White Privilege and the Five Families

There is a scene in the original Godfather movie when the Don Vito Corleone is making a truce with the leaders of the five other families. The Don is just returning home from a failed attempt on his life by Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo. While he was in hospital recovering from his wounds his son Santino “Sonny” Corleone starts a mob war in retaliation for the near fatal attack on his father. Sonny is killed in a hit. Michael Corleone is in a self imposed exile in Italy after offing the Turk. The Don has called a meeting to try and negotiate an end to the mob war and the safe return of Michael.

Mr. Corleone and the heads of the other families meet in a conference room in an expensive and very exclusive hotel. The families want concessions from Don Corleone. The other families are particularly interested in the trade of illegal drugs. The Don isn’t interested in these drugs. In fact, the Turk attacked the Don because Vito Corleone refused to provide the funding and assistance necessary to assure that his heroine trafficking would be successful. Mr. Corleone feels that the destructiveness of illegal drugs is just too dangerous to be tampered with. But the other families are convinced that this is where the money is. For each dollar invested a drug trafficker can make as much as a fifteen hundred percent profit. Another fine example of American capitalism. Don Vito Corleone wants his boy home and so he concedes.

One of the other heads, Don Zaluchi, had something to say. “I also don’t believe in drugs. For years I paid my people extra so they wouldn’t do that kind of business. Somebody comes to them and says, ‘I have powders. If you put up three, four thousand dollar investment, we can make fifty thousand distributing.’ So they can’t resist. I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable.” He slams his hand on the table and raises his voice. “But I don’t want it near schools! I don’t want it sold to children! That’s an infamia. In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people, the coloreds. They’re animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.”

Now the Godfather is an excellent work of fiction. Excellently written by Mario Puzo as a novel and a screenplay and excellently executed as a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. But the fiction is very realistic. And Don Zaluchi is a very realistic example of someone using his position of power and influence to subjugate black people and, as a consequence, reinforce white privilege. The white gangsters in this movie will do their narcotics. But they will only distribute their shit in the black neighborhoods. A perfect fictitious example of white people having the privilege of benefiting from the racist stereotypes of black people.

Interestingly, the reality is that illegal drugs distribution is rampant in the black community. It is entrenched. It has also become entrenched in the white neighborhoods as well. But since everybody knows that the white economy is better equipped to finance the distribution and purchase of their illegal narcotics most people are willing to overlook the white crime associated with illegal drugs. On the other hand, the perception of rampant crime in the black neighborhood and the overwhelming belief in the stereotype that black people are, to paraphrase Don Zaluchi, unethical and soulless animals gives justification for the lopsided focus on black criminal activity.

A lot of people want to combat the drug problem in the black neighborhoods by arresting anybody even remotely associated with illegal usage. A heavy handed approach to drugs in the black community is necessary to reign in the problem. Fifty grams of crack is the equivalent of five kilograms of cocaine. In other words, a black man with just a pebble of a crack rock on his person is the same as a white person walking around with enough cocaine to fill two five pound bags of sugar. I have yet to hear of a black man being arrested for the importation of drugs or for the manufacture of drugs other than the conversion of cocaine to crack. But take a look at the crime statistics and somehow the reality is that black people are the most likely user and distributor of drugs. This is a perfect real life example of the white community benefiting from the privilege of not being black.

So people will focus on the drug user or distributor on the corner. He or she is arrested. But as soon as the drug dealer is removed off of their corner the drug dealer on the corner across the street or down the block simply picks up more business. Until the drugs are stopped at the source the daily arrest of distributors and users in the local community is an exercise in futility. People in the community really like it when the local Nino Brown, the drug kingpin from New Jack City played by Wesley Snipes, is arrested. But as soon as he or she is gone someone will simply move into their place and become Frank Lucas, the organized crime boss in American Gangster played by Denzel Washington. Knock off Frank and then Tony Montana from Scarface will pop up. But that’s okay, with each arrest newspapers will laud the effectiveness of crime work by the Drug Enforcement Agency.

All the while these people who are truly at the bottom of the drug manufacturing and distribution network are being arrested and thrown under the wheels of the system the really bigwigs who control the distribution and sit around an expensive table in an exclusive hotel and make deals targeting the people in the black community for their personal financial gain. The entire white community may not be privileged enough to reap the financial benefits from the distribution of these drugs. In fact, many white people may find themselves the victim of drug distribution as well. One could consider these people little more than collateral damage in the grand pursuit of profit from soulless animals.

But one example of the type of privilege that white people do enjoy is from not having to constantly battle the stigma of being associated with this heinous crime of living in a neighborhood where white crime lords make concerted efforts to profit off the destruction of black people. Even before the inevitable association with illegal drugs black people suffered from the indignity of not being white. All white people may not partake in all forms of white privilege. But at least they don’t suffer the indignity of having to be black in a culture overwhelmingly controlled by other white people who use and abuse black people. And that is a privilege in and of itself.