special treatment
sp/21
Grayson Kelly
ENG 401
Bebout
Special Treatment
My first brush with the law, while terrifying at the time, was, in retrospect, just that: a non-eventful brush with the law. I was sixteen years old, carrying a freshly minted driver’s license, driving my father’s BMW home from a friend’s house late on a Friday night. It was an hour past curfew in the posh town of Paradise Valley, Arizona, and to add insult to injury, I was speeding down Lincoln Dr. going 60 in a school zone after midnight. The gravity of the situation quickly sank in when my rearview mirror lit up with red, white, and blue flashing lights. I was screwed! What was worse was that I deserved it--like any sixteen year old idiot with an incipient alcohol problem, I’d been drinking.
I slowed down, pulled over, and waited, trembling, for the officer to come to my window. When he finally arrived, and demanded my license and registration, I realized that I had neither in my possession. Strike one. The officer then informed me that not only was my speeding considered criminal (strike two), but one of my tail lights was also out (strike three). I was waiting for him to ask if I’d been drinking—home run. Needless to say, the situation wasn’t looking great for me. Tears sprang to my eyes as the officer meandered back to his car, checking my license and registration for what must’ve been ages. Would I be arrested? Would my dad’s car be towed? Would I lose my license? I pictured the worst.
After ten minutes of agony, the officer walked back to my window and told me, “Look, just don’t speed again. Make sure to have your license with you always, and get your light fixed. Have a good night.” Shocked by such a stunning reversal of fortune, I drove home--slowly--and kept the events of the evening to myself.
My second run-in with 12 came two years later, during my freshman year in New York. Drunk on tequila and full of liquid courage, a friend of mine and I decided to sneak under a subway turnstile instead of paying the $2.50 ticket fee. We made it less than five feet before being apprehended by a group of plainclothes police officers. After asking for our ID’s and information, the officers questioned why we went under the turnstiles, and if we knew that it was illegal to do so. We told them that we were only 18, and we had just arrived in the city for college. We simply didn’t know it was against the law, we said, to avoid paying train fare by jumping over the turnstiles--the type of stuff only a drunk would think was a genius alibi. The officers studied us for a few minutes, and then informed us that they would give us the benefit of the doubt. With a firm handshake and a wink, the officers let us go—so long as we promised to never do it again.
I didn’t walk away from either situation with a scintilla of trauma. Due to and because of my whiteness, it never occurred to me to think about what might have happened if I hadn’t been a white man. In fact, I’d never had to examine what my whiteness meant. In his essay “The Matter of Whiteness”, author Richard Dyer argues that there is a “notable absence” of white racial imagery in the subject’s vast history, and that “white” has been mischaracterized as non-racial in modern times. “As long as race is something only applied to nonwhite peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just human.” (Dyer, 10) In my situations with the police, my whiteness made me invisible in a way.
Earlier this summer, I was personally challenged to examine my life and how I’m positioned in the world by exploring the manner in which my whiteness has afforded me with certain privileges. I was somewhere in my second month at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Wickenburg, Arizona when the news of George Floyd’s death ignited a fever spike of racial discourse and tension in America.
There’s a lot of downtime at rehab. Some days, when the nurse techs were busy, my roommate John and I would sneak into the recreational center to watch the news. John--a black, 20-year-old veteran and recovering heroin addict from Appalachia--was like me, in the sense that he considered himself somewhat of a politico and newsie. One day, when the nurse techs were busy admitting a new patient, John and I were sitting in the rec center in silence as the video of Floyd’s murder played on the flatscreen television in front of us. Shellshocked at what we were witnessing, John sighed.
“Just watch,” he said. “A lot of white people are going to justify that by saying he was on drugs or something.”
I glanced over at him as I internalized what he’d just said. I didn’t know how to respond--I didn’t have anything valuable to say. “Do you know how much that terrifies me? That easily could’ve been me. My murder might be publicly justified because I’d done drugs,” John said. “Thank god I was in the Army and have Tri-Care. I mean, why do you think I’m the only black person here? White people go to rehab, black people go to jail.”
What may have been an aside to John was to me, a reckoning. John had unknowingly called me out on my own whiteness in his aside, and it occurred to me, for the first time, that perhaps no real consequences would have ever come to me. In fact, the conversation I had with John that day functioned as the first “text” in which I saw my own whiteness as something separate from myself--as something that catalyzed my ability to exist as an “addict” in the very treatment center I was in.
I realized that, no matter how many laws I broke throughout my addiction--whether it was drinking and driving at 16, or hopping subway turnstiles in New York--I knew, albeit in the back of my mind, that I would end up in rehab. Quite simply, I knew I had to hit rock bottom before I would finally give up the hat and choose to go to rehab. Until then, no one and nothing would stop me. Not once did it occur to me how privileged my worldview was.
In her famous 1988 essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, American feminist and antiracism activist Peggy McIntosh lists 50 “daily effects of white privilege” that white people benefit from in everyday life. Each example details how having white skin comes with advantages that those with black or brown skin simply do not receive. McIntosh examines the social privileges that were gifted to her by her color: “I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.” She noticed the financial privileges that she also enjoyed: “Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.” She observed how governmental privileges work: “If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.” Finally, she commented on professional privileges: “I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.” By pointing out the various life advantages that she had enjoyed – not because of who she was or what she did, but rather, because of what she was (i.e., white), McIntosh offered a unique--or, white,--viewpoint on the question of race and privilege.
McIntosh is doing here what Dyer calls “making whiteness strange” and what Dr. Lee Bebout called “making whiteness legible” in his essay Whiteness. (253) McIntosh isn’t simply pointing out the fact that, yes, she is white and yes, racism exists. Instead, she is making her whiteness legible by examining how it has afforded her certain privileges and positioned her in the world. Bebout, in my opinion, would appreciate McIntosh’s essay for this reason; he also adds that making whiteness legible “requires more than pointing out racial identity. It requires close attention to the practices, ideologies, and identity investments that structure racial inequality vis-a-vis whiteness.”
It was after my conversation with John (and, to be frank, my work at ASU) that I was able to arrive at a deeper understanding of how the world actually works around me and where and how I am positioned, in great part, due to my race. As I thought about past events in my own life, and then considered whether the result might have been the same if I was black, it became very clear to me that my whiteness has shaped my narrative thus far. I am in the pursuit of making my whiteness strange--or legible. As a white man, I have reaped rewards and enjoyed benefits that people like John don’t get. My whiteness, in many ways, made me safe--or invisible, as Dyer would say--in places and in situations where others might not be so safe. My whiteness provided me with privileges that people of color will never receive. This is where my whiteness has written my narrative: I emerged from my encounters with police unscathed, without even a ticket to show for my offenses. I was sent to rehab, not jail. I was considered “sick”, not criminal. I walked away, while others in my exact same position, albeit in a different costume (i.e., a different skin color), might not have. Isn’t that an indictment on our society? When we make our whiteness strange, and visualize life without it, we personalize the power and effect of racism. It is only then that we can meaningfully act to change it.
Works Cited
Burgett, Bruce, et al. Keywords for American Cultural Studies. New York University Press, 2020.
Dyer, John, and Paula S. Rothenberg. “The Matter of Whiteness.” White Privilege: Essential Readings on The Other Side of Racism, Worth Publishers, 2016, pp. 9–13.