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Some have money; some are dirt poor. Some live in great places; some live in squalor. Some come from wonderful families; some come from broken homes.

What all White people have though, is not worrying that the color of their skin is going to hurt them.

Hurt them financially, when they apply for a loan; hurt them at school, or work, when people are selected for special recognition; hurt them socially, when a security guard stalks them around a store; hurt them physically, any time a racist police officer looks at them and thinks that dark skin = danger.

We don't have any of that. We have normal.

We get to live in a country where most things are mostly meritorious. We get to live in a country where driving a car doesn't carry a significant risk of death-for-no-reason.

Do we White people deal with bias? Sure. That school administrator who holds a dirt-poor family's history against the latest scion to come through the system. That religious person who won't hire an atheist; and that atheist who won't hire the devout. Bias against women; bias against gays. All that stupid, regular shit that people deal with every day.

You know, normal.

And every non-White person deals with all that exact same shit, too.

And then on top of that, they deal with everything else that we White people don't have to deal with. All the hurt and the danger and the death.

I don't have White privilege. I have normal. Normal is what everyone deserves. Normal is every American's right. That's what Thomas Jefferson meant when he wrote:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

You can't pursue happiness when your liberty is taken away at a disproportionate rate. You can't pursue happiness when your life is taken away from you at a young age. The survivors can't pursue happiness when the loss of life and liberty leaves shattered families in its wake.

I don't think progress will ever be made, by telling White people that their skin gives them "privilege," not when we're all of us dealing with all of the shit that comes with day-to-day life.

I think we might make progress in winning the hearts and minds of inattentive Whites if we point out that, no, they don't have it extra good because they're White. They just have it normal. And Blacks don't have it normal. They have it extra bad, because they're Black. Or rather, because of the way racists treat them because they're Black.

Better framing of the issue would make us more successful at recruiting White people to the specific cause of overhauling our government. The criminal justice system, policing standards, the prison system, and more all need to better serve the causes of fairness and justice. Those changes will never happen without a lot of White people throwing their support behind making them happen. Right now, the messaging – whatever its intent – comes off as trying to convince White people that they should feel vaguely guilty for being handed the world on a silver platter, when most of them know that they weren't. And even the few Whites who buy into the "privilege" argument haven't the first clue what they're supposed to do to help.

We all deserve normal. Whites have it; Blacks don't. I want to change America into a place where we all have normal. I don't want to fracture the races even further by telling Whites who support equality that they're all accidental supremacists. I want to unify as many people as possible behind the idea of guaranteeing liberty and justice for all; behind the idea of making the changes that need to be made, so we can elevate those who don't have normal, to the place that the rest of us are already at.

Is it Freudian psychological affect, by which straight men date women who remind them of their mothers, and gay men date men who remind them of their fathers?

Perhaps genetic predisposition to be attracted to the same type of person whose genes helped your genetic line survive in the first place, millions of years ago?

Maybe it's the enculturation of broadly accepted societal norms, as modified by more localized standards, and further so by personal relationships, particularly the tastes of those whose opinions we trust most strongly?

Some combination of bits and bobs from all three? A doctoral thesis' worth of nature, nurture, and socialization, stirred into an admixture of conscious and unconscious inputs, synthesized into a desire inexplicable even unto ourselves, leading us to the one person who, in the end, simply makes our heart flutter?

Or... maybe you're flipping channels one night at three in the morning, and an episode of "Flipper" comes on, and you remember that you used to watch hours of those reruns, every weekend, religiously, when you were around ten to twelve years old.

:: blink, blink ::

Oh.

The Dungeons & Dragons animated TV series come to life.

“I don’t know what weapons will be used in the next war,” a young Army lieutenant interrupted, “but in the war after the next one, surer than hell they’ll be using spears.”

Joe Laitin Writing in Frontpage, September, 1946

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One thing that stays in my mind was an occasion at Bikini when a group of Correspondents were discussing the weapons that would be used in the next war if there was one: such as atom bombs, guided missiles, rocket warfare, germ warfare. And in the middle of this discussion a young United States Army Lieutenant suddenly turned around and broke into the conversation, and said some words I’ll never forget – nor do I propose to let anybody else forget them.

“I do not know,” he said, “what weapons are going to be used in the next war, but in the war after the next war, surer than hell they’ll be using bows and arrows and spears.“

Joe Laitin Being interviewed in The Daily Gleaner, September 10th, 1947