15th Annual White-Hates Aka White Privilege Conference

At the annual meeting of the White-haters of
the World, Leftists promoted racial division

and whites as the scapegoat for past evil, that
racism exists in every white person, because
they have no other compelling issue...

The Longer You Are in the Tea Party, the
More Racist You Become: What Educators
Learned at Alarming White Privilege
Conference
May. 9, 2014 6:46pm Erica Ritz
Would it surprise you to learn that educators were recently taught at the fifteenth annual White
Privilege Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, that racism is central to America; the longer
you are in the Tea Party, the more racist you become; and this country was built on white
principles for white people?
Those are just some of the sound bytes captured by Progressives Today a joint collaboration
between Gateway Pundits J im Hoft and EAG News Kyle Olson, who also co-wrote Glenn
Becks most recent book, Conform.
Hoft and Olson teamed up with documentary filmmaker Andrew Marcus to investigate the
conference, and aired some of the controversial footage on TheBlaze TVs Dana Friday.

The fifteenth annual White Privilege Conference in Madison, Wisc. featured a speaker who
argued, The longer you are in the tea Party the more racist you become. (Image source:
Progressives Today via TheBlaze TV)
A lot of teachers that we interviewed said that their schools were paying them to come,
Hoft remarked. Teachers from around the country were getting paid to attend this event so that
they could go back and spread their wealth of information just garbage back in the
classroom and back in the teachers conference room.
The conferences website adds that teachers are eligible for continuing education credits if they
attend. High school, undergraduate and graduate students are also eligible for academic credit if
they participate.
Hoft, Olson, and Marcus said the conference had roughly 2,400 attendees, and many were
students or educators. One individual from the Department of Education told the group there
were at least 45 staff members from just one school district at the conference.
The trio said the speakers repeatedly emphasized how important it is to start teaching students
about white privilege when they are as young as four and five years old, and that they also
conflated racism with capitalism.
Olson said one of the main messages was, in order to deal with racism we need to attack
capitalism and [change] our very economic structure and economic system.
Hoft added: Its not about moving the country, moving society, in a positive direction Its
very clear that theyre just pushing Marxism.
Watch video from the conference and part of Loeschs interview with Hoft, Olson, and Marcus,
below:
15th Annual White Privilege Conference

Journal

Understanding & Dismantling Privilege
The official journal of the White Privilege Conference

Available now at www.wpcjournal.com (see below)

Submissions accepted on a rolling basis for the following sections:
Research
Tools and Strategies
Creative Work and Self-reflection
Youth Voices
Over the past couple of years, organizers of the White Privilege Conference and the faculty and
staff of the Matrix Center for the Advancement of Social Equity and Inclusion have been vetting
ways to share more widely and authentically the research and practices that inform and define
the Annual White Privilege Conference. Through these discussions we developed the genesis for
The Journal for Understanding and Dismantling Privilege, an on-line, open-access, peer-
reviewed journal dedicated to providing a venue for social justice scholars, educators, activists
and practitioners to share their work with a wide ranging audience.

This journal is another extension of the mission and goals of the WPC and the Matrix Center.
The journal will provide a forum for extending the dialogues, strategies and ideas fostered by the
WPC with a wider audience throughout the year, and provide a space for publishing work that
advances social justice for an interdisciplinary audience.

This new journal brings together articles, reflections, creative work, curriculum, tools and
strategies. Like the WPC, the journal is committed to examining not only white privilege and
oppression, but the intersections of systems of privilege based on race, gender, sexuality, class,
religion, ability, nationality, and other axes of inequality. Bringing together voices across
generations and workplaces, the journal is committed to advancing social justice and dismantling
privilege. The journal will strive to bridge academia and practice, highlight activism, and offer a
forum for creative introspection on issues of inequity, power and privilege. Consistent with our
goal of sharing this work as widely as possible, we are embracing the use of the Collective
Commons copyright system, allowing authors themselves to determine the level of copyright
protection they desire.

