Hi,

my name is Dr. Cynthia Alease Smith, and I am an Anti-Racism essayist and educator. I read your essay with great interest. It is difficult, I’m sure, to come to grips with the fact of “privilege" when you can only see your value in terms of finance, economics, and wealth. But that was purposeful, generational conditioning, and it worked.

Of course, you wouldn’t see privilege as anything but economic, since that is the only lens through which you view your own subjugation without realizing it is just that. Many white people treat their unearned merit in this country as essentially the “natural” order of things, the “normal” way of living.

However, while you and all “regular" white people are oppressed through the white economic class caste, Black people are oppressed not only through economics, but through law and justice, education, housing, health, entertainment, politics, etc.; all institutions within this culture, by means of a system of Racism, which is the systematic subjugation within established institutions in the U.S. through structurally designed denial and limited apportionment of opportunity, equity, equality and justice, to control the formerly enslaved and their descendants after the Enslavement ended, and Reconstruction failed. This system ensures the ideology of white superiority and “exceptionalism" is sustained, and assures your own oppression remains limited to one area: economic.

I am confident you are aware that it isn’t enough simply to acknowledge dominance without accountability.

I recently wrote an essay discussing the term “White Privilege.” I invite you to read it.

https://medium.com/the-baldwin/equality-and-justice-an-examination-of-the-natural-order-of-things-193fdc55248a