A New Agreement

Yours truly.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the agreement you make when you’re born white—and especially a white man. You arrive in a system customized for you by people like you and nobody needs to sit you down to explain how things will work. It’s just evident. You will enjoy the advantages of lucking into having the appropriate colored parts… but only if you don’t speak about the obvious.

Regardless of where and into what situation you find yourself coming up from childhood, whiteness is presented as the default. From historical figures to pop culture to the local business community, you start looking around and thinking: “huh, what a coincidence!” The people at the top have been white men. In your life maybe you begin to notice that even the mediocre white people have it better. And just as soon as you start connecting those dots, you see that people of color and women must work harder to have less.

To roll up into life Caucasian is to understand implicitly not only that you’ve got automatic VIP status, but that it is a structure that only works for you and perpetuates only if you go along with it… and keep quiet about it. And the most insidious part is that most of us shrug and keep maintaining that status quo. You do it because it benefits you and makes things easier—and also because you get the sense very early on that questioning this system is dangerous. It is apparent that if you speak up, you will lose not only the advantages you didn’t earn but also you will be punished by family, friends, community, and colleagues because that threatens their sweet deal.

This sort of default opt-in is insidious and young people especially should probably not be expected to reflexively reject it or see it all on their own. I don’t even know if blaming is useful. It’s like if you walked out your front door one day and someone had put in a new front porch while your neighbors stepped out into mud. You wouldn’t deserve mud thrown at you but you can invite them onto your porch or help them build one of their own.

In the past few years, it has become increasingly acceptable and in some spaces even expected to give lip service about the woes of systemic racism and implicit bias. But you will notice something critical in these conversations: they stop at the conversations—which is to say people get to the discomfort of feeling complicit and they want to know what they can do, but very few push through to actually forgo the unfair perks. We have a sense of the inequality and lack of access, yet the idea of getting out of the way so others can have a shot goes counter to everything in the contract to which we’ve silently agreed. Nobody wants to go to the back of the line when they’re accustomed to cutting every single time.

As we’ve seen over recent decades and months, this will not end until a generation makes a new agreement and abandons the previous advantages. One day soon, unless we want to perpetuate the inequity and victimization of our fellow human beings and the generations that follow, we’ll have to commit to not taking the free passes, not looking the other way, speaking up and sacrificing our self interests, changing cultures and systems—especially where we’ll personally take a hit. We’ll have to find the fortitude to raise our voices and say “I won’t take the vaccine until they get the vaccine” and “have you considered her for a raise before you offer it to me” and “this policy works for me and my family but at the detriment of that family over there… let’s change it.”

Whether you are aware of it, super burdened by it, resistant to it or even in denial, the agreement you make as a white person is a Faustian bargain. By going along quietly, you’ve traded fairness and honesty for opportunities you didn’t earn. Fortunately, breaking that deal is simple enough. Just see that you got lucky and that you don’t want others to miss out because of it. Then work a little every day to sacrifice some of your perks.

Sign on the dotted line.