Ignorance And Privilege In The Money By Junot Diaz

Identity: A Product of Ignorance and Privilege
In “The Money” by Junot Diaz, the speaker provides an account of the time his home was burglarized while the family was on vacation. Throughout the storyline, the speaker is able to convey a complex sense of identity to the reader. There are various points in the short story where the reader can pick up on manifestations of white ignorance and white privilege. White ignorance as defined by Charles Mills is a “worldview” or a “racial construction of reality”. (Mills 218) According to Mills, it is a lens through which certain people view the world that allows them to accept the misconception that people of color are inferior. (Mills 219). White privilege can be defined as “an invisible package of

Although at first it is not evident why the police would not be willing to help or why the speaker would not fear repercussions of the law, the speaker goes on to say, “Because if mine had been the normal neighborhood this is when the cops would have been called…”(Diaz 2). At the beginning of the story, the speaker mentions that “all the Dominicans” he knew sent money home. This statements hints at the reader that the neighborhood the speaker lived in was predominantly occupied by ethnic minorities. Therefore, when the speaker says “normal”, he is hinting at a neighborhood occupied by white people. The speaker has taken the absence of the police in his ethnic neighborhood and used this to develop a negative identity for himself and his community: an abnormal community that is not subject to the laws and therefore not entitled to justice. It is almost as if the police department is avoiding the speaker’s neighborhood because it is an institution that even today, silently “accepts the inferiority of people of color”(Mills 219). Mills refers to this as the “heart of white ignorance today” and it is this that pushes the reader to identify as the type of person who “could take the change out of [his] mother’s purse without even thinking”(Diaz 1). It is this white ignorance portrayed by the police department that pushes the

In the case of the speaker in “The Money”, these aspects seem to be heavily influenced by the white ignorance and privilege he encounters time and time again. White ignorance portrayed by the absent police department contributes to the speaker’s identity as a vigilante for his family and to his carelessness with the law. It also contributes to the development of a negative identity for his entire “abnormal” community. The privilege that his other friends’ families portray isolate him and push him to develop the “poverty” and immigrant aspects of his identity. Because white ignorance and privilege are so present in his everyday life, these aspects of his identity are more developed than those that involve his hobbies and his relationship with his mother. Mills’ argument that white ignorance and privilege “have been central to the making of our current unjust and unhappy planet” is evident in throughout this short story and the development of the speaker’s identity (Mills