White privilege, for the most part, protects whites from racial profiling.
Many whites can go on believing that law enforcement officers are there to protect and to serve, while Black and brown people face the greater share of police injustice, which can include being illegally stopped, searched, beaten, arrested and murdered.
In 2011 in New York City, 685,724 people were stopped, 84 percent of whom were Black and Latino residents — although they make up only about 23 percent and 29 percent of New York City’s total population respectively, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights. The human rights group reported that 88 percent of all stops did not result in an arrest or a summons being given.
Because of white privilege, whites will never have to inform their children of the harsh realities of systemic racism.
For Black children whose parents neglect to discuss race, it can be catastrophic, especially in a world that permits a disturbing amount of unprovoked violence against young Black people. On the other hand, white parents can opt out of the conversations as they did in researcher Birgitte Vittrup’s study at the Texas Woman’s University’s Department of Family Sciences.
Vittrup’s research looked at how parents’ attitudes about race affected their children. During the experiments, almost all the “self-proclaimed colorblind” white parents who were asked to talk about race with their children abruptly walked out of the study.
