The phrase “white privilege” is one that rubs a lot of white people the wrong way. It can trigger something in them that shuts down conversation or at least makes them very defensive. (Especially those who grew up relatively less privileged than other folks around them). And I’ve seen more than once where this happens and the next move in the conversation is for the person who brought up white privilege to say, “The reason you’re getting defensive is because you’re feeling the discomfort of having your privilege exposed.”

I’m sure that’s true sometimes. And I’m sure there are a lot of people, white and otherwise, who can attest to a kind of a-ha moment or paradigm shift where they “got” what privilege means and they did realize they had been getting defensive because they were uncomfortable at having their privilege exposed. But I would guess that more often than…

These two signs appeared on the Vanport lot at MLK & Alberta recently:

“Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America’s Main Street” is Jonathan Tilove’s photojournal of his visits to various Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevards in the U.S., published in 2003. He writes:

The second question [“Are there any nice ones?”] has become more nettlesome as time has gone on. The implication of this question is that the streets might do more honor to King is they were nicer, a point of view expressed even by many folks on King. But why? If we wanted nice we could have undertaken a journey along Pleasant Street. Gentrification is about making a street “nice.” King’s life was not.

The genius of King streets is how they honor Martin Luther King in precisely the way that the national holiday cannot, by provoking passions and controversy and conflict, by stirring fervent debate…