White Light. White Heat. White Privilege.

White privilege most certainly exists. As does male privilege, heterosexual privilege, Christian privilege, and middle-class privilege. Not to mention the less acknowledge privileges for those who have children, are married, and dare I say, people who are of an “acceptable” or so called “healthy” weight. The straight, married, middle-class WASPS who go to the gym three times a week have it all in terms of privilege. But as someone who has some of these privileges, but can suffer because I don't have them all, I feel I take a different stance towards the idea of privilege.

The WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) is a gender – especially the heterosexual, married variety. And as we know from Butler, we all fail at maintaining these genders. We can never fully be the gender we think we are. We never truly fit. I'm sure from the outside I may seem WASPy, but while I may be a White Anglo-Saxon male, I am not Protestant, not heterosexual, barely middle-class, with no intention of participating in “legal” marriage or having children – and well, depending on what bar I walk into (Blake's or WetBar versus Woof's or The Eagle) I may be obese or thin.

I'm not angry about the privileges I do get, because I don't think about them (that's the nature of privilege!!!); but I also have no guilt for them either. If fact, the only privilege I find to be truly problematic is institutionalized privilege. Universities, schools, jobs, laws that privilege are the things that need to be disrupted. These are the things that need to be problematized. This is not to say that I think smaller more localized places shouldn't have their privileges disrupted as well; in fact, I call for the Twinks to raid the Bear bars, the Bears to raid the Lesbian bars, Drag Queens to join the church choir, Lesbians to kick the doors down at the ManKind Project, and I invite people of all races to Black Gay Pride and then a drink at Bulldogs afterword where we can crown Miss Transgender Heterosexual Mister Leather Ursa Dyke... yup I said it. As fun as that would be, and as much as I would like to be at the after party for all those invasions, I don't feel like breaking down the walls of men's only and women's only spaces is really what needs to be done.

In the Freakanomics documentary they discuss white privilege in an interesting way... in terms of names. One study found that the more “ethnic” (read is black) a name is, the less likely you are to be called for a job interview. It goes further into terms of the spelling of a name: Tony is more likely to get a job interview than Toni, or Tonee (that means only one out of three Tony, Toni, Tonee's gets called for an interview – dear god, I hope someone gets the joke there).