Alyssa Luboff, PhD

An old college friend once posted, “I’m from the middle of the country, and my political views are exactly the same—they fall right in the middle.” It was a tense election season, and I, swept up in the rhetoric of one side, could not relate. Didn’t the middle mean that you were only half right? And worse, that you were also half wrong?

If you tell me there is another side, opposite yours, I will believe you. There are so many ways – right and left, up and down, diagonal zig-zag and spiraling across all the sides of this 360-world we live in. It is important to see, to acknowledge all of them. If you tell me that other side is

Why can’t we afford another shutdown? The economy, the elections…So we force sick employees back into the workplace and traumatized students back into the schoolhouse…What about the workers whose personal lives fall apart under the stress? What about the drop in the labor force when so many are forced into early retirement? What about the mild cases that lead to permanent disability? What about those already too weak to fight off another round? Why can’t we slow down?

I don’t like the word “privilege.” It connotes the idea of something better, something earned; and whiteness is neither. But the phrase #whiteprivilege has proved useful in explaining the differences in daily experience between people who are white and people of color. This is an essay I wrote several years ago under the title, “Why I Don’t Want to Be Colorblind.” Perhaps another title could have been, “Why We Don’t Need to Be Chanting, ‘All Lives Matter’ Right Now.” It’s the