The goals of the journal are:
1. To create a forum for research and creative work that critically examines issues of
privilege, power, oppression, white supremacy, and social justice.
2. To encourage examination of the intersections of systems of privilege and oppression,
including but not limited to race/ethnicity, sex/gender, sexuality, class, nationality and
ability/disability.
3. To provide a space for self-reflection, bridging the personal and political.
4. To bridge theory and practice we will provide a forum for sharing curriculum,
programming, tools, strategies, and best practices.
5. To foster interdisciplinary dialogue.
6. To encourage the development of and provide opportunities for learning from youth
voices.
The journal will be published one to two times a year, depending upon submissions and
volunteers. We need your help! Please become a reviewer for the journal, by submitting a
reviewer form, and consider submitting your work for review and possible inclusion. We invite
you to join us in Understanding and Dismantling Privilege: www.wpcjournal.com
S
The Editor
incerely,
ial Team
This is a TENTATIVE schedule of workshops, films, and events. Changes may be made.
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
lack Male Think Tank-2 Networking/Social
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
k-in & On-site Registration for Institute Participants Only
course Hotel)
9:00am-5:00pm
Schedule
6:00pm-8:00pm B
7:30am-9:00am Chec
(separate registration fee required)
(Registration will be held at the Con
Institutes and Black Male Think Tank-2
8:00pm-9:30pm Film Previews (Concourse Hotel)
Thursday, March 27, 2014
7:00am-7:00pm Check-In & On-site Registration open
8:30am-10:00am Opening Ceremonies and Keynote: J acqueline Battalora
10:00am-10:30am Performance by J asiri X
10:45am-12:15pm Concurrent Workshop Session I
12:15pm-1:00pm Lunch Pick-up
1:00pm-2:30pm Concurrent Workshop Session II
2:45pm-4:15pm Concurrent Workshop - Session III
4:30pm-6:00pm Caucuses
6:00pm-7:30pm Meet the Speakers & Book-Signing Reception
7:00pm-9:00pm YAP Poetry Slam
Friday, March 28, 2014
7:30am-10:30am Check-In & On-site Registration open
8:30am-10:15am Opening and Keynote: J ohn Powell
10:30am-12:00pm Concurrent Workshop Session IV
12:30pm-2:00pm Action Planning and Networking Groups
2:15pm-3:15pm Keynote: J oe Feagin
3:30pm-5:00pm Caucuses
5:30pm-7:00pm Music, Entertainments & Community Dinner
(reservation required/additional cost)
(Concourse Hotel)
7:15pm-8:30pm Theatrical Performance Featuring Daniel Beaty
(Concourse Hotel)
Saturday, March 29, 2014
7:30am-10:30am Check-In & On-site Registration for Saturday Institutes
8:30am-10:15am Opening and Keynote: Rosa Clemente
10:30am-4:00pm Institutes (separate registration required)
10:30am-12:00pm Concurrent Workshop Session V
12:30pm-2:00pm Concurrent Workshop Session VI
2:15pm-3:45pm Concurrent Workshop Session VII
4:00pm-5:15pm Closing Ceremony featuring the Youth Action Project (YAP)
5:30pm-7:00pm Caucus and Support Groups
7:00pm-8:00pm Talk to Us

15 SPONSORS

Have we heard from this group protesting the
abuse and murder of Christians, including young
Christian women and other women, in Muslim
countries? No? Why not? Muslims aren't
whiteis that it? Or is it something more
sinister?

UNDERSTANDING

RESPECTING

CONNECTING

GRASSROOTS

University Prof. Attacks Obama as the Face
of Global White Privilege
M ay. 14, 2014 2:53pm Erica Ritz
Professor Adrien Wing of the University of Iowa recently attacked President Barack Obama as
the face of global white privilege at the 15th annual White Privilege Conference in Madison,
Wisconsin.
Describing Obama as the front man for the system, Wing said people shouldnt be happy just
because there is a black face in the White House, who is running the White House instead of
serving in the White House.
The masters house has now got a black face, but its still the masters house! she said. He
works for the master of the system of white privilege.

Professor Adrien Wing spoke at the 15th annual White Privilege Conference in Madison,
Wisconsin. (Image source: Progressives Today)
Conservative news organization Progressives Today a joint collaboration between Gateway
Pundits J im Hoft and EAG News Kyle Olson, who also co-wrote Glenn Becks most recent
book Conform has been releasing video they obtained at the White Privilege Conference.
In the clip released Wednesday, Wing also said that critical race theory helps us because it
teaches that you cant just look at the face.
Clarence Thomas is on the Supreme Court, she said. Does he really replace Thurgood
Marshall? Hes an embarrassment and a disgrace to the memory of Thurgood Marshall! And if I
met Clarence Thomas Id call him that to his face!
Thats because I have something called tenure, she added, as the crowd laughed.
Watch the complete video below (Wings comments come around the 1:30 mark):
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You W ill Not Believe'
W hite House Dared People To Photoshop Obam a's Gun Picture...And Did
They Ever
W hite House Now Denying Top Dem ocrat's Claim About 'I Cannot Even
Stand to Look at You' Obam a M om ent

