Well, I wouldn’t call myself pretty but I’d be in complete denial if I wasn’t aware that being a 6’4" white male did not open many doors for me. Somebody once described it as playing life on the ‘easy’ setting. Not that there aren’t challenges - every life has them - but any of us white males who pretend we aren’t getting a relatively free ride are wearing blinkers and blocking their ears to what people around them are experiencing.
On top of that, I grew up in a near monochrome suburb, and the few friends from my childhood that I still have minimal contact with have wholly internalized almost all of the subtle assumptions our culture makes about people who are not white. In Alberta that mostly exists as racism towards South Asians and Natives, though I have little doubt that most of them would be happy to feel superior to anyone else who comes along that is different.
I once had a girlfriend who was black, and it appalled me how often her colour was the first topic of conversation for my friends (if she wasn’t there). Often in a highly sexualized way - them expressing prurient curiosity about that ‘it would be like’, and implicitly assuming that I was involved with her for purely sexual reasons. Which they simply would not have done, at all, if she had been white. That was the end of most of those friendships - I couldn’t really like them anymore once I realized where they were coming from.
