As GLBT people, we often ask our heterosexual brothers and sisters to become allies in the fight for GLBT equality. We tell our straight counterparts to be “open-minded,” to not assume that all their friends and acquaintances are straight, to stop making homophobic comments and jokes, to confront their prejudices and homophobia and treat their GLBT friends with dignity and respect. So we think it isn’t too far fetched to ask ourselves to do the same for one sector of our community: GLBT people of color.

Last Friday and Saturday, we, as white GLBT’s, attended the fifth annual Queer People of Color Conference. The conference, hosted at both the San Diego LGBT Community Center and San Diego State University, was an eye-opening/conscious raising event to say the least. Read this week’s story on the event, “Activists of color announce call to action at conference”. The conference, which brought hundreds of young GLBT people of color from across the nation, addressed a number of problems/injustices that GLBT people of color face: the marginalization of GLBT people of color in GLBT history and literature, participating in a GLBT movement that is often dominated by white GLBT activists agendas, fighting the stereotypes that mainstream and often our own GLBT media perpetuate and the fact of white privilege. White privilege? Yes, we said it. White GLBT people are racially privileged.

As scholar Peggy McIntosh defines it (in a widely read article called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”), white privilege is “an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks … that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious.” In her article, McIntosh gives fifty examples of white privilege. Here are a few of them:

• I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.

• I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

• I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the “person in charge”, I will be facing a person of my race.

• My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.

• If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.

At the conference, both SDSU Professor Anne Donadey (in her workshop on white privilege) and The Center’s Latino Service’s Coordinator Carolina Ramos gave examples of white privilege that we think were right on target. Donadey pointed out how only four people of color (all men and straight) are represented in the US Senate, while Ramos addressed how only eight people of color (in a total of 43 honorees) are on The Center’s Wall of Honor. Both are examples of white privilege. It is not because more than 95 percent of the US Senate is simply smarter or more intelligent, but because white straight men have racial (not to mention male) privilege (from the luck of birth) that have allowed them to climb the social hierarchy to become Senate leaders. We believe it’s the same case with The Center’s white honorees. We are not suggesting that all the white US senators and The Center’s white honorees work and achievements should not be recognized or minimized but only to say that they had/have a certain privilege (that gave/gives them a step up in life) that their counterparts of color do not have.

But you might say, ‘But I’m not privileged, I’m GLBT!’ We say, as many scholars have pointed out, people can be both oppressed as a GLBT person and privileged, whether that privilege comes from race, class or gender. For example, white working class GLBTs – who often struggle with finding work or, if they do have a job, struggle making ends meet – still have racial privilege. The difference is that white working class GLBT people have the invisible knapsack that working class GLBT people of color don’t have.

For lots of people, it’s easy to understand oppression but much harder to understand privilege. As Donadey explained in her workshop, those that have grown up with some form of entitlement or advantage (which is to say most of us) – whether its being male or coming from a middle or upper class background – don’t see or recognize it because they/we were born with it. It’s only when you take away or threaten to take away a person’s privilege that they become conscious of it (i.e. the preposterous idea of “reverse discrimination”).

So what do we do about this? In her workshop, Donadey gave a number of suggestions white GLBT people can do to use their white privilege in a way that contributes to social justice for GLBT people of color. Humility and openness to critique is one suggestion. When GLBT people of color tell us/white GLBT people that we are being insensitive, disrespectful or, perhaps even racist, we need to listen and be open to changing our perspective or beliefs. We also need to put ourselves in the shoes of our GLBT people of color brothers and sisters and recognize that our life experience, while valid, is limited. To be effective advocates, white GLBT people must also look at the representation in their organizations and whether GLBT people of color are given positions of authority and power that white GLBT people hold. As many sociologists have said, the higher up you go, the less diversity there is. Implementing these suggestions, we think, will help change that and bridge the divides that we GLBT whites often unconsciously create in our community. We also think doing these said suggestions would make a far stronger and diverse GLBT civil rights movement for all GLBT people.