Week 2: Privilege: A Big, Scary Word

It can't be overstated that race and privilege are taboo topics in the United States.

Peggy McIntosh describes white privilege as an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.”

But try to get a white friend of yours to admit that they grew up with privilege, and you'll probably get a variety of responses that range from explicit denial to defensiveness to anger. People will try to come up with examples of how they were different, how they didn't have it easy growing up and how class and privilege shouldn't be assumed to go hand in hand.

What are we all so afraid of?

Acknowledging white privilege does not mean we have to be burdened by white guilt, because feeling guilty doesn't do anyone any good. But it does mean we have to be honest and objective about our experiences and identities.

I'm Romanian, the daughter of immigrant parents who left their country in their late twenties to offer me a better future. While Romanians aren't the most respected nationality in Europe, I recognize that a combination of my father's hard work, my mother's sacrifice and my light skin have all granted me access to a variety of opportunities in the United States that others have been systemically denied.

"Colorblindness will not end racism."

This statement deeply resonates with me, because there have been more than a handful of times that I've heard white friends of mine whimsically say, "I don't see race. We're all the same" or "Why do we have to have all these ethnic and cultural groups at the university? They're segregating themselves" or "Why can there by Black and Latino communities, but there's no White community?"

While it's true that skin color is only skin deep, choosing to ignoring the influence that race (as a social construct, not a biological trait!) has in our society does not help to improve the day-to-day realities of those who have to think about race all the time.

As Beverly Daniel Tatum mentions in "The Complexity of Identity: Who am I?" people of a dominant group (white, heterosexual, male) typically don't mention these labels when they're asked about their identity because it is one that they take for granted. Since being white is "the norm" in the United States, asking white Americans to talk about their racial identity is kind of like asking a fish to talk about water because many white people haven't given much thought to how being white has impacted their life.