Why white people can’t see there is ‘White Reality’ and ‘Everyone Else’s Reality’ [View all]

By Jamie Varon

When I turned 16 and started driving, I was afraid of speeding tickets. I hated the police in an abstract way because I hated having to follow the law of the road. I wanted my rebellion and my 80 mph on the freeway.

Since getting my license, I’ve been let go with a warning more times than I’ve been issued a ticket. For someone who spent her twenties consistently speeding, driving recklessly, and generally not caring much about whether I was breaking the law or not, I’ve been pulled over a negligible number of times. And on the off-chance I saw police car lights flashing in my rearview mirror, I never feared for my life. Not once. I was never scared of the police—I was just concerned about the repercussions of a traffic ticket.

So, when I started to see video proof of police brutality towards people of color—particularly black people—I was horrified at first, but then I was skeptical. What had they done to incite this behavior? What was missing from this video? How could officers actually treat people like this?

To me, it felt like there were two kinds of police: the ones I saw on video and the ones I met in my life. I realized, then, that part of my white privilege was being able to trust police to have my best interests in mind; to trust that they assumed my innocence; to trust they’d be rational when dealing with me. Once I recognized that my experience with the police wasn’t universal, I started to listen, to recognize my privilege, and to believe people of color. I wish I’d realized this earlier, but that’s the insidiousness of privilege: It’s so entrenched that you don’t even realize it’s an advantage.

Systemic racism, police brutality, the very real disadvantages that people of color face—all of this can be hard to make sense of, especially if your experience with authorities has been vastly different. As someone who’s been championing social justice causes for more than a decade, I thought to myself: If I was this ignorant, this blinded by my own experiences, other white people must be, too—probably even more so.

http://fusion.net/story/352140/white-people-reality-people-of-color-reality/