In Pennsylvania this month, two stories about white privilege were about business managers who unjustifiably requested police assistance to remove black customers from their premises. Meanwhile, President Trump and Michael Cohen are sparring with the Department of Justice, and among themselves, over who gets to decide how much of their past conversations are protected by attorney-client privilege.
Both stories convey the usual sense of disadvantage on the other side of privilege. But it’s all relative. And that binary simplicity was thoroughly routed in a Mudrooms story told by a young woman named Carly Dennis.
Let’s start in Philadelphia. At Starbucks, two black men were arrested for trespassing after the café manager complained they had used the restroom and sat at a table without ordering anything. They claimed to be waiting for someone. Arriving after the men had been handcuffed, their friend told the officers he intended to buy them coffee. But before being released, the police took them to the station where they were photographed and fingerprinted like criminals.
Two days later the CEO of Starbucks stated “the basis for the call to the Philadelphia Police Department was wrong. Our store manager never intended for these men to be arrested and this should never have escalated as it did.”
Referring to that apology as “hindsight,” journalist Adam Harris argued calling the police for protection is a privilege “still reserved disproportionately for white Americans.” He wrote that shortly before an official at the Grandview Golf Course called the police complaining that five black women were playing too slow.
Put aside racial profiling and racism itself as possible motivators. I want to discuss the evidence of privileges held by the black people involved in these stories. Not to use the advantages they’ve had for dismissing Harris’ opinion. I agree with him. But peeling away the layers across the entire spectrum of privilege exposes a powerful one that’s rarely recognized.
In the Starbucks case, the men retained a private criminal defense lawyer, and then another to explore filing a civil lawsuit. That tells us they weren’t on the bottom rung of the disadvantaged class. Likewise, anyone who can afford a club membership and green fees for 18 holes of golf course is well above that.
But if the tiers to privilege go up from the bottom, they must continue all the way to the top.
Enter the president. Trump can play golf almost anytime on one of the 17 courses he owns. And his long-term relationship with Cohen is a reminder that only the most privileged hire attorneys on a regular basis. By invoking attorney-client privileges, he’s trying to protect other interests spanning his empire of privilege.
We “wouldn’t believe” how many work for him, he told the hosts on Fox and Friends on Wednesday. Advertising success that way is a form of encouragement for others, including the black people targeted in these stories, to climb the ladder toward greater privileges. Once there, what’s gained must not be lost.
Not so for Carly Dennis. The 19-year-old from Eagle River attended Scotland’s International School of Aberdeen. She told a Mudrooms audience in early April that its emphasis on service and volunteerism changed the course of her life. She was especially inspired by a woman who designed a solar powered stove for people in poverty with poor air quality living in Western China.
Dennis reluctantly acknowledged the privileges which made her education possible. The Aberdeen school was founded and funded by five big oil companies. Only children of their employees could attend. Her father worked for British Petroleum.
Rather than focusing on protecting her privileges, Dennis wants to turn what they’ve given her into a healthier, sustainable environment for us all. It’s a choice ripe with conflict, the most obvious being the work that’s in opposition the wealth her father earned. And she’s uneasy about working for the same cause alongside people scraping by on nonprofit wages.
Her story evokes a word most often meaning to rise up. But challenge is downward toward hardship. And if it’s true that adversity is one of the best teachers in life, then the privileged few choosing that path might be the brightest hope for our country and the entire world.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. He contributes a regular “My Turn” to the Juneau Empire. My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire.
