — in this case, because you may not have any other choice — does something wrong. I don’t know if Lane Bryant is listening — of my many experiences witnessing Mass Fatshionista Wrath, Lane Bryant has not been particularly responsive. But you can still speak up. Maybe they’ll hear. Maybe they’ll even listen. At minimum, maybe they’ll realize that if they can’t stomach the idea of body-positivity, then they should keep to quietly producing clothing and leave the politics to the rest of us.

—-

*Extreme inside joke: one wonders if Aria is running their Twitter feed.

ETA: YOU MUST ALSO CONSULT THIS AMAZING OLD SPICE GUY / LANE BRYANT SPOOF BY POLIANA. So fucking brilliantly hilarious. I am dead.

So I’ve been alive for thirty-three years now. When I reached plain old thirty, I was told by a great many folks that my thirties would be awesome, because their thirties were awesome, or were in the process of being awesome. I believe them. But my thirties — the three years by which I have to judge them — have been decidedly mundane. I don’t feel any wiser; indeed, if possible I feel like even less of an adult than I did in my twenties. I do feel older, which has good points and bad points but about which I am primarily apathetic. I’m no more financially or professionally well-off than I was in my twenties, but that may be as much owing to broader economic problems as to anything I’ve done or failed to do on an individual level.

The best thing about being in my thirties is that it’s increased my awareness on two crucial and related issues. For one, I am not immortal. I’ve always been tremendously lucky — dare I say privileged, lest readers evaporate? — in that I’ve not had much reason to confront the inevitable truth that my life is finite. My occasional ponderings of the abyss have really only been encouraged in the context of either historic cemeteries or unfathomable cosmic theory. For two, time goes faster as you age. This isn’t something anyone can explain to you when you’re younger, because it sounds ordinary enough but then it happens and one day you find yourself looking around thinking, where did the past decade go? What year was that? How long have I been growing up, and when will I know that I’m done? (My suspicion, at thirty-three, is that the answers to these final two questions are forever, and never.)

The idea of fatness as something other than an embarrassment or a temporary ailment came to me as a result of Susan Stinson’s novel, Fat Girl Dances With Rocks, which I read slowly, standing up, in the late lamented Tower Records on Newbury Street, when I was nineteen years old. I spotted the book whilst browsing, and I paused because I had seen it before, mentioned in Sassy magazine, when I was in high school. I told myself that I wasn’t going to buy it because I was a student and dollars were scarce, but the truth was that I wasn’t going to buy it because it had the word “fat” on the cover, and bringing such a book to the register to purchase would be like allying myself with that word. Instead, I went back to Tower Records daily, after class, and stole the book, page by page, word by word, by reading it in the store. The unhappy ending to this story came when someone bought it — or else it was moved or otherwise lost — and I felt regret, deep regret and loss.

A couple years after that I mustered the courage to order another fat-titled book, and there weren’t many in the late 90s, from the fledgling amazon.com. It was, unsurprisingly, Marilyn Wann’s seminal Fat!So?, and the rest is history.

I’ve been doing fat — living it, performing it, questioning it, and deconstructing it — in one way or another since then, since I first laid a hand on Susan’s novel in Tower Records, since I first burned through Fat!So? in a single evening and began to memorize the statistics and arguments contained therein, as tools, weapons even, to validate my continued existence. I’d had a lifetime of hating my body thus far, for failing to be thin when I had worked harder for that goal than I’d thought possible to do and still fail. Wanting something to be real does not make it real, no matter how intensely you throw your want at it.

Occasionally, very occasionally, I’ll still get the drive-by comment here that goes something like: “You complain so much; why not just lose weight?” Well, first, I don’t think I complain so much as I make observations and tell stories — I am capable of manufacturing vivid complaints of immaculate purity, and they do not sound like the things I write here. But this is subjective. No, what these comments impress upon me is the enormity of the task I’ve been about for so many years. I find them laughable, and not simply because losing weight may be inconceivable-to-impossible. It’s that the very core of this observation belies the commenter’s complete failure to grasp my purpose. Even if assimilation is possible, problems are not solved by assimilation. If they were, then no one who currently fits within standardized beauty standards would have to grapple with their self-esteem. And they do. I am not confronting simple, individual injustices here, of sometimes being treated badly. I am defying and opposing all the social systems that value some appearance-based characteristics over others, and which thusly contribute to a culture in which people who fail to comply — or who overtly resist — are punished.

Fuck that.

I don’t do this for personal validation. At least not anymore, though surely that was once the case, and is probably at least initially true for many people who come to radical forms of self-acceptance. I do it because it is right, and because everyone deserves respect and justice no matter what they look like. You are not required to be awesome in your fatness. I do not need you to be awesome in your fatness in order for me to feel justified in being awesome in my own. You can be awesome in your fatness, if you want, or you can choose another way. I will continue on with my own life in my own body no matter what you decide. Because this is what I do. I’m stubborn and outspoken and ridiculous and outrageous and defiant and I make observations and I tell stories and I cause problems.

