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In reply to the discussion: Why I don't like the term "white privilege" PART TWO [View all]shaayecanaan
(6,068 posts)and the fact that you are are not affluent underlines that. I have seen the dumbest motherfuckers in the room make money hand over fist, while people who were smart as hell stay poor. People who could work for us for something like six months and pick up pretty good Arabic in that time. I still remember a kid like that.
However.
Let me tell you what would have happened if my father had held one over my mother (not that it ever happened). Firstly, no one would have called the coppers, because no one does that to a wealthy man. But if they did, a nice police officer would have called my father and said "Is everything all right Mr Canaan?". At the very most, a policeman would have pulled up at the front of our driveway, he would have politely pressed the intercom and asked for my father, and then he would have waited patiently for him to come outside. With his hat off. There would have been smiles all round and then my father would have asked my mother to come out and talk to the policeman for form's sake.
And that would have been the end of it. If Charles Saatchi has shown us nothing else of utility in his whole life (and he hasn't) its that no police force in the world will stand in the way of a wealthy man's right to give his wife a bit of chin music, Jewish or not.
I accept everything you say about there being a difference between being poor Black and poor White and having a copper knock on your door at night. No question. But its not a patch on the difference you encounter between having money and not having it.