My Lesson On White Privilege
In the spring of 1967, at the ripe old age of 20, I was playing in a rock band trying to make and impression on the world. We had scheduled a recording session in Hollywood and were staying at a motel on Sunset Blvd. not far from the Whiskey
1/11

and near the burnt out ruins of Pandora's Box which had been torched during a riot there a year before. Marvin Greenlee, our drummer and I had decided to get a bottle of wine and took a couple of joints and sat on the curb watching the "scene", taking turns taking swigs from
2/11

the wine and sharing the joints we had, when a couple approached and asked if they could share a "hit". We invited them to sit down. As the wine and joints passed between us we started talking about the riots the year before and how the police were coming down hard on kids,
3/11

and how bad it was for the hippies. I told them a story of what had happened to me a few months earlier when I was walking home from a bar in my home town in Central California. Hippies were not well tolerated in our town and local rednecks, the "jet jockeys" from a nearby
4/11

Airforce base. As I walked down the sidewalk next to the side of a store a pickup approached and slowed. The truck had two or three guys in it that started yelling at me, calling me a goat, an fing hippie, and all sorts of other things I don't recall. In my best impression
5/11

of Billy in Easy Rider, I flipped them off and kept walking. The pickup, having passed, screeched to a stop and then reversed toward me from behind. I turned back and saw the barrel a shotgun sticking out the window, again, ala last scene in Easy Rider. I hit the sidewalk
6/11

face down as a shotgun blast hit the stucco wall about ten or twelve feet above me. They took off in one direction, I ran off in the other feeling a lot like pissing my pants. I finished my story with the thought that I knew a little bit about discrimination and
7/11

the troubles of being targeted by police and hostile members of the community. I don't recall the young black man's name, but what he said has stuck with me the rest of my life. He took a long hit off the joint, passed it to me and said to the effect that,
8/11

he understood my story and could relate. "But, he said, you can always cut your hair". That statement has turned out to be the most stunning example of what white privilege means. Over the years it has taught me why I would never, ever know for certain what it is like
9/11

to walk in a black man's shoes. No matter what I believe, how I live, who I am or who I will be come, I will never know. What I do know, is that somehow we must find a way to cross that chasm of experience, change our behaviors, hold ourselves to a higher
10/11

and greater standard so that we can prove once and for all #BLM. For this, we cannot rest.

JD Sanders August 28, 2020
11/11