Sunday, May 27, 2012

Reflection #1

After I read "White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack" I took a moment to process everything that Peggy McIntosh was saying in her essay.  As white people, we learn a behavior towards other races without even noticing it.  We can blame racism, but racism is only a part of it.  I was reminded of a problem a friend of mine had when he was an undergraduate in an education class.  After doing a school observation, he wrote that the class he observed was not diverse, a vast majority of the students were the same ethnicity (not white) and there were only a few students who were different form this majority.  His professor criticized this and said this observation was wrong and that the class was diverse.  Could this be the white privilege in action?  Maybe in the US a white population is the majority, but in a class with only one or two white students wouldn't that make those few students the minority?

No comments:

Post a Comment