As the sun rises over the beach and the sky glows purple, red then orange and finally turns to blue, I remind myself for the umpteenth time how fortunate I am. Not fortunate as some sort of idyllic abstraction, but “fortunate” as the result of the structural privileges of my race, class, gender, sexuality, and geography. Fishing is not a particularly privileged activity. It is dominated by men, it’s true, but it is not a rich man’s sport — though fly fishing can certainly lean that way. Nor is it particularly white. My fellow anglers on the Christopher Street Pier are almost exclusively Asian, those casting their lines into Central Park’s Harlem Meer with me are usually Black and Latino, and any trip to an urban pier or a country brook (or East Asia) will soon dispel any stereotypes. Yet my own love for fishing is largely dependent on the fact that I have a good salary, a flexible schedule, and own a house in Cape Cod while renting an apartment in New York City. My fishing is untroubled by a need to work double shifts at the Stop and Shop to make ends meet or worry about getting hassled by the police or assaulted by a thug as I pull up to an empty beach parking lot while it’s still dark. Hell, I wouldn’t be fishing at all if European colonizers hadn’t forced the Nauset peoples off the Cape, and the Lenape out of Manhattan. Recognizing my privilege doesn’t keep me from enjoying fishing, but there is no escaping it: I am a White Man Fishing on the Cape.
In my twenties, I traveled to war-torn Nicaragua to build houses to support their recent revolution. Although we were all pretty good carpenters in our group, it soon became clear why we had been invited by the Sandinista government: yes, to build houses for the poor Campesinos who had been living in substandard conditions under the former regime, but also to put our US bodies in an active combat zone so the US-funded Contra guerillas would be more reluctant to attack. After a month, with no attacks and several houses built, we were getting ready to leave when one of the local Sandinista officials said to us, “Thank you for building these houses in our country, but now you must go back to your country and get the US to stop funding this war. This is your real work for the revolution.” This was what we were asked to do with our privilege. As a privileged activist today, at a time when this privilege is increasingly being identified and called out by others, I ask myself constantly what I should do with my privilege. I can continue on in the great white way of refusing to acknowledge that my experiences are particular and privileged, then get increasingly alienated from social movements as my ways of thinking and doing become increasingly irrelevant and ignored. Or I might conclude that my activism is so tainted by my privilege that the only right thing to do is stop being an activist, and retreat into a guilt-ridden, yet morally righteous, solipsistic inactivity. (Guilt, perversely privileges the privileged.) But then I think back to that Sandinista who was suggesting another path, his words less diplomatically translated into something like this: “Listen up, Yankee! You’ve experienced a little of our reality, take that understanding with you, but now use your privilege to stop your government from killing us.” My privilege does not make me a better activist. In many ways, it makes me a worse one in that I am too often blind to other’s experiences. But my privilege does give me power in the world. My responsibility is to recognize this, yes, but then use that power in the service of those without it to make a world where privilege no longer exists.