And I think that is a huge part of what actual, real white privilege is – not having to think about the colour of your skin all the time and its relation to all aspects of your existence. It has never informed any major decision I have made – or even come close.
Karamo went through huge soul-searching when he was a young man about feeling he was too dark-skinned.Īs a white man living in white-majority countries all my life, I have never been forced to think about my race particularly at all. Mingus was constantly chided for being light-skinned he felt that black people regarded him as essentially white, while to whites he was still seen as black. Yet what both of them contain are large sections about how race has affected the lives of each author to a massive extent. Both are autobiographies by black American men, but after that there are huge differences between them – Beneath the Underdog is a hard-hitting, brilliant book written by a musical genius Karamo is an affable holiday read written by one of the blokes from Queer Eye. Two books that I think are worth citing are Beneath the Underdog by Charles Mingus and Karamo by Karamo Brown. If black people can use ‘white privilege’, doesn’t that sort of negate the whole idea of what ‘white privilege’ is in the first place? In other words, if ‘white privilege’ isn’t ‘white’, what exactly is it then?įor the record, I think there really is such a thing as white privilege – particularly in America. First and foremost is how exactly a black man, particularly in America, can even begin to access ‘white privilege’. There are several confusing things to consider here.