In my first ever politics lecture at uni, the bespectacled, craze-haired lecturer told us not to use Wikipedia for our research. This was unsurprising, as we'd been prohibited from Wikipedia all through high school (knowing it was full of lies, we all relied on it anyway). But this time it was not because of Wikipedia's perceived amateurism.
'It's a good resource for starting out. But the vast majority of contributors are North American white males. It's a fairly limited perspective,' she said to us. This elicited comic groans in the lecture hall, mainly from the white males who had yet to understand — or perhaps to fully experience — their own privilege.
Statistically, white men are less likely to be murdered in the US than black men, and in Australia, are far less likely to be arrested, die in custody, or commit suicide. Men are more likely to win jobs and to be paid better than women with the same qualifications. White male privilege is real, and the basic ways we report and consume information protects that bias: 87 per cent of Wikipedia's editors are men, the majority in their 20s .
Which is not Wikipedia's fault. Wikimedia projects are radical, and are changing the world for the better. Articles are becoming more scholarly, and university feminists around the world are putting their students to work to contribute more knowledge. But Wikipedia exists in a world already weighted towards the white male experience.
A few weeks ago I checked D'Angelo's wiki article to find out about his new album. Where Marvin Gaye was the king of soul, D'Angelo (pictured) is its prince (I know this because I read it on the internet). Yet a large portion of the wiki article was dedicated to D'Angelo's 'Legal Issues' (a subheading seemingly exclusive to black musicians, intellectual property pages and anzac biscuits), including a DUI charge and a marijuana possession charge.
My friend and I deleted them — their relevance to D'Angelo's career is negligible, and their level of interest as biographical facts is debatable.
We searched Wikipedia for entries on other musicians we knew to be guilty of similar indiscretions. The manner in which famous white drug-users are represented is notably different.
The entry on Keith Richards, the grandfather of recreational drug use and all comedy based on chemically-eroded intelligence, includes detailed information on his drug use and trouble with the law. But he does not have 'Legal Issues'; his story is a rich and balanced biography. Even Lou Reed, who wrote songs about drugs as well as under their influence, apparently never possessed them.
R. Kelly, on the other hand, has serious 'legal issues' pertaining to an alleged statutory rape. Yet this disturbing crime is lumped in with a sound pollution charge for playing music too loudly in his car. This juxtaposition is offensive: who cares about a sound pollution charge? Certainly not the young survivor of sexual assault.
The murder of Trayvon Martin has catalysed a broad criticism of the real-world effects of white male privilege. Sure, Florida's 'Stand Your Ground' laws sound bizarre and dangerous to almost anyone living outside the state, and to many within it. But the main reason this death became so political is because the law was actively, and openly, protecting the killer, a white man, and not his victim, a black man.
We saw laws that were created by white men used to validate an irrational and murderous fear of black men. The huge political response to the murder articulated an urgent need for the white male perspective to give a little.
When I checked D'Angelo's page a few days later, his 'Legal Issues' were back up.
Ellena Savage is a Melbourne writer who edits Middlebrow, the arts liftout in The Lifted Brow.