Here in Canada, white privilege has been with us for centuries. In my part of the country, Atlantic Canada, the white epidermis has been a pure passport to bliss and favour. For generations Cape Bretoners, for example, have revelled in the advantages that poured on their coal-dusted heads and corrupted lungs from generations of labouring under the earth, stooping with pick and shovel, in the murky, dank, mildewed hell of the coal pits. Privileged? I’ll say. How they lorded it over the folks selling haberdashery in the above-ground stores bathed in sunlight and fresh air. Forty years in a coal mine — if accident or early death had not claimed them — and the world was their grime-coated oyster. What were the odd mine collapses, early deaths, TB, and a lifetime working in darkness and danger compared to the privileges that came their way just from being white?
Likewise a lot of the early men and women who fled the Irish Famines — so white and pale from endless hunger they could pass as ghosts. Sure, they left a lot of their families either starving — literally — or past all emaciation and already into the grave. But they came to the East Coast as servants, went off to the holiday of a seal hunt, or chewed a living out of the thin soil and treacherous sea for generations. It was life as one big open-air picnic — diversified by endless corn beef and cabbage dinners, and the beautiful thought that they didn’t ever have to worry about money or goods, because they didn’t have any money and there weren’t any goods.
But they were white — so privileged crowned their every hour. Up at 4 a.m. to go to sea for the men, up earlier for the women to light the stoves, start the breakfast for their masters, and work their fingers to the bone serving their betters. A privileged life? You betcha.
War was always one of the crowning moments of white privilege. The poorest whites, the least educated, always went to war in the biggest numbers. And there their privilege was to crowd in rat- and rain-filled trenches, huddled next to dead comrades, and then to throw themselves “over the top” to face a frenzy of artillery and rifle fire, where loss of life and loss of limb was preordained.
