A few days ago I saw a meme circulating Facebook that said the Jack Daniel's family is embracing a legacy they'd known about but hadn't made a big deal about until recently - that Jack Daniel's learned how to distill whiskey from Nearis Green, a slave. I did a bit of digging and found out this was true. I mean, it's financially advantageous for them to embrace this in the age of #blacklivesmatter (Hey, black people, we're down! We even had a slave teach Jack how to distill!), Blackish, Black Twitter...with the help of social media and a few newspaper pieces, Jack Daniels is getting some attention. I guess that's why they waited 150 years to make a big deal out of Nearis Green being the one to teach Jack, when they admittedly have known about this all along. Major side eye.
Anyway, it made me think of white privilege. This man was taught by a slave how to do something that made him A LOT of money. This distillery is still making Green's recipe and it is sold in more than 165 countries worldwide now. I am not off the mark to say that Jack was able to pass this information down through the generations so his offspring could benefit and begin to build wealth for his family.
Why didn't Nearis Green's family do the same? Well, he was a slave. We weren't allowed to own businesses, property, and all sorts of other things until after slavery ended. And even then when we were allowed, if the business was too successful and taking business away from whitey...the Klan would come and burn it down. Ask my Grandmother how her father died. Ask my Grandfather why he and his brothers fled Swainsboro, Georgia in the middle of the night. This was in the 1940's. Jim Crow didn't end until 1954. But we all know the legal end of Jim Crow did not hearken a new age for black people in this country where we were automatically treated as equals.
What was the Daniels family doing during this time? Building their whiskey empire. Fine. American ingenuity is something that should be championed. But it would be remiss to overlook the fact that while this white family is profiting on the knowledge imparted to him by a slave - the slave's family is experiencing a life filled with tragedy, segregation, and a quiet fear for one's well-being that black people still live with to this day. White people had the chance to build wealth, buy property, pass that property down, pass that money down, enter their children into colleges with that money. Send their kids to summer in Martha's Vineyard while black families were considered lucky to eek out a living and go home every night to their family on the wrong side of the tracks.
Even after the Emancipation when the west was being settled, the poor Irish, German, Italian immigrants were literally given plots of Cherokee land in a plot by the government to settle the west and prevent overcrowding of the east coast. The slaves were freed - but they still were not able to own land in their own country, still being seen as inferior and childlike - they were reduced to having to rent land from their former white owners; while white immigrants were given the opportunity to buy.
Pause and think what your life would have been like if white people weren't allowed to build wealth. What if your grandfather hadn't become a doctor? What if your parents weren't allowed to buy a house in the nice neighborhood in Chicago? What What if Bank of America denied your home loan? What if Toyota gave you an interest rate higher than you could afford for your Camry? if your great-grandparents moved here from Stolkholm and their children weren't allowed to attend universities?
White privilege is real and it permeates our culture. Don't feel guilty that you have it, it's not earned, you're born with it. But don't sit on your ass and deny it's existence. What is white privilege? You'll have to Google it. Or read Francis E. Kendall's book White Privilege (or any of the other duplicitous books written by sociologists and race scholars). It's 2016, by now, white people - you should know what it is. But when you hear the phrase and you go to a place of defensiveness, and are met with the reaction to dismiss it as another way to make you feel guilty for being white, you need to check yourself.
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