I recently found out that a visitor to my home considers me a racist ...

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

101. It's tough to get your head around the first few times you

encounter these ideas as a white person. Fish and wet, or whatever the simile was. When you're not obviously being injured by institutionalized power structures, it's harder to see them in action. I thought it was all a bunch of 'hooey' before I finally saw it, not because I was trying to 'retain' my privilege, but simply because I couldn't even 'see' the privilege until enough of it was laid out before me in ways I could observe. and I still would be ignorant of the ideas of privilege if it hadn't been for people who WERE being hurt to take the time to patiently explain over and over in different ways until it finally clicked.

Getting past the 'layman' usage of 'racism' is one of the hardest parts for a lot of white people I've seen in white privilege diaries elsewhere. The notion that one can be, even in part, 'racist', without being a racial bigot, and having to work at seeing the pervasiveness of privilege and racial bias in culture takes a lot of work for us pasty folks who have decades of 'unlearning' to do.