Louis Armstrong's lesson on white privilege

When musician Louis Armstrong was 7 years old, he was taken in by a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family. Morris Karnofsky employed Armstrong to help with coal deliveries for Storyville residents (Storyville was New Orleans’ red light district) and his wife treated him like one of their children. [Source]
Armstrong learned Yiddish and Russian lullabies from his time with the Karnofskys, and when he saw a $5 cornet in a pawnshop, Morris advanced him half of the price (and then taught him how to save for the rest). Armstrong never forgot their generosity, and wore a Star of David for the rest of his life.

Armstrong also remembered how they were discriminated against. In his memoir "Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907," he wrote, “I was only seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the white folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for."[Source]

Armstrong went so far as to say the Jews suffered even worse than the black residents of New Orleans. “Of course, we can understand all the situations and handicaps that was going on, but to me we were better off than the Jewish people.”

Based on that, I think Louis Armstrong would take issue with the notion of “white privilege” as a one-dimensional trait – something all white people have, and all people of color lack. “Privilege” – or “advantage,” as Stephen J. Aguilar prefers -- is not a light switch; it’s not something that’s either on or off. [Source]

New York post writer Rav Arora confirms this. As an Indian Sikh immigrant growing up in British Columbia, he was bullied and harassed because of both his race and religion, but he recognizes that certain minorities in the United States are advantaged in different ways.[Source]

Arora points out that Japanese-Americans have had a long history of being discriminated against as “perpetual foreigners,” and until 1952 were even barred from owning land in a dozen states. Yet today the demographic outperforms white Americans “by large margins in income statistics, education outcomes, test scores, and incarceration rates.” [Source]

Conversely, there are many white Americans who have grown up in poverty, and they bristle at the notion of white privilege. After all, if you’ve “ever spent a frigid northern Illinois winter without heat or running water” or “made ramen noodles in a coffee maker with water you fetched from a public bathroom,” (in writer Gina Crosley-Corcoran’s words) then lectures about white privilege fail to land.[Source]

As she explains in her essay “Explaining white privilege to a broke white person” this is the effect of what's called "intersectionalism." In short, the perception of race, like religion and class, is just one aspect of “otherness” that creates disadvantage.

So in place of that “light switch” mentality, I now think of advantage as a kind of cloud around a bull’s eye target – the intersection of various traits that mark who is “in” and who is “out.”

For every one of these traits you have, you take a step inward: Are you married? Heterosexual? Male? White (specifically, western European)? An urban resident? Right-handed? At least middle class? Cisgender? Protestant? Fully mobile/physically capable? Raised in a two-parent household?

Now, being in the center doesn’t mean everything was easy for you. It just means that our society was build around catering to people *like* you. This is visible in any number of policies/practices -- tax breaks for married couples. Adoption restrictions against same-sex couples. Voting rights. Immigration restrictions. Housing locations and availability. And even what hand is acceptable to write with.

(Really? Left-handedness in on the list? Oooh yeah. [Source1] and [Source2])

So while I don’t I think there’s any shame in being advantaged, I do think it’s important to 1.) understand the various *ways* that we can be advantaged, and 2.) work to include others who are not like us. As a society, we benefited from Louis Armstrong’s contributions – a man who grew up at the unenviable intersection of poverty, racism, and anti-Semitism.

Let’s eliminate the unnecessary barriers he overcame, and widen our society’s circles for those on the outside.