White Privilege, Two Ways

In jest, and yet, not funny at all. VOTE.

Photo by Ashlee Marie on Unsplash

I have been a chicken mama (that is a hen-keeper or poultry mistress) for many years, and it is a personal sadness that I don’t have a flock right now. I’m aiming for next spring, however, to get my equilibrium back. Chickens—God, I love them! So much personality, so much dinosaur in their small, fierce bodies.

I always name my hens for herbs and flowers. We have had Dahlia, Rosie, Daisy, Violet, Buttercup, Rosemary, Bluebell, Tansy, Fern and Chamomile, aka Cammie. Unfortunately, both Daisy and Cammie turned out to be roosters, so Daisy (a Buff Orpington, sigh, such a beautiful bird) became Donald, and we found him a home where he probably became someone’s dinner. Cammie, however, quickly grew into his own aggro. You couldn’t walk past him without being attacked. He chased people and cats, he flew at my face, and he relentlessly raped the hens. He was a white Leghorn (not pronounced like Foghorn Leghorn, by the way. LeGORN or LEHgern are the pronunciation if you want to be correct. Which I do.).

He was an ass. And so, without further ado, I dubbed him White Privilege.

White Privilege was strutting around the yard one summer day when a clutch of SUVs pulled up, full of our daughters’ friends from Oakland and Berkeley, dressed for a day of floating on the river. Vegans and vegetarians, dreadlocked and prepared to drop acid and float for the day, they had beer, floating ice chests, and a pack of their rescue dogs with them. Their dogs, just for an extra giggle, have names like Tomato, Whisky, Peanut, and Cujo.

After an hour and a half hot drive from the city, dogs and young people spilled from their cars, and in an instant, White Privilege leapt to claim his territory. And in another instant, Cujo snapped at him, broke his neck, and White Privilege was dead. The vegans were aghast. Horrified. Guilt-ridden. They were almost in tears.

I pulled up about then, with groceries, and when I was told, sorrowfully, what had happened, I said, “What a relief! Thank you. A natural end. The predator is gone.” I felt nothing but gratitude, in fact, because White Privilege had met a reasonably just and natural end. There’s always someone higher up the food chain than you, in case you hadn’t noticed. And I could go about my own yard and garden without being attacked. (See also: Why we choose the bear.)

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My husband and his brothers used to play a game in the car as children. When they were crossing a county line or a city limit, whoever was in the front seat would yell, “I got here first.” If there were two kids in the front seat, one would stretch out his hand and touch the windshield, shouting, “I got here first!”

Husband told me this story and periodically, when we go on a trip, we will say it to each other, “I got here first.” Sometimes I stretched out my hand and touched the windshield, as his brothers had done, saying boldly, “No, I got here first!”

As if getting there first meant something superior, more powerful, more lasting.

I am a scant 5 feet 1 inch, same height as I was in eighth grade and have neither grown nor shrunken since then. Husband, however, is 5 feet 11 inches, and his legs are almost the full length of my body. He folds himself into the front seat, and his arms are longer than mine as well. The foot well in the car is the same on both driver and passenger side, but my legs don’t reach the depth of the foot well unless I am stretched out in the passenger side. These days, with Husband’s ongoing back disability, I usually drive.

So it happens, that even when I say it first, and I stretch out my hand to touch the windshield, his feet are there first. He is ahead of me no matter how hard I try. And it dawned on me the other day, when I lost again, through no fault of my own, the race to “get there first.”

“That’s white privilege,” I told him. “You are ahead by virtue of your size and length, and you take up all the space. I can’t win while you are taking that space. There is simply no way to be fair unless you pull back a little. Your feet will always arrive before my hand can touch the windshield.”

On the lake cruise in Chicago, 2019.

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It’s not a dispute in the family. It means nothing. I supposed we will continue to play the game when we think of it, knowing that unless he pulls his feet back, it will never be fair. The race will never be even. I suppose perhaps he would have been rougher with White Privilege the rooster than I was—I wanted to let nature take its course, and rehome the bird. I wanted to avoid violence. Husband would have booted the bird if it came close to him—perhaps that’s why the interaction never happened.

Are you seeing the pattern here? Avoid violence or act with violence. Take up space so that others do not have a chance. It all ties together somehow in my mind—waiting for the gentlemen—and the not-so-gentle men—to step aside. Asking for space. Taking up space myself. I won’t beat the metaphor to death (I dislike violence, see?).

But there’s a progression here, and I hope we are allowed to continue to explore this. I hope we continue to have our freedom in the USA to grow and expand and learn and evolve, instead of shrinking backward into a time when the bear isn’t even a part of the equation, because it is lying like a rug on the floor while some dude plots the next win, the next space he’ll take over as his own.

Vote blue this fall. Don’t be an ass. Black, Brown, Indigenous, LGBTQIA, elderly, and disabled folks will suffer under a Project 2025 regime of repression. Please vote BLUE no matter who.

(Don’t split the vote. Don’t write in. Don’t hold off or refuse to vote because of ONE issue —> Palestine. We have one chance here. It’s not a joke. It’s a dire warning. Trust me, I’m a journalist. I’m a poet. I’m a fuckling bleeding heart.)