Tagg Romney: Mr. White Privilege -Tagg Romney admits he'd like to slug Obama

Tagg Romney admits he'd like to slug Obama, becoming the latest white man that thinks he can say whatever he wants



Tagg Romney, grandson of George Romney, son of Mitt Romney, is the latest flesh-and-blood embodiment of White Privilege on the national presidential stage. Though that stage has historically been a catwalk for the whitest and most privileged in the world, Tagg is in a class few achieve. With his lineage and his inherited wealth he equals George W. Bush when it comes to getting advantages by virtue of nothing more than whose crotch he popped out of in the hospital delivery room.

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One of the hallmarks of White Privilege is the unquestioned and largely unchallenged assumption that white people can say heinous things about people of color without blowback or even mild criticism — things that people of color rarely dare to say about white people, for fear of serious retribution. Tagg — aka Mr. White Privilege — proves the point perfectly. He feels totally comfortable fantasizing about committing physical violence against an African-American man. And remember, he’s not just any white guy pondering such grotesque dreams. On the contrary, he’s one of the public faces of a national presidential campaign appearing in a public media interview, meaning White Privilege has made him feel so comfortable airing such notions, that he didn’t hesitate to whimsically broadcast them to thousands of voters.

To know that’s a reflection of the new intensity of White Privilege is to witness the relatively muted reaction to the episode from a media that otherwise treats every microscopic nuance of the presidential race as a “breaking news” event. What’s more, this is a country where, whether in an election season or not, any threat of violence against any president of either party is a potential federal crime and thus covered as a major news story. That is, of course, before Obama, a black man, became president, and representatives of his white opponent started joking about physically harming him.

If that’s not enough proof that this episode is a profound example of the pervasiveness of White Privilege, then simply go through the mental exercise of switching the races. Ask yourself: Would the media reaction be similarly muted if a young black male relative of Obama appeared on a radio show and publicly fantasized about violently bludgeoning Mitt Romney? No, it would be the opposite. It would be a multi-day, above-the-fold, 100-point-typeface story initially fueled by Drudge, Fox News and right-wing radio hosts, and then pervading the network news shows. We’d soon see headlines about security beefing up around Romney and his entourage, as staid “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press” panels — populated by mostly white faces, of course — paternalistically lamented the “race issue” in America.



Thus, it all comes back to White Privilege. This little episode and the lack of reaction to it confirms Tagg’s — and much of white America’s — unspoken day-to-day assumption that there should be two standards of acceptable decorum: one for privileged white people, another for everyone else.





http://www.salon.com/2012/10/18/tagg_romney_mr_white_privilege/