I just want you to know that awesomeness is possible. Always. Your body is not a tragedy. It is the only one you get, no matter how it may challenge or confound or frustrate or thrill you, and fighting your body just isn’t worth the hurt and the divide.

When I was in Los Angeles last month, I spent a beautiful day in Santa Monica with my dear friend M. That afternoon, M explained to me her theory of Universal Obedience, which basically states that the universe has a way of directing you to the things you’re meant to do, and you can resist, but you’re still going to do them, and the more you fight the harder it’s going to be. So when I was recently approached about writing a book, it wasn’t a surprise. Even now, as I find the idea terrifying and intoxicating in equal measures, it’s still not a surprise. So I’m writing a fucking book. Seriously. Don’t ask me to say more on the matter — I’ll say more when I feel comfortable doing so. I’m writing a fucking book because this is what I do and I’m thirty-three fucking years old and it’s probably time I got my head round the idea that what I do and what I write might have an effect on people, out there, like those other books had an effect on me. That I might be good at it. That it might be useful to someone. That I can contribute to the chorus I first heard so distantly, so many years ago.

Our voices matter. Now I’m going to raise mine a little louder.

Way back in the first episode, Ian and Will first bonded, as it were, over a shared appreciation for the Pixies. Somewhere, in one of the many interviews I’ve read (the best yet being this piece in The Advocate), producer Savannah Dooley comments that while the Pixies are as good a band to bond over as any, she also had in mind that Black Francis/Frank Black is a — I don’t remember how she put it, a “big guy” or some other friendly euphemism.

I write a lot of imaginary letters to Savannah Dooley in my head these days. Typically, they go: “Dear Savannah Dooley: I love you. Thank you so much. Cheers, Lesley.” But the letter I composed after reading the above began: “Dear Savannah Dooley: That’s great. But let me tell you about Gossip.”

Previously: Amber got a hoodie from George; Alistair got blown off by his sister. Wayne the survey guy appeared and got Dr. Gina even more flustered than usual, and Will couldn’t believe Ian didn’t really read her journal.

It’s evening in the girls’ cabin, and hooray, we get more Twilight spoofery. Chloe’s reading a magazine about the alleged romance between the stars of Phantasma, everyone’s favorite vampire ghost love story. Amber is dubious, and Chloe brandishes the magazine, saying, “Look at this body language! He’s unconsciously protecting her with his arm!” I wonder if the screenwriters read Jezebel’s Midweek Madness. That’s good shit, yo.

As the girls debate the veracity of the backstage romance, Will announces that the fake RPatt is gay, which she knows because she saw him making out with a guy at a club in London. Sierra takes this badly and bursts into tears, to be comforted by Carter. I’d wondered why Carter — played by Ashley Fink, who has also played an awesome fat girl on Glee — has been MIA for a couple episodes now, so I’m glad she’s back. Amber tells Chloe she hasn’t seen Phantasma — she was supposed to go with her mom, but mom lost her job that week and they had to move. Oho! Interesting shift from the source material here; maybe Amber’s mom isn’t going to be a caricature of disability. I also like that Amber’s class difference is being explored so delicately over time, rather than us being beat over the head with it, or her being tokenized as the poor kid.
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Kids, I’m bringing you the ultimate in lazy blogging: recycling my own words. I wrote the following in August of 2008, but I think it bears occasional repeating. In other news, I apologize for this joint being all-Huge all-the-time right now, but I’m juggling several projects at the moment. Your regularly-scheduled post-diversity should return soon.

Here’s the newsflash: Race affects me.

I’m white. I’m white as white gets. You’d be hard pressed to find whiter. I am so white, in fact, that I could tell tales of overt, organized participation in racism amongst certain of my great-grandparents. As a child I heard elderly family members toss the N-word around at the dinner table. That’s my ancestry, that’s where I come from, in part. I’m fortunate enough to also come from other relatives who lived their lives in decidedly, demonstrably anti-racist ways, though not everyone has that balance. I think for all the indignance that a lot of white people express when allegations of plain-spoken racism against people of color comes up, it’s probably a little closer to home than we like to admit. Generationally, we can’t be as far removed as we’d like to imagine, because culture didn’t change that long ago, and hasn’t really changed as dramatically as we like to think besides.

This affects me; race affects me. If you’re white, race affects you too. And I don’t mean other folks’ races, which is often the mistaken assumption a lot of white folks seem to make whenever the subject comes up. Being white affects you. It is a function of our privilege as white folks that allows us the option of living our lives without knowing the how or the why - an option, I might add, that is not afforded to the majority of people of color. Race ain’t something that happens to other people. Race is not external to you. Your race influences, to one degree or another, how everyone anywhere interacts with you, what they assume about you, how you’re treated in public and private spaces, the kind of attention you get, the expectations placed upon you.

Because most of these interactions and assumptions associated with whiteness are positive, we get to walk around feeling like nothing’s wrong, everything’s cool, race ain’t our problem.

That’s white privilege.

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