It's not black and white

I've been studying cultural perspectives within counselling and it's making me think. I am a little wary of writing a post about ethnicity because I know it is so easy to cause offence or to be insensitive. I want to state up front that this is not my intention and I am just trying to make sense of stuff I'm learning right now. Think of me as a child taking my first steps if you think I am being naive or insensitive. If you think I am blind to something, please tell me - if no-one points me in the right direction, I may never see and I really want to learn.
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I’ve never thought about what it meant to be white. It has never crossed my mind to think about it. It felt somehow insignificant. Apparently this is quite normal for white people. We don’t really associate with white ethnicity or ever think about its implications. Some studies say that we are ‘trained to be blind to the fact of our privileges’.

Now, for possibly the first time, I am thinking about my whiteness and the privilege it brings. I have always felt lucky, perhaps another term for privilege, that I am intelligent, that I am ‘good enough’ to always get a job. I recognise that I have been luckier than others in always having work, because I am bright, because I am attractive – I know this makes a difference in interviews – and because I am naturally sociable, outgoing and empathic. I have never thought about the fact of being white as helping me to get work, but now I do think about it, I wonder if perhaps I have been luckier than some because I am white. 

I wonder if despite being a ‘lovely person’ and actually being good at what I do, whether being attractive, white and unmarried has also helped me enormously. I wonder and I know for sure it’s true in some cases. I don’t feel guilty, I feel very lucky. Although I see that being white may have helped me, I also know that if I was shit at my work, I would not have been allowed to stay employed…but then I question that statement. Could I have got away with more, I wonder, because I am white?

Should I feel guilty then, I wonder? And I think, no. I used to feel terribly guilty (as a teenager) for being intelligent and having an easier time at school than others, but I know now that I shouldn’t have. I also know that it wasn’t always easy – there was being a foreigner with an odd name, there was not being rich or having attended one of the posh universities, there was having illness in the family, to cope with on top of ordinary daily stresses, on many occasions providing support that other people wouldn’t have had a clue about.

As long as I don’t boast or use my privileges unfairly to get one over on someone else, then surely I should be grateful for whatever I have been blessed with, and use it in a positive way to help me get on in life and to make a difference. Be grateful for what I have and accept the things I don’t have. Surely ingratitude would have the same outcome as feeling guilty. I would waste opportunities to make a difference and, for me, that would be a crime.

But then I come back to things that might change - I will always be white, intelligent and sociable, but I may one day be less attractive (as I age, perhaps) or I may not always be unmarried. I wonder how those changes would impact my chances of employment and I feel a tinge of anger that they may make things harder. I have, perhaps, taken for granted the things that make my life easier. I feel a tinge of what it must be like to have to fight that little bit harder for something you know you could do standing on your head, perhaps a million times better than the person who got the job, a little bit more attractive than me, a little bit more sociable, with money or connections I could never hope to have, or simply, a different skin colour.