Invisible White Privilege

A few weeks ago a YouTube video surfaced showing two University of Oklahoma white frat boys leading a song that pledged to keep their fraternity racially pure even if it meant lynching a few students. The University moved quickly to close the fraternity's chapter and expel those involved.

The video and its contents did not surprise me. What struck me was that the young men in the video were only 19-years-old, yet they held sway over other students' futures. They possessed what I call invisible white privilege. Invisible to those who possess it, that is, seen by those who do not.

While I have been unable to find a study that places a dollar value on fraternity membership, it is most likely very high. A look among the country's leaders and you will find few who have not emerged from Greek Life with valuable contacts that helped them ascend the ladder to power. One study posits that only two US Presidents since 1825 were not members of fraternities (I actually doubt this because the Military Academies do not have fraternities and two presidents, Andrew Johnson and Harry Truman did not attend college). Still, the number is likely high and the study's more rigorous elements showed a high correlation between fraternity membership and prestigous jobs. In short, fraternities are deeply woven into the mechanics of upward mobility. Blocking someone because of race exhibits the worst traits of the old boy network.

The Oklahoma video comes shortly after the U.S. Department of Justice's report on Ferguson, Missouri. The two events show clear evidence that keeping poor people poor, whether out of prejudice or greed, is a working business/governing model in the U.S. Factor in the student loan industry, the judicial-industrial complex, and the plethora of businesses that benefit from poverty and the decline in upward mobility over the last four decades is no surprise.

The subject of class and race have provided much fertile ground for writing projects. Currently, along with my wife and partner, Anniken Davenport, I am developing a book proposal for a non-fiction book, tentatively titled, The Business of Poverty in which we hope to explore the various interests who benefit from perpetuating poverty. Anniken is also writing a dystopian novel that follows the exploitation curve into the future entitled Labor Force. To get a feel for the novel, check out the Labor Force novel blog.

Finally, a short story I wrote recently attempts to address invisible white privilege in its native habitat, the southern gated community. The story, entitled Lovely People, is now being considered by several magazines for publication.

The Southern gated community is a post-civil rights era phenomenon. As cities became more integrated, upper middle class whites moved to the suburbs. When the suburbs started integrating, the gated community filled the need of the paranoid well-to-do.

Lovely People is an homage of sorts to Flannery O'Connor. I firmly believe that if she were alive today, she would be writing about gated communities. In her staunch Catholicism, Flannery referred to the South as a Christ-haunted land. Her stories exaggerate and ridicule the hot, emotionally-driven fundamentalism so popular in the South. While those elements remain, I would posit that Nat Turner's ghost also haunts the South and his specter has built more gated communities than the carpenter from Nazareth.