What It Means To Be White

Being white means being more privileged. Throughout history, fair skin has been believed to be somehow superior and preferred to darker skin. I realize that it is only a color and a skin tone, but prejudices and stereotyped are so ingrained into our systems that we can hardly choose to ignore them. They are there whether we like them or not, and there is truth to them. When I say that being white means being more privileged, I am not necessarily referring to the idea that white people have nicer cars or bigger houses in suburbia, although that could very easily be the case. I am talking specifically about being of Caucasian decent. There are tangible inequalities between the daily life of a white person and that of any other race. For example, if taking a standardized test and asked to list ethnicity, a white person can simply choose to fill in the "Caucasian" bubble. They don't really truly have to specify what race they are, they have an option of hiding it. Anyone else, however, has to fill in the correct bubble, whether that be "Asian", "African-American", or "Hispanic". Those choices are far more specific, and therefore slightly less equal, since it is not the first, most prominent choice. If this were a dominantly black community, the choices would say "African-American" and then proceed to list something along the lines of "Irish", "English", "Italian", "Swedish", or "German" and so on and so forth. If the world weren't racist at all, all of the choices would be there and everyone would have the option of listing what ethnicity they are. This was just one example, however. These same subtle inequalities occur all the time, and very often subconsciously. As far as appearance, people can be from a wide variety of countries, but white people can hide that. They can just be white. Black people always have to be black, Asian people always have to be Asian. It all goes back to the idea of the "other" and how any variation from a White, Protestant male is automatically one of them. Perhaps I am being too harsh, but a lot of my opinion on this was realized when I read Watching The Canary in a Sociology class. It is about the subconscious expectations between races and the apparent pre-determined destiny that is self-fulfilled by each of these races.