Me & My White Privilege

One time I told me therapist, “This is how Black people must feel.” I was going through my own personal shit, but that connection was not lost on me. In fact, I felt like I could see for the first time things that I thought weren’t real, theories. A veil had been lifted.

Then I remembered a mistake I had made. My white privilege was showing, like a slip peeking out from under my skirt. Gross is the only word that comes to mind.

I referred to myself as a black sheep, a phrase that I realize now is rooted in racism. Outsider is what I meant. I felt the need to use the term for poetic prose? Metaphorically? I don’t even know. Probably because this shit is so ingrained in us that we can’t see what is standing right in front of us. Just use the correct term that doesn’t hurt anybody. It’s not that hard really.

Sadly enough, I used the word privilege to illustrate that I have the free time to do all of this work on myself. This is something I realize that others don’t have. I understood my financial privilege, but I didn’t realize the privilege that being white in this country gives me. I was struggling so hard to belong to something that I missed another point entirely.

I wanted to be a part of something. I wanted to find people who thought like me, who appreciated the same things that I do. I have learned since then that the I actually relate to people who don’t look like me. I am interested in things that aren’t mainstream. Healthy deviance some call it.

It’s all problematic.

Even the damn book we read during the book club is problematic. The author compared herself to Harriet Tubman in a now-deleted tik tok video. She has tried to pass the blame onto her team. She plagiarized Maya Angelou during the height of the BLM movement. (I quoted Maya Angelou in that same blog post, smdh at myself.)

Still…I rise.

Maya Angelou

She referred to “this sweet woman” in her employ who “cleans her toilets” in an InstaGram video. As I am watching her fuck it all up on a pretty big platform, I am realizing all of the mistakes that I have made. I don’t want to dehumanize anyone.

Numerous Black women have pointed out that her next mistake was to delete all of her fuck ups. What it does, they explained, was delete all of the education that was in the comment section of those posts. She has (had?) a following of 1.7 million on her InstaGram page. This could have been a great learning experience. She whisked it all away. For what? Image?

I would rather be remembered for trying to better the people in my space. I want to uplift, and if that means leaving all my mistakes in internetland so that someone else doesn’t hurt another person, so be it.

Learn with me.

It started with a web search. “Is the term black sheep racist?” The short answer is yes, but I am never satisfied with such little information. I have to know how we got here. It’s the way I can fully comprehend things. I have to wrap my head all the way around it. So here we go! A little history lesson for you.

According to the Psychotherapy Network, the term came from a misinterpretation of one of the early English Bibles. Myles Coverdale’s 1535 Bible, which was the first complete bible printed in English, stated in Genesis 30:32 “All blacke shepe amonge the lambes.” There was no usage of that term in the Early Version (1382), the Later Version (1395), or the King James Version (1611). It showed back up again in a King Henry VIII ballad, “the blacke shepe is a perylous beast.” You remember him, right? He was the one who started his own church.

In 1640 an English Puritan Minister in America, Thomas Shepard, wrote in The Sincere Convert, “cast out all the Prophane people among us, as drunkards, swearers, whores, lyers, which the Scripture brands for blacke sheepe, and condemns them in 100 places.” Puritanism is at it again!

I am going to take this one step further. According to Grammarist, in terms of husbandry, white wool is the dominant gene in sheep and black is the recessive. Scientifically speaking this means that there is the rare chance that two white sheep could produce a rare black sheep. Back then black wool was not as valuable since it can’t be dyed in the same way that white wool can be, which resulted in a financial loss for the sheep farmer.

So here is my question: why are we using terms that refer to farm animals when we are talking about humans? (Yes, I know we are all animals.) We are treating Black people like property, and we don’t even realize it. It’s everywhere. It’s in everything.

What happens next.

We learn. We evolve. We help others on their path. We take responsibility for ourselves. We do better.

I read Me & White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad to start with. I will continue to unfuck myself. I will continue to learn. I will share what I’ve learned.

I used to be embarrassed to share my mistakes. I am more forgiving with myself now. I still don’t want to hurt people. Sometimes I forget to stop hurting myself.

Mad love, Jenna