Why White People are Afraid

http://www.alternet.org/story/36892/

I found this article by Robert Jensen of the University of Texas. He's pretty much nailed on the head why many white people who perhaps do have some idea of white privilege or racial injustice do nothing - fear, on multiple grounds. White people now have to deal with being the problem in the race discussion. This spurs all kinds of axieities of them.

A couple of things that he mentions are that whites in some degree fear what seems now inevitible: becoming the minority in the country. Whites likely will not be the majority demographic in the U.S. They may hold unequal amounts of wealth, but this loss in numbers can mean social and economic changes in the balance of power. This makes whites wonder if they will be treated the same way that non-whites were treated in the past and are currently treated today. Will whites no longer be the equivalent of "American", "normal", "standard"? This causes fear.

He also mentions that with greater economic justice and less privilege, resources would be more evenly distributed. This means whites lose some of the comfortable, higher lifestyle they've come to live in and become accustomed to. This also incites fearful reactions to such ideas of changing white privilege.

Along with the final fear in the article, which is the most obvious, that whites do not want to admit a degree of having been given an unearned head start due to their skin color, I must say that this article is dead on. Jensen points out what I believe is the biggest fear holding Whites back from helping to achieve racial and social justice - the above mentioned fear of "what will happen when we're the minority? How will we be treated?" And oddly enough, it is this fear that will likely lead to the worst result if it is used as an excuse to do nothing.

The more white people live oblivious to social injustice, not speaking out and recognizing the supremacist system set up in our country, and use their guilt and fear as a reason to do nothing, the less sympathy other ethnic groups will likely feel in the U.S. when a time may come when whites no longer hold all of the power demographically. If steps are taken now to correct inequalities based off of hundreds of years of past discrimination, and whites stop using cop-out excuses like "colorblindness", "I never owned a slave!", "my ancestors weren't even here!", "Affirmative Action discriminates against whites!", then maybe history may be kinder in such a hypothetical situation.

One thing is for certain: doing nothing does whites no good.