Learning Advocacy: A Youths Perspective

Rachel Samuels
Air Academy High School

Abstract
High school can be a difficult place to begin advocating for social
justice...especially for a student. This article follows the struggles of one
high school student in creating allies for social justice, and in learning
how to become an effective communicator in this work.
Rachel Samuels is currently in her first year at Stanford University.
While attending Air Academy High School in Colorado Springs, she
created the club, Social Action Youth (SAY) at the beginning of her
sophomore year, and she is the President of the Gay-Straight Alliance
(Spectrum). She has attended the White Privilege Conference since
2008, serving as a Student Leader for the Youth Action Project, and
more recently as a Presenter in 2012. She has also presented at the
Pedagogy of Privilege Conference at the University of Denver (2011).
In addition to participating in school activities and conferences, Rachel
has been trained to be an advocate at TESSA, where she volunteers.
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Understanding and Dismantling Privilege Samuels: Learning Advocacy
ISSN 2152-1875 Volume IV, Issue 1, March 2014 110
Rachel, do you think this is racist? my
white friend, a fellow ninth-grader, asked
me one Halloween, at school, where 80
percent of the population is white. I
evaluated his costume: an Arab robe
complete with a headscarf. I nodded in
response, not quite trusting myself to say
anything. Im not proud of what happened
next, but it happened nonetheless. What
should have been a calm dialogue evolved
into an all-out screaming match in the
middle of the hallway. As he yelled about
why his costume wasnt racist, I yelled right
back about how offensive it was. Im not
sure how the battle ended, but I nearly gave
up on social justice advocacy right then and
there. I had not raised awareness; I had not
acquired peace; I had only turned myself
into a source of entertainment.
I could have vowed to avoid the
sensitive topic of race from that moment on,
making my life a whole lot easier. Thats the
benefit of white privilege, right? I have the
ability to just walk away. However, I made a
promise to myself instead: to learn how to
communicate in a more effective and mature
manner.
In the spring of 2010, I attended the
White Privilege Conference as a participant
in the Youth Leadership Conference.
Throughout the conference, I learned plenty
of new factual information, furthering my
understanding of racial intricacies and
intersections of privilege. I met some
wonderful people who inspired me to take
home what I had learned about social
justice.
At the start of sophomore year, I
created a club called Social Action Youth, or
SAY, to offer a place to start discussions
about race. Rather than only making my
point in the hallways, I could invite people
to come to the club meetings. I started out a
bit rough, since I was on my own. I filled
meetings with statistics and intense videos to
make a point about how racist our society
really is. I learned that this technique didnt
bode well for many attending members. My
approach was too heavy, too vehement to
present at an optional lunchtime experience.
My friends came to support me instead of to
partake in the conversations, and everyone
else seemed to enjoy the complimentary
doughnuts more than the discussions. I had
advanced from shouting bouts to uni-
directional meetings. I could spew facts and
examples, but I couldnt quite connect with
my peers on a personal level. It isnt
difficult to lecture; there isnt much
challenge in a setting that allows only one
voice. Likewise, there isnt much growth
listening to a lecture, either. How can we
learn if we cannot participate?
I returned to the WPC in 2011 as a
leader for the Youth Action Project. As a
facilitator, I turned my attention toward
learning how to better understand my own
position as a social justice advocate. I knew
the facts; I just had to learn how to use them
effectively. It was challenging to acquire a
more empathetic approach instead of my
usual logical tactics. I sought to become an
advocate whom others wanted to approach,
rather than a maverick to whom others could
not relate.
Before junior year, I was invited to
present at The Pedagogy of Privilege
Conference at the University of Denver. I
explained my challenges in working with
other students. While I had overcome some
administrative obstacles, I wasnt quite
satisfied with my impact at school. After
months of meetings with my administration
concerning the official approval of SAY,
they finally allowed me the privileges of a
school-sponsored club. I had advanced on an
institutional level; however, my title as a
Understanding and Dismantling Privilege Samuels: Learning Advocacy
club leader or a conference presenter
held no weight in a high school hallway. My
friends still made racist jokes and
stereotypical comments.
My second year with SAY produced
occasional moments of magic. There was
one particular meeting for which I happened
to be ill prepared. I hadnt managed to put
together a video, or an article, or a lecture.
As a spur-of-the-moment decision, I decided
to have a conversation about the N-word. I
figured this topic would be relevant, since
we were reading The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn in AP Language. Instead
of leading the meeting at the front of the
room, I arranged everyone in a circle, pulled
up a chair, and asked one question:
What do you think of the N-word?
We engaged in a more elaborate
discussion that day than we had at any other
meeting. We talked about historical burdens;
we mentioned the benefits and detriments of
using it in classical novels; we connected on
a personal level. At the end of our allotted
time, I felt more effective than I ever had
before, and I had barely said seven words.
This is what it felt like to be a social justice
advocate. I sparked a discussion, but I didnt
direct the entire meeting; I listened instead.
By stepping back and trusting my peers to
provide their own input, I sensed how to be
a better communicator. It took more
listening than talking.
Uncharacteristically for my school,
we had a similar discussion in AP Lang the
following day. The young man who had
donned that Arabian attire as a frosh raised
his hand and explained what he had learned
the previous day in SAY: he contrasted the
literary merit of Huckleberry Finn with the
societal and personal implications of using
the N-word. I had been a part of making an
impact in the classroom.
That year, I created a mantra for
myself: I would rather make progress than
make a point.
Upon returning to the WPC in 2012,
this time as a presenter, I appreciated
presentations such as that of Dr. Charlene
Teters, a Spokane Indian artist, educator,
and activist. She was one of the many WPC
participants who found peace within her
work. With that peace, she has been able to
connect with others on a deeper level. This, I
have realized, is my ultimate goal.
After three years of SAY at my
school, I have noticed a growing maturity
within my class. Im not quite sure if this is
in direct correlation with the club, but I
notice my peers thinking more deeply about
comments they would normally have
disregarded. By listening more, I seem to
better represent the change I desire, since
people approach me much more often to
inquire about racial topics. At a recent WPC,
one Youth participant even told me that she
had never seen someone so calm in this
work. This particular comment encouraged
me to continue to challenge myself and to
strive for justice on an even more profound
level.
I have since had several
opportunities to create workshops and
presentations about my challenges in
bringing social action to a rather
unwelcoming environment. Its been the
hardest task of my high school career, but
the small moments of connection make it all
worthwhile.

