About a week ago I stumbled on this tumblr page, white guys doing it by themselves. I thought it was the perfect satirical commentary on the patriarchal “white male” culture we live in.  As I found out after posting a link to the site on Facebook, some of my fellow law students (specifically, white males) did not think so.  They all agreed that our culture should be about promoting diversity, but they didn’t agree with how “anti-white male” everything has become.

It seems as if whenever women or other minority groups make strides, it is at the cost of the “white male” majority.  The baselessness of this argument is perfectly demonstrated in the article, “How Feminism Hurts Men” by Micah J. Murray.

What bothered me most about my fellow students commentary was that they didn’t understand my point: it is not about being a white male, it is the ideology of white male privilege. As Zillah Eisenstein states, “The phallocratic standard in Western industrial societies is white, middle-class male.” Historically, this is fact – whites have always been in more power-filled positions, and this includes white females, like myself.

I think the first step to moving forward is admitting this to ourselves – colorblindness and genderblindness are not the answer. In order to successfully move away from white privilege and towards a society where we can learn to appreciate each other’s differences, we have to accept that the structural inequalities in place position white males at the helm.  As Peggy McIntosh states, “To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions.”

This is not to say that I, or feminism, are “anti-(white) male;” many people have the perception that feminism is about man-hating. Why does it have to be one or the other? Why must we sacrifice the rights of one group in order to elevate the other? Feminism is about human rights, not necessarily women’s rights – we are all a combination of different races, sex/gender, religion, economic status, and more. Feminism is about learning to appreciate those differences in ourselves and in others.

I told all of this to my fellow students, and I hope we (as whites) can become aware of our privilege and learn to use it to change the system of inequality we currently live in.