The article on white privilege by Peggy McIntosh brought up conflicting feelings in me. It opened my eyes to many privileges I never thought about. Part of me reacted with denial. Part of me said “yes, I have many privileges that I was previously unaware of.” After further thought I realized that I myself have racist attitudes, some of which I got from my mother who was born and raised in the gentile southern ways of the US South. At this point in my life I have some barely conscious biases toward African Americans and other people of color. Not always, but sometimes I find myself thinking that they are inferior to me in some fashion that I do not overtly identify. I also sometimes do that with disadvantaged people. In general I keep these biased attitudes from showing. Rather instead they play at the edge of my awareness. It has been disturbing for me during this past couple of weeks to face that reality about myself. It is also true that I have been aware (usually at the very back of my mind, so to speak) of the many privileges that I have as a white male; I’ve become complacent about them and enjoyed having them.
Now that I’ve come to these realizations, I’m left with questions about how to deal with my own prejudices and my casual acceptance of privilege. I think that one of the pathways out of this is to make myself aware when I have thoughts like those and make a conscious choice to reject that thinking. I should point out that I already am sometimes aware of my biased thinking and reject it (at least intellectually). But I think I need to make that process more consciously than before.
Another response I can make is to take opportunities (and this is something I can do in my classroom) to find out more about the lives of the persons I would normally discriminate against and people who do not have the privileges that I have. One thing I already know about myself is that my natural instinct is to make room for others and to share social power. It’s just that now I’ve been made aware of the scope and dimension of these issues. They can have a powerful effect in all groups where there is diversity among individuals.
What the topic of privilege now means for me in multicultural terms is that I have my own internal work cut out for me to understand and change my thoughts and feelings about people of other cultures or other groups. I hope that this will be a lesson that I remember throughout the rest of my life. I’d like to think that I can and will be an anti-racist and someone who in general is proactive in working for pluralism and power sharing for everyone.
Although I don’t know where I will be teaching or what manner of children I will be teaching, but I hope to be a teacher who will be aware of which students in the class are being oppressed or dominated by some overt or subtle form of discrimination. This includes spotting and taking action when I see a student who is evidently at a disadvantage in some way. I would hope to have the presence of mind and heart to work proactively to help eliminate obstacles and barriers for students. Moreover, I want to learn more about things I can do to draw attention positively to the culture and experiences of all of my students.
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