Privilege

Privilege as a distinction between people or classes or societies is never going to disappear. It can be based on skin colour, and also, or as well as, on religion, money, or education, all of which can give one power. We don’t choose at birth to be privileged or to less privileged, it is what, who and where we are. We can choose what we do with it. We can also refuse to be the victims of other people’s privilege, and we may find that within our homes and our friendship groups we each and all have different levels of privilege, of rights and responsibilities.

White Privilege

“White Privilege” is racist prejudice about a person’s skin colour that victimises Black people. In fact, there is only one human race and thousands of variations in skin tones. There are even colourless people with albinism. What then are the dangers of identifying people by their skin and what can we do about “White Privilege” to make the world a better place for people of colour?

White Immunity

Britt Hawthorne posted that “Privilege is a contronym. It’s a word with two opposite meanings, like dust and dust or overlooks and overlooks. (Her) children are most familiar with the definition of privilege meaning something you’ve earned through hard work or maturity. . . . . The point is, they learn that privilege is a GOOD thing and people should earn it.” Britt Hawthorne has taken a lead from Nathan Cabrera who explains that White Privilege is frequently misinterpreted and that “White Immunity” is a better label.  There is no denying the advantages of being White in a world where White people rule the government, the opportunities, the media and the culture, but that doesn’t mean that all White people are equal to each other. Neither does it mean that all White people are discriminatory when often they are simply thoughtless or, as Cabrera says, “immune” to what it means not to be White. In fact, Hawthorne and Cabrera are Black people in the USA, where Trump’s idea of Make America Great Again actually means Make America White Again. America never was “White” and can never be “White.” I quote the 2020 population statistics for the USA from Wikipedia –“white Americans numbered 235,411,507 or 71% of the population, including people who identified as white in combination with another race. People who identified as white alone (including Hispanic whites) numbered 204,277,273 or 61.6% of the population, while non-Latino whites made up 57.8% of the country’s population.”^[35]

Mythical Appearances

I was taught at Cape Town University by a Black lecturer. That changed because the apartheid government ended Academic Freedom and student protests made no difference. I was also taught anatomy at art school and I learned that Africans are a tall long-boned slender and handsome people. In spite of what Racism said about African women’s appearance, I saw this was true. What I also learned was that under the poverty that resulted from apartheid, many women became weak and bloated on a diet mainly of maize meal because they gave what nutrition they could to their children. It was obvious that poverty in rural areas made people less healthy than townsfolk with work and better nutrition.

Social Obligations

What privileges do we all have, Black, all between and White, and what benefits do they give? Does privilege give us power, or create obligations? What does privilege mean for us and our relationships with other people? Is identity the main issue? Social scientists say that from our infancy we identify with people who look like us, sound like us and smell like us. They say also that infants do not appear to see different-looking people as enemies. That happens later maybe through manipulation and propaganda. Humans have however, always fought to have territory, and power and control over it.

Majority or Minority Privilege

“White Privilege” or “Immunity” doesn’t always happen where there is a rich and powerful White majority? It was not the case in Rhodesia before 1980 or South Africa before 1994 where there was White minority rule. The minority Nationalist apartheid government in South Africa was so poor when it came to power that it did it by creating a corrupt bank, the Volksas. In both cases only Whites had the vote but consider, not all White people voted for the government so it is not even possible to lump all White people together as racists.

History and Technology

White Privilege is, or was, a problem is the parts of the world left over from Empires and Republics ruled by pale-skinned people who benefited from an extremely cruel slave trade and a class system that kept most of its people in poverty. How and why did this happen? In every situation where a group of people have held power, they did not do so because of the power of their skin, they did so because of the power of their technology and their weapons. White Europeans may have had the best technology for a while, but they did not invent it. They borrowed, adapted, improved, and stole it from people who looked and were different. They also shared it. There have always been countries and nations with caste systems, and ranks of privilege and power and too many have kept women without either. Again, we need to remember the rigid and discriminatory Caste system in India. There have been many others in world history

Riches, Power and Damaging Privilege

What gives us power? Wealth and weapons? How many rich people live in a world where most are extremely poor? According to the Brookings Institute, “there are only 1,645 billionaires in the world. The figures for this tiny percent of extraordinarily rich are 90 percent of billionaires are male; 65 percent are white; 60 percent are 60 years old or older.” If so few people hold enormous power and riches, how do they control us? White Privilege and White Immunity are real and like other systems of division can be damaging to social cohesion. Can we change them? What are they based on? In any case over 80% of the world population is not White but they are divided too and may see each other as “the other”.

Growing up privileged

Southern Rhodesia was a land of opportunity for Whites and I grew up privileged but understood it was a gift and a responsibility. I was equal to all other people and inversely, all other people were my equal. Being privileged meant I had a good education and learned to question, to reason and to think for myself and to reject racism. Other White Rhodesians like Sir Garfield Todd and his daughter Judy, chose to act on their beliefs that Africans were our equals. It isn’t wise to treat people in one group or another as having the same ideas. In the shameful politics of the Cold War in Africa the Russians used the African desire for nationhood to fight the West while the West supported the apartheid government and Ian Smith in Rhodesia instead of equal human rights but that is another story . . .

Dr Guy Lindsay Scott

On Monday 21st, 2026, my friend Guy was buried. In fact Guy was given a State Funeral as a Vice-President of the Republic of Zambia from 2011 – 2014. He was also the Acting President of Zambia for 3 months after the death of President Michael Sata. Guy was educated at private boarding schools and studied at Cambridge and Oxford Universities. If anyone could have been “labelled” as “privileged” it would be Guy Scott but Guy made absolutely no distinction between himself and any other person in his life. He treated everyone as a person deserving courtesy and equality. He put Zambia and Zambians first. Of course he encountered racism himself from time to time, he was after all the first White President in Africa since 1994.

As Guy said, his skin was white but his blood was black.