There may well have been some privilege you lacked that led to your experience in high school, but it wasn't white privilege. There's lots of types of privilege, and the all intersect with one another.
I think there's some confusion because there really was a process by which light-skinned Jews became white, meaning that white privilege was extended to them even though there was (and is) still a degree of anti-Semitism operant in society. Today, I have white privilege because law and society code me as white and I lack Christian privilege because I'm of Jewish descent and am there oppressed by anti-Semitism. Between fifty and a hundred years ago, Jews weren't coded white, but regarded as the "lightest of the black."
There was a time when people would literally say, "Jesus wan't a Jew, he was a white man" as if they were mutually exclusive categories.
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Date: 2010-08-24 07:59 pm (UTC)I think there's some confusion because there really was a process by which light-skinned Jews became white, meaning that white privilege was extended to them even though there was (and is) still a degree of anti-Semitism operant in society. Today, I have white privilege because law and society code me as white and I lack Christian privilege because I'm of Jewish descent and am there oppressed by anti-Semitism. Between fifty and a hundred years ago, Jews weren't coded white, but regarded as the "lightest of the black."
There was a time when people would literally say, "Jesus wan't a Jew, he was a white man" as if they were mutually exclusive categories.