When the Student Is Ready, the Teacher Will Appear:
Teaching Black in the White Classroom

Patricia D. Hopkins, Ph.D.
Christopher Newport University

Abstract
Problems arise when you are a Black student at a Predominately White
Institution (PWI), which I always thought was par for the course and
thus, simply held the mis-education of the said teacher/professor
responsible. Unfortunately, those problems did not magically go away
when I chose to step in front of the class; for nothing is ever really that
simple. Rather, in many ways, teaching at a PWI is a greater challenge,
because I no longer have the privilege to hide in that invisible space I
seemed to occupy most of the time while a student on a predominately
White campus. As I see the shocked faces of students entering my class
for the first time, I become the elephant in the room, Ivy League degrees
notwithstanding. Therefore, my article, When the Student Is Ready,
the Teacher Will Appear: Teaching Black in the White Classroom is
important, for it addresses issues that have not gone away simply
because we have moved forward with a Black president. Further, it
talks about the important issue of teaching Black in a White classroom,
whether you want to or not.
Keywords: Black students, Black faculty, predominately White
institutions, college students, college adjustments, identity, pedagogical
practices, communication strategies, identity negotiation, racism, anti-
racism, White privilege, institutions of higher learning, negative
stereotypes, teaching.

Patricia D. Hopkins, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of English and Director
of African-American Studies at Christopher Newport University
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr.
Patricia D. Hopkins, Christopher Newport University, African-
American Studies, Director, Assistant Professor of English, 1 University
Place, MCM 233, Newport News, VA. Phone: 757-594-7452.
E-mail: patricia.hopkins@cnu.edu
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Understanding and Dismantling Privilege Hopkins: When the Student is Ready
Teaching the Professor:
I was a junior in college and sitting
in my American history class and todays
lesson was on the wonders of colonialism. I
sat there, only half listening, because I have
heard the same story since elementary
school. I could probably recite it by rote.
Then it happened. The professor, whom I
will call Dr. Crawford, pointed at me and
said, For example, if it werent for
colonialism, Pat would be running around
the jungle with a bone in her nose, grunting
and scratching herself, instead of sitting here
in a college classroom. She said this
smiling proudly at my accomplishment as I
tried not to scratchthough all of a sudden,
I felt very itchy.
I was the only Black person in the
room. As numerous pairs of eyes turned to
look at mesome seeming to see me for the
first time, pride was not what I was feeling
as I willed myself into that invisible space I
seemed to occupy most of the time on this
predominately White campus. The student
directly to my left touched my arm and said,
Wow, is that true? I looked intensely at
my notebook, as though the answer would
be there, and remained silent. My stomach
sank as I felt Dr. Crawford move from her
central position in the front of the classroom
toward my desk. She paused, and I knew she
was waiting for me to look up, but I just
started taking copious notes. Finally, she
said: If Pat has done her reading, she
knows that Africa was full of heathens, with
no civilization to speak ofno real
language, culture, religion, or traditions
before the introduction of colonialism. Did
you do your reading, Pat? I nodded, head
barely moving, never looking up from my
notebook, and finally felt her move back to
center stage. I took a deep breath and
continued to stare at my notebook in shock.
Not the real shock of I cannot believe she
said that, but rather, that I did nothing, said
nothing. Slowly I felt the eyes lose interest
in me as I slipped comfortably back into my
cloak of invisibility, admonishing myself:
How dare I not speak up? What was I
thinking?
I was thinking that I wanted to
protect my A average in the class. I was
thinking that I needed to fly under the radar,
get in, get my grade, and get out without
being seen and making a spectacle of
myself. I was sick to my stomach by the
time class was over and ran to my academic
counselor, a Black male, and told him what
had just transpired in class and asked his
