I have privilege.
Whenever I step on a court or a field there is a level of respect offered to me that doesn’t go to non-black players. Without knowing me and despite the pregnant-like gut, I am considered a top athlete. I have access to scholarships and opportunities that others will never have. I am looked to in order to join circles that lack faces that look like my own, so those circles may be able to say they know my people and my plight and, above all else, my privilege.
It has been this way since I’ve gone to predominantly white schools. There remains a baseline assumption that I can ball, no matter the sport. This is often accompanied by an assumption of a skillset that I largely do not possess. No, I cannot hotwire a car. No, I don’t know how to find a dealer. No, there is no cousin in prison (anymore). These assumptions afford a certain level of privilege and respect in certain environments. As I said before, I am never the last one picked for a pick up game though I often should be. Instead I am looked to as a natural leader, a captain among inferior men.
Thus is my privilege, one born of athletics and a presumed toughness that makes me right for the court. After all, weren’t my people bred to be bad ass? Did we not survive some of the worst persecution and torture known in the history of man? don’t our ancestors bear the scars of whips, the PTSD of the master’s touch?
Are we not children of the oppressed?
I write these words as an echo of recent quarrels. Listen to a middle class white student and you will here a constant refrain: They are the oppressed and we, the minority, are the children of privilege and handouts and opportunities that they were never afforded.
Perhaps in a sense they are right. There is no minority scholarship for middle class whites. There is no expectation of Physical prowess or street smarts. They lack the privilege into which I was born.
But this does not mean they lack privilege themselves. Perhaps they ought to acknowledge theirs as I have mine.