Posts Tagged ‘Ron Koeberer’
Pop culture, white privilege and widening the lens
This aspect of white privilege has bubbled under the surface of recent debates about college admissions policies and unpaid internships.
As a recent post on the Web site Journos of Color noted, for instance, “The only people who can afford to work full-time for free come from wealth, and generally, if you’re wealthy in America, you’re white.”
Outlook published this July 27, 2013 on the WP Opinions section:
Ron Koeberer/AP – Michael B. Jordan as Oscar Grant in a scene from “Fruitvale Station.”
Many people, especially white people, don’t realize the extent of the disparities that persistent structural privilege creates. According to some estimates, whites on average possess 6 times the accumulated wealth — in the form of home equity, savings and retirement accounts — of blacks.
That discrepancy is explained Not by financial savvy or luck, but by the legacy of now-illegal practices in housing, education and employment that formed the foundation of America’s enduring — and widening — wealth gap between non-Hispanic whites and minorities.
The challenge is creating characters that can transcend polarized and entrenched perceptions of race. This past week, a Washington Post poll found that a sobering 86% of African Americans say blacks and other minorities do not get equal treatment under the law, whereas a majority of whites — 54 percent — say there is equal treatment for minority groups.
In a recent interview about their book “Justice in America: The Separate Realities of Blacks and Whites,” political scientists Jon Hurwitz and Mark Peffley described a “gulf” between African Americans, who largely lack faith in the criminal justice system, and white citizens, who consider it essentially color-blind.
Just as the roots of blacks’ mistrust of the system lie in their unfair treatment over generations, the roots of whites’ optimism can be found in our own history.
Like compounded interest from an investment we never made, the advantages white people enjoy derive from past racist practices and present-day unconscious behaviors that create channels no less wide, deep and real for being largely invisible.
If movies are equipped to do anything, it’s to make those channels visible. And the best films can show viewers how to navigate them.
“Fruitvale Station” does that, in just one brief encounter. The San Francisco street scene may begin with an acute observation of separate realities, but it ends by suggesting a possible bridge, in the simple act of a black character taking the business card of a white man he’s just met.