advice. He told me to keep my head down
and protect my GPA for that was the most
important thinganything else was a mere
distraction. Dont get distracted, he
commanded. I left his office, still feeling as
though somewhere my ancestors were
ashamed of me, and bumped into my
favorite English professor, whom I will call
Dr. Jacobs.
Dr. Jacobs is a Black female like me;
she was almost 6 feet tall, and spoke as
though she were trained for the stage,
enunciating every syllable and projecting to
the rafters. When she spoke, you listened. I
told Dr. Jacobs about the history class; she
looked me straight in the eye and said, So.
Even her so was delivered properly, no
rolling eyes, rolling neck, just very matter-
of-fact, but with power. Imagine the power
behind voices like those of James Earl Jones
or Charlton Heston and that was Dr.
Jacobss voice, even when she was just
saying so. Dr. Jacobs was very calm as
she patiently waited for a response, which
infuriated me even more. What did she
mean? After all, even though she is an
English professor, she was the one who
introduced me to African American
literature as well as African American
history. You cannot understand the
literature if you do not understand the
history that produced it, she was fond of
saying. Consequently, Dr. Jacobs made me
believe in the validity of historical criticism,
so what does she mean by so? When I did
not respond, just looked back at her, mouth
agape; she took a deep breath and said, Pat,
why does what happened in that classroom
bother you?
Are you kidding? I just told you
what happenedand dont say so again.
It felt as if I was shouting in the hallway, my
voice reverberating off of the teal-tiled
walls. Moreover, I felt that my anger was
now moving towards rage.
She almost laughed, but looked at
my face and swallowed hard and said,
First, remember who you are mad at, I did
nothing to you. And second, consider, why
does what happened bother you so much?
Think.
I thought about the African
American history I knew, not the blurb
generally taught in schools. I thought about
the African history that I knew to be true,
found outside of the textbooks assigned in
class. I thought about the philosopher
Socrates saying that the most important
thing a teacher can do is teach his students
to think for themselves. Then I thought
about my children and the anger left me. In
almost a whine I pleaded, I do not want
someone like that mis-educating my babies.
I want them to know the true American
story, the good and the bad.
She smiled at me and said, Good, so
now what? How do you guarantee that
someone like yourself is in front of the
classroom and able to teach the next
generation?
And then slowly it came to me, I
will go on to graduate school and I will
teach.
She winked at me and headed for her
office. But over her shoulder she challenged,
And the first lesson you need to teach and
learn is what?
I did not know what she meant, but I
knew there was no point in asking her
because all she would say is think. So I
thought.
I thought about all that I had read
since coming to college: Sol T. Plaatjes
Mhudi (1913); Chinua Achebes Things Fall
Apart (1958); Eskia Mphahleles Down
Second Avenue: Growing up in a South
African Ghetto (1959); Ng!g" wa
Thiongos Weep Not, Child (1964); Bessie
Heads A Question of Power (1973); Buchi
Emechetas The Bride Price (1976); and
Mariama Bs So Long a Letter (1981), to
name but a few. None of these books were
read in any of my literature classes. Rather,
as I exited Dr. Jacobss classes, she would
hand me a book and say, I cannot wait to
hear your thoughts after you read this.
Even when I was no longer her student, she
continued this practice, passing books to me
when I passed her in the hallin fact, to this
very day I might get a nondescript manila
folder in the mail with a book and a yellow
post-it note stuck to its cover saying, I
cannot wait to hear your thoughts, which
never fails to bring a smile to my face.
Among this collection of
autobiographical and semi-autobiographical
works and historical fiction and fiction, the
themes were diverse: Mhudis (1913)
romantic epic is set in the first half of the
nineteenth century. Its main action is
unleashed by King Mzilikazis
extermination campaign against the Barlong
in 1892 at Kunana (Selagole now), and
covers the resultant alliance of defeated
peoples with Boer frontiersmen in a
resistance movement leading to Battle Hill
(Vegkop, 1836) and the showdown at the
