Top 7 Best Things About Being White

By: Ginger Ray

If you look past all the privilege seeping out of our guilty pores, white people have done some pretty cool things. Not to mention, a lot of the cool things that we have done have helped non-white people advance their personal liberties and reach a point of racial equality. But never mind all that, it’s probably just the privilege speaking.

1. We founded America

I mean, freedom is just whatever. Kind of a white people thing, really. But the United States is thanks to the sweat, blood and a lot of white tears from colonial revolutionaries and our pasty, white founding fathers. If those old, white men did anything right, it was that little Declaration of Independence thing they wrote. But they’re still heteronormative cis-gendered misogynist racists.

2. We freed the slaves

No one likes that Abraham Lincoln was a white Republican. He was the original hipster. You could say that white people were not only responsible for freeing the slaves, but they were the ones who enslaved them in the beginning. But were we the only ones responsible? There were several freed blacks who own slaves in the southern states before the civil war. Nicolas Augustin of Louisiana and his 12 family members collectively owned 215 slaves, while William Ellison of South Carolina owned hundreds of slaves throughout his life.

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Plus, in the beginning, African tribal leaders actually had a fruitful partnership with European traders and sold their own people as slaves in exchange for weapons and industrial goods. Blacks had been captured in Africa by Africans who sold them to European slave traders. Dear all pissed off SJW’s, I don’t like it any more than you do. But if we’re going to say white people are responsible for slavery, well…. black people sort of are too.

3. We discovered electricity

“Don’t hate me ’cause you ain’t me,” said Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was a white guy with huge balls. I mean, he attached a metal key a kite and flew it in the middle of a lightning storm just so we could have light bulbs someday. He was pretty fly for a white guy. The discovery of electricity by his gouty, pasty, white ass put the crack-a-lackin in cracker.

4. We liberated women

Susan B. Anthony? White. Elizabeth Stanton? White. Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell were a married (white) couple that founded the American Woman Suffrage Association. And most, if not all, suffragists during the voting rights movement supported equal voting rights for blacks too. Some people just get equality. The inventors of the dishwasher, washer/dryer, car, microwave, and other appliances and innovations that helped liberate women were all white (and, excluding the dishwasher, male!). It should be noted, however, that there were several black Americans that contributed to the cause as well, not forgetting Ida B. Wells or Frederick Douglass. Shots all around!

5. We created moonshine

In the depths of the Appalachian mountains, the Scottish and Irish immigrants used their distilling knowledge from home to brew America’s first jar of moonshine soon after the War of Independence. The desperation for private liquor sales actually came as a result of an extremely high federal tax on liquor and spirit sales that were put in place in order to recover from the war. Then came the Whiskey Rebellion. It doesn’t get much more white and revolutionary than that. Yeehaw.

6. We founded the NAACP

From the NAACP’s website itself, it says that “a group of white liberals that included Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard, both the descendants of abolitionists, William English Walling and Dr. Henry Moscowitz issued a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice,” and created the NAACP- a foundation “to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination.”

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White people created a foundation to protect all people, specifically minorities! But we’re still probably racist and privileged anyway… sigh.

7. We made the Internet

Lawrence Roberts, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee were the pioneers of the internet, and these fellas were milky, lily white. I mean, they invented the internet for crying out loud. It doesn’t get much more white than that, excluding Pokemon and SPF 70 sunscreen. But now look, because of the invention of a few white guys, average people can continue to spread the message of racial equality and justice while sitting on their couches. That’s pretty cool no matter what color you are.