Lessons in White Privilege, from Oaxaca to Wisconsin

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The Milwaukee-area school district of Oconomowoc has issued a directive limiting discussions of white privilege, in an effort to appease parents who were offended by a Martin Luther King Day event.

I read about this flashpoint in the Trump-era culture wars while spending the year abroad in Mexico, where the concept of white privilege is beyond debate.

If you want to see an explicitly racial caste system up close, come to Mexico, where guero (“whitey”) is the go-to form of flattery, and indio is still a term of abuse. Instead of “Hey, handsome,” market vendors, taxi drivers, and salespeople open their appeals to prospective customers with, “Hey, whitey” (even if the person they are addressing would be a “person of color” in the United States). To be white, it goes without saying, is to be at the top of the social heap.

Part of the lesson in privilege developed by the National Civil Rights Museum, and presented to the students of Oconomowoc, to their parents’ dismay, was a “privilege aptitude test” in which students were asked to answer true or false to the proposition: “When I go to the store, people do not look at me and think I may steal something.”

It might take some imagination for students in the 90 percent white Oconomowoc school district to put themselves in the shoes of a black or brown kid who is constantly treated with suspicion and distrust. In Mexico, we guerros have the opportunity to realize what it means to stand out as white—and to feel, awkwardly, the evidence of white specialness and privilege everywhere you turn.

In Mexico, we guerros have the opportunity to realize what it means to stand out as white—and to feel, awkwardly, the evidence of white specialness and privilege everywhere you turn.

On billboards all over majority-indigenous Oaxaca, blond, blue-eyed models gaze down on streets packed with shoppers, almost all of whom are brown.

The governor, Alejandro Murat Hinojosa, his wife, and other state and federal officials, are overwhelmingly guero, in contrast to most of their constituents. Oaxaca’s first lady has long blond hair, which she occasionally wears in traditional, indigenous-style braids, which only highlights how out-of-place she looks among her constituents.

In a famous leaked phone call, the governor complained to his father, the ex-governor, that he and his wife hated campaigning in Oaxaca, the campaign was not going well, and, he told his dad, “a mi me vale madre esos pinches inditos”—roughly “I could give a shit about those fucking little Indians [i.e., the people of Oaxaca].”

Commenters to an online magazine that ran the transcript of the call labeled the governor a “junior”—in Mexico, that means a well-connected rich kid who moves through the world with total impunity. Here in the little town where we are living, a group of “juniors” dragged to death a local volunteer police officer who was doing his community-service stint (a custom that is part of communal local government dating back to pre-Hispanic times). Tearful neighbors, on their way to the funeral, told us about it. Did they know who did it? Yes. Would there be any consequences? Absolutely not.

But what does any of this have to do with the aggrieved white parents of Oconomowoc? “We have poor people in Oconomowoc who are saying they’re not privileged . . . and people that say, ‘Don, we worked our butts off to have what we have,’ ” school board president Donald Wiemer told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Oconomowoc, in Wisconsin’s Waukesha County, is Trump Country, and the complaints of people who believe that the discussion of white privilege “went a little far,” in the words of Oconomowoc superintendent Roger Rindo, are by now a familiar refrain.

In this world view (aggressively supported by the brotherhood of rightwing radio talkers who heavily influence politics in the white-flight suburbs around Milwaukee), black and brown people should stop complaining.

Hearing that point of view, expressed so frequently and vehemently in the United States, from across the border, what’s striking is what an enormous case of historical amnesia we Americans have, and how much our lack of historical memory fuels our current politics.

It’s impossible to ignore the history of racial hierarchy in Mexico, dating back five centuries to when white invaders first landed on the American continent and started pillaging their way from sea to sea. After all, this is the land of magnificent ruins and multiple indigenous languages, not to mention a majority-mestizo population.

What’s striking is what an enormous case of historical amnesia we Americans have, and how much our lack of historical memory fuels our current politics.

But in the city of Oconomowoc—land of the Winnebago and Potawatomi, whose name derives from Coo-no-mo-wauk, the Potawatomi term for “waterfall,” and where the first white settlers didn’t even show up until 1837—discussion of white privilege is taboo.

In fact, the residents of Oconomowoc, Waukesha, and many other towns with indigenous names all over Wisconsin are some of the most ardent defenders of a “traditional” vision of white America, and a sense of aggreivement over tax-supported anti-poverty programs they see as supporting black and brown people in the cities—not to mention the hot-button issue of illegal immigration.

The amnesia it takes to sustain this view of America is impressive.

As Betty Lyons, president of the American Indian Law Alliance recently pointed out in The Guardian, “Many so-called ‘undocumented people’ are in fact Indigenous Peoples, children of the Original Nations.”

Many of the workers who form the backbone of Wisconsin’s dairy industry are from Oaxaca. Many speak Zapotec, one of the major indigenous languages here. We’ve met Zapotec speakers here who, a generation ago, were punished for using their native language in Spanish-only schools. Some lost their ability to speak their native language as a result, and are trying to recover it now, as adults.

It’s likely that people who had this experience migrated to the United States as children, back before Mexico instituted a more enlightened curriculum in the schools. Some must have run into the kind of English-only instruction my mother was urged to practice when she taught school near the border in Brownsville, Texas, in the 1960s. Kids were punished for speaking Spanish. Imagine enduring two separate rounds of cultural extermination.

Now the United States is ramping up a whole new batch of policies fueled by white supremacist ideology.

White privilege continues to assert itself.

My daughter is doing her semester project here in Mexico on the contrast between indigenous peoples of Mexico and the United States. She’s become galvanized thinking about how little she has learned about the indigenous peoples of Wisconsin, where we live—how strangely invisible they are, the people who named so many places we know.

To figure out how to change our current politics, it helps to learn more about our past.

Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive. She is living and working in Oaxaca, Mexico, this year.