Some reference material for engaging in a conversation about white privilege
Last edited Mon May 23, 2016, 11:01 PM - Edit history (1)
First off, thanks to DUer, Yardwork for inspiring this OP: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=7850322
I'm going to present four very fascinating videos and other essays that discuss systems of privilege and white privilege in particular. I've tried to put them all in order so that they'd make the best sense.
Enjoy.
by Peggy McIntosh
Through work to bring materials from women's studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women's status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.
Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there is most likely a phenomenon of white privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.
I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.
Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women's studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, "having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"
http://ted.coe.wayne.edu/ele3600/mcintosh.html
"How Studying Privilege Systems Can Strengthen Compassion ... "How Studying Privilege Systems Can Strengthen Compassion ...
Allan G Johnson on The Gender Knot + Privilege, Power, and Difference (2003)
Allan Johnson: Privilege, Power and Difference 2nd Interview
Putting Racism on the Table: Robin DiAngelo on White Privilege
By Sam Adler-Bell. This article originally appeared on Alternet. _____
Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
Last year, a white male Princeton undergraduate was asked by a classmate to “check his privilege.” Offended by this suggestion, he shot off a 1,300-word essay to the Tory, a right-wing campus newspaper.In it, he wrote about his grandfather who fled the Nazis to Siberia, his grandmother who survived a concentration camp in Germany, about the humble wicker basket business they started in America. He railed against his classmates for “diminishing everything (he’d) accomplished, all the hard work (he’d) done.”
His missive was reprinted by Time. He was interviewed by the New York Times and appeared on Fox News. He became a darling of white conservatives across the country.
What he did not do, at any point, was consider whether being white and male might have given him — if not his ancestors — some advantage in achieving incredible success in America. He did not, in other words, check his privilege.
To Robin DiAngelo, professor of multicutural education at Westfield State University and author of What Does it Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy, Tal Fortgang’s essay — indignant, defensive, beside-the-point, somehow both self-pitying and self-aggrandizing — followed a familiar script. As an anti-racist educator for more than two decades, DiAngelo has heard versions of it recited hundreds of times by white men and women in her workshops. She’s heard it so many times, in fact, that she came up with a term for it: “white fragility,” which she defined in a 2011 journal article as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include outward display of emotions such as anger, fear and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing situation.” -
See more at: http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/white-people-freak-theyre-called-race-hesaid/#sthash.FcW91BzV.dpuf
The author of "What Does It Mean to Be White?" examines the ways white people implode when they talk about race
DR. ROBIN DIANGELO, THE GOOD MEN PROJECT
I am white. I have spent years studying what it means to be white in a society that proclaims race meaningless, yet is deeply divided by race. This is what I have learned: Any white person living in the United States will develop opinions about race simply by swimming in the water of our culture. But mainstream sources—schools, textbooks, media—don’t provide us with the multiple perspectives we need.
Yes, we will develop strong emotionally laden opinions, but they will not be informed opinions. Our socialization renders us racially illiterate. When you add a lack of humility to that illiteracy (because we don’t know what we don’t know), you get the break-down we so often see when trying to engage white people in meaningful conversations about race.
Mainstream dictionary definitions reduce racism to individual racial prejudice and the intentional actions that result. The people that commit these intentional acts are deemed bad, and those that don’t are good. If we are against racism and unaware of committing racist acts, we can’t be racist; racism and being a good person have become mutually exclusive. But this definition does little to explain how racial hierarchies are consistently reproduced.
Social scientists understand racism as a multidimensional and highly adaptive system—a system that ensures an unequal distribution of resources between racial groups. Because whites built and dominate all significant institutions, (often at the expense of and on the uncompensated labor of other groups), their interests are embedded in the foundation of U.S. society.
http://www.salon.com/2015/04/10/white_americas_racial_illiteracy_why_our_national_conversation_is_poisoned_from_the_start_partner/
= new reply since forum marked as read
amongst my white friends who are good on every other topic/ issue except this. Bring up white privilege and they think you are talking personally about them and they get all defensive ("I am poor, etc etc"
. I owned up to my white privilege long ago but it took some time to unpack.
I will bookmark this thread. 
I am taking my time digesting these. I am only on the second video, and was reminded that healing involves going counterintuitive and going toward the most pain and discomfort rather than away. This is the only way to heal, not to just medicate and distract and run away from it.
This white over culture is very stoic, which would consider facing white privilege too 'touchy feely', anger is allowed for white people to feel--but grief, sadness, guilt, shame--those get projected onto everyone else, then their shadow boxing commences from there. I was raised in a very stoic family, so I understand what these repressive dynamics can have on functional relationships first hand.
Reminds me of a book I read as a teen, Anais Nin upon arriving in NYC in 1930 from Paris, said she related best to the immigrants and Africans, because they weren't as stoic. She wrote that she believed this to be a key to racial divide, since people who are stoic tend to be overwhelmed when met with uninhibited people, and people used to being open have trouble trusting people they cannot read. I continue to find this to be a profound observation, and hope that I explained this well. Not meant as a broad brush but actually insight into how different cultures relate, and depend upon body language as well as appearance.
When I look at humanity as a collective, I see this white over culture as an inflated Ego that has grown away from symbiosis with the planet and of all life--and in order to sustain itself it has to deny the pain that this causes. Denying grief and denying the pain people are in and have been is a big part of how each of us participates and perpetuates this sickness.
Thank you MrScorpio
