{"id":30699,"date":"2013-04-28T21:40:28","date_gmt":"2013-04-28T21:40:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30699"},"modified":"2014-12-19T15:42:26","modified_gmt":"2014-12-19T15:42:26","slug":"i-thought-he-was-white-you-know-a-regular-american-the-boston-marathon-bombing-shows-us-how-white-privilege-hurts-white-people-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30699","title":{"rendered":"“I Thought He was White You Know a Regular American”: The Boston Marathon Bombing Shows Us How White Privilege Hurts White People… Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

“I Thought He was White You Know a Regular American”: The Boston Marathon Bombing Shows Us How White Privilege Hurts White People… Again<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

We Are Respectable Negroes<\/a>
\n2013-04-19<\/p>\n

Chauncey DeVega<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Race is a social construction. There is only one race, the human race.<\/strong> But, race has historically been something negotiated by the courts, has legal standing, and has impacted people’s life chances across the color line.<\/p>\n

As Cheryl Harris<\/a> and Ian Haney Lopez<\/a> have detailed, to be “white” is to have a type of property in America. Because “Whiteness” is property it can be inherited, passed down from one person to another as an inheritance, and has value–both symbolic and monetary–under the law, and in the broader society.<\/p>\n

European immigrants understood (and continue to understand in the present) the value of Whiteness. In the most stark example, they knew to distance themselves from black folks as a way of become fully “white” and a “real American.”<\/p>\n

In addition, the United States government helped to create race and reinforce the value of Whiteness when it passed immigration laws that privileged “desirable” races from Europe over those “less desirable” from Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world.<\/p>\n

And of course, the racist implementation of the G.I. Bill<\/a> and FHA<\/a> Housing Programs after World War 2<\/a> helped to create Whiteness again by creating a segregated place called “suburbia,” and creating a stark divide in the racial wealth and income gap that is still with us today.<\/p>\n

Race works through a type of “common sense” that is based on individual experiences, cultural norms, (misunderstandings of) history, the law, politics, as well as psychological motivations and decision-making that operate on both a conscious and subconscious level.<\/strong> In total, the race business is a type of magic and pseudo-science. This makes it no less real or important.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Whiteness is synonymous with “American” for those who have socialized into what sociologists such as Joe Feagin<\/a> have termed “the white racial frame<\/a>.” Here, common sense dictates that “those people” look “American” and those “other people” do not…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I Thought He was White You Know a Regular American”: The Boston Marathon Bombing Shows Us How White Privilege Hurts White People… Again We Are Respectable Negroes 2013-04-19 Chauncey DeVega Race is a social construction. There is only one race, the human race. But, race has historically been something negotiated by the courts, has legal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,394,20],"tags":[10174,1965,728,2340,12655],"class_list":["post-30699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-chauncey-devega","tag-cheryl-harris","tag-ian-haney-lopez","tag-joe-feagin","tag-we-are-respectable-negroes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}