Several friends enjoy reading John Pavlovitz’s website (johnpavlovitz.com) and I received from one of them a June 23, 2020 post from it entitled “The White Privilege of Ignoring the News.”
I was intrigued, both because I continue to try to understand—as an old white man—how I have been affected by white privilege and because I know a number of friends who have stopped watching the TV News shows or, in one case, watching television at all. They say it makes their life less stressful and instead rely on newspapers and public radio.
This practice seemed like a good one, even though I am too much of a news junkie to do this myself. I was therefore surprised to read Pavlovitz’s statement:
“When I hear white people say, ‘I just ignore all that political stuff,’ or ‘I don’t look at the news,’ it reminds me that America is still afflicted with inequity; that white people here are still afforded the option of indifference solely by our pigmentation, and that while that is true we have work to do’
“Until we are so tethered in mutual relationship to vulnerable people that we refuse to look away from reality because we know our destinies are tied together, America is not the place we imagine. It is not the place of the stirring songs and the stratospheric anthems and the glorious (but whitewashed story) we tell ourselves about it. As long as we have the luxury of ignoring the difficult reality of America, we’ll be perpetrating it.”
Gee, I thought, not watching the news doesn’t mean that we are “ignoring the difficult reality” of America, but only an attempt to protect our mental health. We still care about what is happening to our black and brown and poor neighbors, and we support them with donations and words of support as often as we can, don’t we?
But then I tried to get in the head of this blogger. Was he saying that those who suffer oppression in our society because of their skin color (with all the economic, material, and psychological problems that comes with that) can’t afford to NOT watch the news? The news directly affects them, as it could be a neighbor, relative, or friend that “makes the news” on a given night as a victim of that oppression.
Is our ability to ignore TV news tied to the fact that we know that we are not likely to see looters, robbers, murderers, or brutal police conduct in our white neighborhoods? Is this “option of indifference” another “luxury” that we enjoy because of white privilege?
I am not sure. but blogger Pavlovitz is making an interesting point, and one that likely does describe some of us, don’t you think?