On White Privilege, by Carolina Soto

Recently in our writing circle, my fellow writer Arvetta forcefully noted that I had white privilege. I say forcefully because I didn’t respond directly at first, and so Arvetta repeated it. You have white privilege; you know that you do have white privilege?

I said yes; I know that I have white privilege. I also know that it does not mean I am exempt from privilege because I went to prison. It was an accident of timing. I work for social justice.

Re/Creation started as a writing workshop but has entered a phase where we work things out in our group as in dialogic circles. Our circle is a place where anything can be said. The circle has developed a sense of love and belonging among the longest participating members, and a level of trust is building among the newer members. We all want to promote security and honesty. We address things both as a group and individually. I miss the hugs from the group, but we are now working with Zoom.

John Proctor is the workshop facilitator and the person who organizes our group readings, encourages and suggests about our writing, and edits for our new website. He is now expanding the group to women who have loved ones in New York prisons. He came to my rescue, noting that he had white privilege and used it to do what was right and benefit people who did not have that privilege.

For me, it was a situation that did not need defusing. I agree that the only thing we as white people in a racist society have is the ability to confront racism in ourselves, work on it, and turn what benefit we have into a social benefit. I don’t remember the exact conversation that followed. I knew I could at least satisfy a bit of Arvetta’s righteous anger at society and white people by admitting privilege and so admitting guilt.

Racism is the poison air that we all breathe. Racism does not make the world a better place, it harms my brown and black brothers and sisters, and it harms all of us. It is not the world that I want. I have spent my adult life in the streets and organizing. My journey to understanding has been long, over forty-five years. As a woman who has faced off sexists, I applaud Arvetta’s directness using the same confrontational manner. Her husband is in prison, and they both are suffering. The system tears families apart, destroys the fragile economies of those affected, is unjust, unreasonable, and only one face and form of oppression they both face.

* * * *

I remember some of my first confrontations about racism. The most significant began on my first trip outside of the country. I probably would not have had money to travel if I had not received a settlement from a head-on collision. It had just turned very dark when I saw headlights coming up my single lane, passing two lanes of traffic coming up the hill at a terrific speed. To my left was a steep drop off and guard rails. I was the second young woman, the driver, while drunk, had nearly killed. I was in the hospital for over two weeks, eyes covered, head sandbagged, my arms and legs nearly double their size. I had bent the steering wheel in half with my chest. I couldn’t return to work for two months.

It took several years and several trips to court to get my settlement. I spent the money four years later. I joined two friends trekking in Nepal. Two of us continued on by train across India to Chennai (then Madras) and Sri Lanka. I was a working-class woman from a small industrial town who had no experience with cities or traveled outside of the country. It was as if the world turned upside down.

It was astounding when the Nepalese talked to me about privilege. True, I felt that I had a class change as soon as I stepped off the plane. I met people of education and money with whom I would never ordinarily associate. The people who confronted me spoke British English and lived in the countryside where people subsisted in what appeared to be the 17th century. First, they marveled at how rich I was, and then they noted the other advantages I had that no Nepalese could have.

They were familiar with many types of exploitation. They had a king who levied high taxes and imposed the caste system on his subjects. There were tenant farmers living in hovels paying off debts of their forefathers, indentured slaves. I saw children walk as far as ten miles each morning to go to school, returning to help with any chores before doing homework. The primary fuel was wood and dried cow dung. Living close to China’s border and revolution, it was no surprise that twenty years later, a Maoist revolution began in the same area we walked. The Chinese had electricity even in small towns, tractors instead of wooden plows pulled by oxen, widespread and accessible education and health centers and the many important consumer goods such as shoes of all kinds, hats, thermoses, clothing and machine milled cloth had been coming through the borders for years.

It took me a while to register that the Nepalis were speaking of everything, my skin color, my education, my ability to buy a plane ticket, and come halfway around the world. Still, I felt it was all an accident. I worked for an insurance company and had automatic coverage when an uninsured driver hit me. I was born into a white working class family, and I came out white, blue-eyed with blonde hair. I had one year of college in 1970 when I tuned in to the Bobby Seale trial and turned on to another way of thinking and dropped out of society in general. I lived in a cabin in the woods, hitchhiking for transportation and working odd jobs, mostly for the Separatist LGBT women in the area who only hired women.

