{"id":31635,"date":"2012-12-22T13:00:08","date_gmt":"2012-12-22T18:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=31635"},"modified":"2012-12-19T17:54:16","modified_gmt":"2012-12-19T22:54:16","slug":"white-privilege-and-the-snow-white-santa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/12\/22\/white-privilege-and-the-snow-white-santa\/","title":{"rendered":"White Privilege and the Snow-White Santa"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is one of our favorite Christmas-themed posts from the archive. \u00a0We hope you don’t mind the re-post!<\/em><\/p>\n

White privilege refers to the many, many benefits of being white in a society dominated, both culturally and materially, by other white people. The notion was popularized by Peggy McIntosh in a 1989 an essay titled White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack<\/a>. \u00a0One benefit is that most fictional characters, unless otherwise specified (and sometimes even so), are assumed to be white. \u00a0Growing up non-white in a white-dominated world, then, means that \u00a0most of the mythological figures of your childhood do not look like you in one important way.<\/p>\n

Santa, of course, is a fictional figure whose appearance is invented. \u00a0Theoretically anyone could be Santa. \u00a0Yet, while we may see the\u00a0occasional\u00a0non-white Santa at the mall or in novelty holiday stories, he is unbearably and overwhelmingly white in our (google-able) imagination: \u00a0The first three pages of a google image search for “Santa”:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For more examples, see all of our posts about white privilege<\/a>. \u00a0Thanks for <\/span>Martha Pitts as Ms<\/em><\/a>. for this post idea.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is one of our favorite Christmas-themed posts from the archive. \u00a0We hope you don’t mind the re-post! White privilege refers to the many, many benefits of being white in a society dominated, both culturally and materially, by other white people. The notion was popularized by Peggy McIntosh in a 1989 an essay titled White […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[254,285,1757],"class_list":["post-31635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-holidays","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31635"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53125,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31635\/revisions\/53125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}