Battle of Mosega (17 January 1839). Mhudi,
the eponymous heroine, is still an enduring
symbol of the belief in a new day. Things
Fall Apart (1958) explores the customs and
society of the Igbo, and the influence of
British colonialism and Christian
missionaries on the Igbo community during
the late 1880s and early 1900s. Down
Second Avenue: Growing Up in a South
African Ghetto (1959) gives a true-to-life
portrayal of the Apartheid era, showing what
it was like for a Black man to live under
Apartheid and yet still rise amidst all odds.
Weep Not, Child (1964) deals with the Mau
Mau Uprising and the dispossession of an
entire people from their ancestral land, while
exploring the detrimental effects of
colonialism and imperialism on Kenya.
Further, it is heavily critical of British
colonial rule. A Question of Power (1973),
on the one hand, is an insiders description
of the mind of a suffering, delusional
person. On the other hand, it is an
exploration of power relations and political-
social evil. By conflating these two evils, the
text demonstrates that social evil inflicted on
individuals can lead literally to madness.
The Bride Price (1976) tells the story of the
clash between the traditional customs of a
small Igbo village in Nigeria and the ever-
encroaching influence of Africas European
colonizers, as seen through the eyes of a
young girl. It is also the tale of male
domination. The caste system in Nigerian
culture is also explored. And So Long a
Letter (1981) explores the condition of
women in West African society. While all of
these titles did not share the same genre,
they all nonetheless collectively spoke to me
in one voice: Language, culture, religion,
and tradition existed on the continent of
Africa long before colonialism.
I thought about all of these books
and more. My reading list surpassed what
Dr. Jacobs would give me to readeach one
of her books leading me to another. And
even though some were fiction,
nevertheless, they collectively discredited
the dated material in the textbooks I was
using in history class. The history of Africa
is as vast and grand as the continent itself.
Further, the notion that colonization was
needed to civilize the uncivilized, was not
only erroneous, but a hangover from the
days when the white man believed it was his
mission to bring civilization and its values to
the world (Hamilton, 2007, pp. 33-34). In
any sense of the word, civilization came to
the continent of Africa centuries before
colonization. Consequently, I compiled a
booklist, which included the aforementioned
texts, as well as From Slavery to Freedom: a
History of Negro Americans, by historian
John Hope Franklin (1980). I felt Franklins
text was important not only because it shows
the origins of Black people in Africa, but
also because it traverses the horrors that
colonialism and imperialism brought on the
people, culture, and traditions of Africa. In
addition, like many of these texts, Franklins
book shows a people, in this case the
African American people, rise amidst all
odds.
Now what do I do with this booklist?
Should I call Dr. Crawford out in class? She
called me out in class. No, I decided.
Sadly, I am not sure if my decision was
based on the fact that I was embarrassed to
be singled out as the only Black person in
the class and consequently did not want to
embarrass my professor, or if it was
something else. It has been my experience
that when people are put in what they
perceive to be an embarrassing or awkward
situation, some feel threatened and strike.
So, was it fear? Was I afraid to go in the
front door, self-righteously brazen, for fear
of being attacked? Or was I opting, rather, to
enter through the comfortable back door,
which is less confrontational and suggests
on some level that I know my place?
Historian and educator, Carter G. Woodson
(2005) contends in The Mis-Education of the
Negro:
If you can control a mans thinking you do
not have to worry about his actions. When
you determine what a man shall think you do
not have to concern yourself about what he
will do. If you make a man feel that he is
inferior, you do not have to compel him to
accept an inferior status, for he will seek it
himself. If you make a man think that he is
justly an outcast, you do not have to order
him to the back door. He will go without
being told; and if there is no back door, his
very nature will demand one. (p. 55)
So, maybe I am just a product of my over-14
years of education, or as Woodson (2005)
would contend, my mis-education, in spite