I had not come to terms with my privilege. I knew that I came from a sick society, but didn’t really believe that I embodied that sickness. I read, went to study groups, and tried to make all of my politics actionable. I defined myself as an anti-imperialist, anti- racist feminist.

* * * *

I have for many years sought out feminists of color in my reading and in my life. Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop a commentary on the construction of whiteness in the United States by Rev. Dr. Spaulding is a book I recently read about but have not yet read. When I saw a tweet about the op-ed piece in ColorLines “WHITE FOLKS: IT’S TOO LATE FOR “ALLIES’” by Rev. Dr. Spaulding, I looked it up immediately. It brought several questions to mind. What am I - an ally or an accomplice? An ally will mostly engage in activism by standing with an individual or group in a marginalized community. An accomplice will focus more on dismantling the structures that oppress that individual or group—and the stakeholders in the marginalized group will direct such work. An ally’s work focuses on individuals, and accomplice work focuses on the structures of decision-making. The Reverend Doctor cites Tre Johnson of The Washington Post that “allies are such that when Black people are dying, white allies start book clubs and reading circles.”

As a lifelong anti-imperialist, I feel that the work that I do is that of an accomplice. As a prison abolitionist, I work with a broad coalition of groups to end prisons and help make social structures viable for a new non-racist, non-capitalist social order. I work with high school students to bring the ideals of abolition and transformative justice to schools. I am a founding member of The National Council of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. I have been in the streets protesting my entire adult life. That does not mean that I do not have to struggle with the training, influence of media and what is easy. I do, which is why I value being called out as a white person. I value the moments where we can help each other understand the world we want to live in.

Now is not the time to marginalize anti-racist white people. We need both action and education. We need guidance from the spectacular leadership personalities among people of color and to find opportunities to combine our voices and energies. The founders of Black Lives Matter alone offer innovation and wisdom beyond their years. Patrisse Cullors is the director of Truth and Reinvestment at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California, and the founder of Dignity and Power Now, a grassroots organization in Los Angeles fighting for the dignity and power of incarcerated people and their families. Alicia Garza is special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance. And Opal Tometi is executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. In Portland Lilith Sinclair, a Portland antifa #activist & sex worker, says she is organizing for the abolition of the United States. After reading the interviews, I am ready to join her!

White people need to take leadership from these innovators. We need to clarify our vision of a new society and actively work towards it together. If people have nothing better to do while people of color are dying at white police and white terrorists’ hands than reading books, they are not even allies.

It is not enough to be anti-racist today. White people have to step up their game and be proactively anti-racist. An Abolition study group you can start with your friends includes interviews with Ruth Wilson Gilmore from Intercepted and many great reads done in six parts as a convenient study guide. We need to educate ourselves in this way in order to help educate other people. We need both education and action.

I think there are always several fronts to any movement. The gains of the civil rights movement happened not because of Malcolm X or Dr. King but because of both of them and their followers.

The particular opening that we are experiencing will not last long. I am obligated by the privilege that I do have to be more than not racist. I am obligated to work to make change. To develop a society that is not white against color, rich against poor, consumerists against the planet. I have experienced hope by working shoulder to shoulder with people of like mind. It is time to take action.

Here are some starting pointers from Black Lives Matter, join us.

One of “the real women of Orange Is the New Black,” Carolina Soto is one of the founding members of the Re/Creation writing workshop at Restoration Plaza in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Unlike the fictionalized Yoga Jones, Carolina has a long history of work in social justice and advocacy, and is a seasoned painter and visual artist. Since beginning her work with Re/Creation, Carolina has increased her confidence and aptitude with both the written and spoken word, composing speeches and essays for her advocacy work and as well as written memoir. In particular, her essays and memoirs illustrate her vast capacity for empathy in her descriptions of people with whom she shared time inside. She now splits her time between living in New York City and the Dominican Republic.