Different Shades of White Privilege

Two stories this week have made me think about the different shades of white privilege.  On one hand, the recent Old Navy ad, built around the evidently amusing scenario of a white policewoman (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) pulling over a carful of millennials, of mixed races, seemingly for no reason at all, shows how clueless white privilege can make young ad-writers and marketing executives and corporate retailers.  Could everyone involved in green-lighting this ad have been unaware that we are in the middle of a national conversation about racial profiling, police tactics, and the tragedies that result from violent escalations resulting from random traffic stops?   For the whizz-kids who designed the Old Navy campaign, wrapped in the insulating comfort of their 5- and 6-figure salaries, the sad fates of Sandra Bland, Samuel DuBose, and Water Scott never happened.  It's just funny to portray a poorly-trained officer, bumbling through a traffic stop, recklessly accusing the car's passengers of undocumented crimes, the entire confrontation ending in an inexplicable impulsive act (in this case, the officer hopping in her patrol car to race off to Old Navy to grab up some bargains).  Maybe when your business is selling cheap casual clothes to white suburban moms, you don't have to worry too much about black lives.

The other story is the reporting around the new study by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, which identified a spike in mortality among white, middle aged men.  The jump is connected with suicide, liver disease associated with alcoholism, and drug abuse.  Middle class black men still have higher mortality rates, but that's not a story David Brooks cares about.  Shielded behind his gated community of privilege, Brooks recently became unnerved by Case and Deaton's research, and the connection between these lives and the decline of the post-war economy that once generated financial security for millions of working class families.  This decline has been the defining economic narrative of the country for a generation, yet it seemed like news to Brooks.  Detroit's tumble into an abyss, like Cleveland's, and Youngstown's and Flint's and Gary's, and the vast human toll that the collapse of the industrial midwest brought with it, evidently escaped Brooks' notice.  But scientific evidence that white people pay some of that cost made Brooks philosophical, wringing his hands over "social dysfunction." Like other media voices, the idea that a decades-long improvement in American life expectancy has been derailed by the consequences of income inequality, joblessness and underemployment, and the collapse of American manufacturing was brought into stark relief by the discovery that even white people, with all of their perceived cultural strengths, couldn't escape the grim reality of America's neo-feudal present. Without being fully aware of what he was doing, Brooks (and Case and Deaton's research) has directed our attention to the fact that things are so dismal in America, that not even white people can escape injury.  

What much of the media, and Republican politicians, and Tea Party voters can't grasp is that we need to point out that Black Lives Matter.  Because Old Navy doesn't think they do.  And commentators like Brooks doesn't think they do.  If he did he would have noticed the "social dysfunction" associated with the decimation of broad sectors of Black America, all the miserable schools, and health disparities, and joblessness, and global-leading rates of incarceration, and hand gun violence.  Those 16 year olds gunned down in Chicago's streets are as much a product of "social dysfunction," as the graying white men drinking themselves to death in Case and Deaton's study, but Brooks can't be moved to worry about them.  We don't need to say White Lives Matter, Brooks is ready to tell us they do.