of my outside readings.
Whatever the reason, I chose the
back door and thus went to her office hours,
with booklist in hand. She sat at her desk.
Three walls of books from ceiling to floor
surrounded her and her cluttered desk like a
comfortable blanket. She looked up at me,
over her glasses, with questions chasing
each other in her steel-gray eyes. What is
wrong? She never speaks in class. She
barely makes eye contact. What could she
possibly want? I saw the questions in her
eyes, which she blinked excessively, as if
trying to clear an apparition from her vision,
brow furrowed in the attempt. After my
assessment of the situation, I averted my
eyes, choosing to look over her right
shoulder instead. She cleared her throat. I
lost my courage and voice at the same time
and laid the paper on her desk and fled. I
have never told anyone about my cowardice
that day, until now. I still feel the shame.
As it came time for us to have class
again, I was a nervous wreck. Would Dr.
Crawford call me out again or would she
just find a reason to fail me? Dr. Crawford,
however, never mentioned that slip of paper
or me coming to her office. We got through
the rest of the semester not speaking or even
seeming to see one another. Interestingly
enough, even though more Black topics
came up in classafter all, it was an
American history classshe never
mentioned me again. I thought it was a sure
sign that I had crossed the proverbial line
and forgotten my place and that she would
surely fail me when the time came, despite
my grades. But that did not happen either. I
received the grade that I earned in the class,
nothing more and nothing less. And as I
spent the next year applying to graduate
programs and had no other classes with Dr.
Crawford, I slowly forgot the incident.
I forgot it, that is, until the day I had
to walk across the stage and accept awards
for graduating with honors in both my
majors, English and History, and noticed
that standing next to Dr. Jacobs stood Dr.
Crawford. Again, I almost fled. Both
professors held a folder in their hands; one
looked at me, while the other looked out at
the audience, never making eye contact. I
took a deep breath and forced myself to
walk across the stage after my name was
called, willing myself not to trip and fall. Dr.
Jacobs handed me her folder and gave me a
warm embrace, then whispered in a thick
French accent, courage, as she pivoted me
towards Dr. Crawford. My primary goal
from that point on was to get off the stage as
quickly as possible. I walked up to Dr.
Crawford, who handed me the folder that
she was holding and shook my hand. With
my eyes lowered, I mumbled, Thank you
to her shiny black shoes, and glanced up to
see her lips moving as I headed for the
stages exit. The blood pounding in my ears
was deafening, thus I was almost three steps
away from her, and beginning to descend the
stages steps when my brain registered what
she had said: Thank you. She said thank
you to me. Why? I ran to the nearest
restroom. I needed to be alone.
I sat in the sitting area of the ladies
restroom, trying to remember how to breathe
and then opened the English folder I had
been given. In it was a nicely emblazoned
award acknowledging my graduating with
honors in English. Now, with bats playing
tag in my stomach and much trepidation, I
opened the next folder. I saw the same
emblazoned award, except that it
acknowledged my graduating with honors in
History. There was no trip wire or
explosion, no tricknevertheless, I took it
out of its folder to inspect it more
thoroughly. I held it up to the bathroom
light, and that is when it happened. A paper
fell out. It had been placed behind the
award. I picked it up and turned it over. Dr.
Crawford included the first page of her new
syllabus, which included a new book list.
She even included some from the list that I
had given her. There were 14 words
beautifully handwritten in cursive, in the
right corner: Pat, you have much to teach
and we have much to learn, thank you. I sat
there, rocking back and forth, clutching that
piece of paper to my breast, without a care
for the two awards that I had just earned,
thinking, That is what Dr. Jacobs meant by
And the first lesson you need to teach and
learn is what? I needed to teach Dr.
Crawford and in doing so, I would also learn
a lesson or two myselflike first, there is
power and great responsibility in teaching,
and second, that I can teach. That I love to
teach is just icing on the cake.

