Privilege and Separation and Representation

James Baldwin in an image from Esquire magazine.

A word stuck out to me from the 1981 BBC documentary The Troubles. The scene was a 1960's parade of Unionists marching through Derry to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne, at which William of Orange secured victory for the Protestants in 1690. The commentator was saying that the Protestants were marching to--among other things--assert their "privilege."

In America today, it is common to hear people speak of white privilege, the way in which white people can freely go about their business without worry that their race will be a factor in how others treat them in our society. The concept was around before Peggy McIntosh's famous 1989 article White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, but that article and the embrace of it by many educators certainly helped to accelerate the use of the term in popular media in the years that followed. But it was not as much in common parlance in the early 1980's (in the United States at least). To hear the British commentator speak of Protestant privilege in Northern Ireland in 1981 really stood out to me, and made me think about whiteness in America in relation to Protestant Unionism in Northern Ireland.

So before we judge a group that has maintained an unsteady dominance in a region since 1690, we as "white" Americans should acknowledge the place we have held in our own region since about 1607. And before we judge the walling off of cities to separate people along sectarian lines, we should look at the history of how real estate developers have built invisible (yet entirely visible, if you are really paying attention) walls between races here in our own cities.

These thoughts were going through my mind as I watched Raoul Peck's ingenious James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro on the night of a day in which I learned that one of my black eighth grade school buddies had been killed in Atlanta, where he had been living. He was something of a legendary MC by the time he died, according to several internet sources (actually eulogized as a "legend" by none other than Kurtis Blow). But I had been unaware of that, pretty much unaware of every development in his life since eighth grade. I wouldn't say we lost track of each other's lives for any real reason; it just sort of happens.

Baldwin talks about childhood friends of different races whose friendships end "at the schoolhouse door" and how walling off one another from each other's lives can lead to very negative outcomes and effects.

And yet, in our country, in spite of the way race plays into all of our major systems--educational, residential, political, economical--there are still black voices in government at every level. Right now, in the United Kingdom, the Nationalist voice has stepped away from the table. While the more moderate Nationalists of the SDLP have lost the three seats they formerly held--and occupied--at Westminster, Sinn Fein has gained three more abstentionist seats, bringing their total of empty chairs to seven. No Nationalists are seated at Westminster anymore, while the Unionist DUP gains an incredibly valuable bargaining chip as they agree to complete Theresa May's Conservative majority in the UK government. All this is going on while Northern Ireland's own power-sharing assembly at Stormont is suspended over the fallout from a green energy funding scandal and other disagreements. Who will make the case to the UK now for the rights of the minority in Northern Ireland?

In I Am Not Your Negro, as Baldwin discusses the Sidney Poitier-Tony Curtis relationship in The Defiant Ones, and the differing white audience and black audience responses to it, he categorizes the white racist impulse as springing from fear of having one's dominant position overturned, while the black antagonistic impulse comes from rage. Perhaps The Battle of The Bogside and similar Northern conflicts spring out of this same construct: Unionists fearful of the loss of their country assert their historical power and privilege, while enraged Nationalists throw petrol bombs. As Baldwin said, not in this particular documentary but elsewhere, in The Fire Next Time, "the glorification of one race (or group) and the consequent debasement of another... always has been and always will be a recipe for murder."

Baldwin's repeated request was for the dominant other to recognize him--and he often speaks of himself as a larger, representative self--as equally human. 

Northern Ireland's story is all of our stories.