Amidst the stories of nationwide protests in response to the
grand jury decisions in the Mike Brown and Eric Garner shootings, actor Mark
Wahlberg’s request to have his decades-old criminal record expunged is poorly timed, to say the least. But Wahlberg’s story nicely exposes a concept that’s sometimes hard to pin down: white privilege in America.
Let’s take it piece by piece. For one thing, there’s the fact that Wahlberg was unharmed while being arrested, despite having committed two violent crimes. According to media reports, while strung out on cocaine, Wahlberg brutally assaulted a Vietnamese man named Thanh Lam while stealing two cases of beer from him, in the process calling Lam a series of racial epithets. Wahlberg then assaulted another man, Hoa Trinh, beating him so badly that he was left blinded in one eye. Yet like so many other white, violent criminals—even heavily armed, rampaging mass shooters like James Holmes and Jared Loughner—Wahlberg suffered no injuries while being apprehended by police. That’s as it should be. But given how many African-American suspects, like Brown and Garner, are wounded or killed during their encounters with police, the discrepancy is striking.
Even more striking is the degree to which Wahlberg was able to leave this incident behind. Although the assaults culminated in years of criminal behavior for Wahlberg, including two incidents of harassing African-American schoolchildren among more than twenty encounters with the police, he was sentended to just two years in prison and had to serve just 45 days.
When he emerged from his month and a half in prison, Wahlberg professed to be a changed man. Aided by the connections of his older brother Donnie—who was, at the time, already famous—Wahlberg moved smoothly into a successful entertainment career. Less than three years later, Wahlberg and The Funky Bunch released the album Music for the People (1991), featuring the #1 single “Good Vibrations.” In the following years, he famously modeled for Calvin Klein and began his acting career with roles in TV and feature films.
For so many Americans, especially Asian-Americans, Latinos, black women, and most of all, black men, a criminal record permanently impacts their professional and personal futures. A criminal conviction—indeed, even a simple arrest—can reduce their options in every part of their lives, from employment to travel to child custody to voting. Wahlberg claims his record has denied him certain recent opportunities. Maybe so. But his record clearly didn’t stop him from making millions and becoming famous.
There is a larger historical and cultural story at play here. In response to both the recent police killings and the subsequent protests, many commentators have emphasized supposed racial differences. Rudy Giuliani argued that African-Americans commit more violent crimes and so require police response–and he is not alone in making that argument. Others say that African-Americans riot far more readily than other communities. Yet Wahlberg’s childhood neighborhood of Dorchester reveals the inaccuracies in both those narratives. This impoverished white community has seen decades of systemic crime and violence, often tied—as Wahlberg’s assaults were—to drugs and gangs. And in the busing riots of the 1970s, Dorchester featured sustained, brutal communal violence on the part of whites against African-Americans, the latest in the long series of American “race riots” targeting African-American communities.
Many Americans might prefer to erase the histories of white crime and violence from our collective memories, just as Wahlberg now requests that his own history of violence towards people of color be legally erased. This ability—to write history the way we choose, regardless of the facts—is a frightening example of white privilege. Until we make these histories a fuller part of our understanding of our shared American identity, our sense of ourselves will be as partial as a bio of Wahlberg without his teenage crimes.
Ben Railton is an Associate Professor of English Studies at Fitchburg State University and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.
Couple of rhetorical problems in this piece. Before I get started, of course white privilege is real. Of course, doors and opportunities open more often for whites than blacks. But Wahlberg is a really poor choice of strawmen.
First, looking at his past, as pointed out in the article, he was coming from a neighborhood where even as a white man there were not a lot of opportunities available to him. So while he may have had other opportunities later in life because of his race, the time of his life marked by crime was dictated by many of the same pressures that land black men disproportionately in jail. Pointing to a couple of white guys who weren’t killed by the cops as evidence of white privilege doesn’t work either. You mention Holmes and Loughner, and I can raise you the DC Sniper and the Fort Hood shooter. Neither of them were white and neither of them were shot in apprehension. I will also point out that a lot of white shooters are taken out by the cops, Larry McQuilliams being the most recent example of such. If you want to make a point, you should not point to the extremes, because there will always be an equal and opposite extreme right on the other side of the argument. Point to the average.
