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Putting together the two words "white" and "pride" make as much sense to me as "banana" and "carburetor". People can make the connections and emphasize them ad naseum, but they are irrelevant to anything that's important to me. My ancestors did great things -- so did yours, most likely. Why does it matter where they are from? Good for all of them. Only a fool is ashamed his skin.
Prejudice is a human frailty, and every suffers from it. Racism is a socio-enonomic act, and in the US you gotta be white to do it, because you have to have the power to yield it. Some parts of white America imagine that they are unfairly discriminated against because of their skin, but their families still have far fewer barriers to get an education and get hired than the families of minorities, all because of active discrimination against minorities. As a white man I've seen and heard that discrimination many times. That's the silent power of racism in the US. Discrimination from a position of power is exactly what racism is and does. Since I'm a white, hetero, healthy middle class man, I don't see how I could be discriminated against in the US.
I'm white and very advantaged as such in the USA -- not every day of my life, but certainly in general. I didn't construct things that way, and I eliminate unfairness when I see it. I wince when I think I've been treated unfairly, but resentment towards the fortunate people around me is no way to solve the problem. As far as race is concerned, it means almost nothing to me. I'm a genealogist, and I like to think of people in terms of their immediate family, with the people they love. Their families do most everything my family does. Some customs seem pretty far out there, but then again the conversations at my Thanksgiving table get pretty weird too. BFD!
Scholarships --everybody gets uptight about scholarships. I think the variety of scholarships for "minorities" is a fabulous thing. They were conceived and funded and lobbied for by people generally thinking of their own families -- their people, their culture, their children -- having opportunities they never had. Blaming the good fortune of others in terms of scholarships makes no sense to me. Should I focus my frustration at my cost of college on the rich white man up the street, whose life has afforded him more "opportunities" than mine? That sounds ridiculous. But we very easily target people who look different from us, usually because we know so very little about them. My sister married a Puerto Rican man, who was very well educated and provided well for his family. He developed a brain tumor, and fought it for a decade, and their family lost nearly every asset they had earned. When it became time for their daughter to go to college, she applied for minority scholarships because she was half Puerto Rican, and those scholarships got her into an Ivy league school she could have never afforded without her minority scholarship. She might have moved ahead of another person financially because of who her dad was, but was it unfair? Should there be more PRs in Ivy League schools?
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less I say, smarter I am
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