privilege

Phenotypes & Stereotypes

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I drive three hours almost every weekend to go home to my family, and lately I’ve been listening to podcasts to help pass the time, namely RadioLab. I came across an episode from season five simply titled “Race.” There are a lot of interesting stories featured under this topic, but one in particular has kept me thinking long after listening to it. There has been this trend circling around the internet where people reveal the …

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The First Encounter (of Many)

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You never think it will happen to you, until it does. I am biracial. I was raised more so with my Greek heritage than anything else, but the pigment in my skin lets others know that I am different. I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood, school, and most of my friends were white. There were micro-aggressions that I faced along the way (i.e., getting made fun of from elementary through high school for …

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The Whitesplaining Epidemic

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To all of the people who identify as women out there, have you ever had the experience where you are talking to a man and during the course of the conversation he feels the need to explain something to you, oftentimes in a patronizing or condescending way? This is called mansplaining and it is a phenomenon that women face even if they have extensive knowledge on the given topic. For issues of race, there is …

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The White Man as The ‘Boogie Man’

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In the classroom, when we talk about who benefits from systems of power & privilege, the answer is usually White, straight, cis males. As I continue to have conversations about race with my White friends (males especially), this response is usually one not received well. I’m often met with anger and frustration – an emotional response to what has been described to me as feeling ‘attacked.’ As one male friend put it, “blaming everything on …

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Placing Chris Rock in Conversation with Beverly Daniels Tatum

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It seems as though anytime there is a widely-publicized instance of police brutality in the United States, my Facebook timeline is flooded with the same grainy YouTube clip entitled “How to Not Get Your Ass Kicked by the Police.” In the faux public service announcement filmed in 1998, comedian Chris Rock provides black viewers with a comical step-by-step guide to follow in order to avoid getting into trouble with the law.   The skit is …

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Can a White Person be a Good Ally?

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After stumbling upon Macklemore’s “White Privilege II,” I was excited to hear what he had to say. It felt like a direct application of the concepts that we had been learning in Contemporary Racism. The song directly references protest slogans from the Black Lives Matter Movement, police brutality, the double standard of hip-hop, and (of course) white privilege. He goes as far as to call himself out for the base of his fame from—and the …

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The Complications of Hard Work and Privilege

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Something that has been on my mind recently is the idea of the myth of meritocracy. The myth of meritocracy is the popular American notion that if you work hard you will succeed. This myth, however, does not take into account the fact that it is easier for some people to succeed over others because of privileges they have in terms of their social identities. I struggled making sense of this concept at first for …

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Why Excluding Whites from Black Liberation Movements is Counterproductive

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Recently, I came across an article on Facebook posted by a fellow like-minded student, which surprised and intrigued me. The article was entitled “White People Have No Place in Black Liberation” and was from RaceBaitr.com, written by Kevin Rigby Jr. and Hari Ziyad. The basic premise of the article was that white people should not be allowed to participate in black liberation movements. Rigby and Ziyad argue that because whiteness is historically and contextually seen …

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Overcompensation Doesn’t Improve Relation(s)

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately in class about the tendency that white people have to overcompensate for the racist acts of other white people. For example, when a white person hears a story about another white person acting in a racist way or making a racist comment, they often react by making a dramatic claim in order to make it clear that in NO way do they associate with the racist belief system of another white person. In the …

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Thoughts on Color-Consciousness

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Originally published March 17, 2014 The recent literature in social psychology and other disciplines is clear: colorblind racial ideology is a harmful way of viewing the world. By ignoring both the material disadvantages faced by people of color and the implicit racial biases that influence decision-making, subscribing to colorblind racial ideology leads people to ignore the realities of racism in modern America and thus oppose policies that would address racial inequalities. In a recent class, …

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Spending privilege

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Recently I was on imgfav and saw a picture that was asking why doing something like calling a white person worthless is mean, but saying it to a black person is racism. I think people forget that racism is about power. It is about a majority oppressing a minority. It’s hard to remember sometimes because it’s easier to see oppression than privilege. This is why people who try to fight racism often end up in …

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