Second, blaming Wahlberg for putting in his bid now is ridiculous. Anyone who has an opportunity to bid for a pardon is going to do so, regardless of race. And they aren’t going to sit back and say, you know there are riots in a city I have never been to, I guess I won’t ask for a pardon today. The two are completely unrelated, and trying to make them so from the start makes the piece come across as ridiculous.
Third, Wahlberg is a particularly bad example of showing how a criminal record can prevent future job opportunities. Why? Because he is an entertainer, a job profession that almost has a requirement of criminal pasts or at the very least some sort of mental disorder. I point you to Curtis ‘50 Cent’ Jackson. His rap sheet is way longer, more violent, and ‘impressive’ than Wahlberg’s, and yet he is worth millions. Is he the beneficiary of white privilege too? No, he is an entertainer, and in certain circles, the checkered past is a benefit, not a hindrance.
If you want to make a point about white privilege, point to an upper middle class white guy with a checkered past but still was able to work their way up to middle or upper management. Point to the frats at any four year institution where the white fraternities can get away with any sort of criminal BS and it is boys will be boys. Yet the black frats are watched for any tiny mistake by a single member. Point to the fact that blacks get longer jail sentences than whites do for the same crime. There are a million ways to point to white privilege, and you, by trying to stay hip with pop culture, decided to miss every single one of them. Honestly, it is almost like you tried to construct a failing argument. You start off with an interesting idea and then tripped over your own feet in the very first sentence and never got back up. I’m sorry, but this was a rhetorical failure from the word go and hurt your own cause.
The problem with white privilege isn’t the “privilege” part, so let me second the motion that making Wahlberg the straw man here is out of place. Does he deserve a pardon? Has he repented of his misspent youth, become a pillar of the community, and so forth? Okay–then let him have it. AND let his non-famous, non-wealthy, non-white equivalent have it too.
The problem here isn’t that Wahlberg’s pardon request is “ill-timed”–when will there ever be a good time, if he has to wait until we live in a truly post-racial society? The problem is that the request coming from all the other former teenage felons is ill-timed, as in “too early for society’s liking.”
It’s not unreasonable to think we can get, someday, to something much more like a racially egalitarian society. But it’s not going to happen by denying anyone, no matter how privileged, the privileges they actually deserve. It will only happen by extending the franchise of those privileges.
Thanks for the comment and responses. I would agree that highlighting any individual story as a reflection of such a broad concept like “white privilege” is necessarily reductive, and a significant goal of any such highlighting is to connect to the bigger issues and help us talk about them. In that sense, your last paragraph is exactly the kind of next step I would also argue for, and I appreciate it.
Otherwise, I would simply say this: I think your use of 50 Cent actually makes a different point. Jackson’s crimes were much less violent than Wahlberg’s–mainly, he sold drugs. No assault charges, for example. Yet he did more prison time than Wahlberg, and remains associated with his crimes far more readily and consistently than Wahlberg. (And yes, Jackson was shot 9 times, but in that case he was the victim, not in any sense a criminal.) Whereas I would argue Wahlberg’s far more serious crimes have already largely been forgotten, and now (and it is right now that he’s asking and raising this issue, for whatever reason) he wants them legally forgotten to boot.
Thanks,
Ben
Ill-timed, SERIOUSLY?
The man has a right to put in his bid and doing so shouldn’t make him seem insensitive.
I’ve seen LOTS of white men every day who have had a difficult time finding meaningful jobs because of their crimes.
Maybe Wahlberg made it because HIS BROTHER was FAMOUS and had connections?
Thanks for the comments, all. I’ll simply add this: to my mind, my final two paragraphs are the far bigger and more relevant issue here. Our conversations about race, community, identity, and so on seem consistently to elide histories like Wahlberg’s and Dorchester’s and focus on ones like Mike Brown’s and Ferguson’s (to put it reductively, again). So honestly, the issue to me isn’t whether Wahlberg gets his pardon–it’s whether we can, collectively, reframe our memories and histories to be more accurate to these shared issues.
Thanks,
Ben