Teaching the Class:
In one of my earlier teaching posts, I was
asked to teach an American literature survey
course. Even though I considered myself an
African Americanist, I was comfortable
teaching the course because I was well
trained in American literature and history, as
well as in the politics of what it means to be
an American. Although I was given a
canonical list, I was also told that I could
tweek it, which I did. I decided to be
more inclusive with my definition of
American literature, beyond the
predominately dead, White, male writers on
the list that I was given. Thus, I added some
color to this list. For example, I had
section (A) Narrative prosecanonical
voices and section (B) Narrative prose
multicultural voices. In the latter section I
included the likes of Zora Neale Hurston,
Richard Wright, Carlos Bulosan, James
Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gloria
Anzalda, and Sandra Cisneros. Within the
poetry section, I had four distinct topics, all
from canonical poets, which I called
Continuing American Lines, Major
Directions in the Twentieth Century,
Artistic Consciousness, and Probing the
Personal. To the canonical poetry list, I
also included a fifth section, Poetrythe
Outer World, where I added poets like
Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Sterling
Brown, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen,
Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audr
Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton,
Michael Harper, and Rita Dove. And I
balanced the canonical section of American
drama by including Lorraine Hansberry and
August Wilson. I did not take away one iota
from how the canonical list had been taught
by the previous professor, but I did add to it,
which to me benefits everyone.
Enter the classMonday (first class
of week one). Now as a Black woman,
having taught in predominately White
institutions before, just like many of my
Black and Brown colleagues, I understood
that
I do not have the privilege of walking into a
classroom and having students assume that I
am a capable and credible teacher. Nor do I
have the privilege of walking into a
classroom and having people assume that I
have earned my position through hard work
and determination. I have to be deliberate in
the subject matter that I teach so that others
do not see me as an exception to their
assumptions about who is qualified, about
who has a right to be here. I also do not
have the privilege of having people know
that I am a well-educated person with three
degrees . . . and is an expert in my
discipline. (Tuitt, Hanna, Martinez, Salazar,
& Griffin, 2009, p. 69)
I must explain myself; therefore,
when I introduce myself, I do what I know
my White colleagues do not have to do and
give my students a brief rundown of my
curriculum vitae, Ivy League degrees and
all, in the hopes that it validates my reason
for standing before them, ready to teach.
And this class was no different, I introduced
myself. After I mentioned my academic
pedigree, however, a hand immediately shot
up from the back of the room. Before I
could call on him, a student whom I will call
Matthew said: I only came to this
university because I didnt get into my first-
choice school. My friend, who is Black and
did no work the entire time we were in high
school, was offered a scholarship to my
first-choice school. I think Affirmative
Action is reverse discrimination.
As I leaned against the blackboard, I
thought about my slow climb out of the
projects of East-Harlem, New York, to the
Ivy League campus of graduate school.
With every stroke, I was swimming against
the tide, exhaustion whispering to me to quit
or at least rest awhile, but I knew the current
would carry me away from my goals and
toward a trap: enslavement to the welfare
system, prison, or the cemetery. Still silent, I
looked around the room at the other
students, some showing signs that they were
getting uncomfortable in my silence, many
refusing to make eye contact. I willed them
to understand that Affirmative Action may
have opened the door, but it did not keep me
in the seatspure unadulterated hard work
did. But still, I said nothing. If I were
White, Affirmative Action would not even
cross anyones mind. I sighed, weary to my
soul, for I realized what Matthew did not see
when he looked at me: a studious hard
worker, a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps
go-getter. He saw a slacker, someone who
was handed something she did not deserve. I
knew it was problematic to discuss diversity
on a predominately White campus,
nonetheless, without a trace of emotion, I
said, I am sorry that you did not get into
your first-choice school and I am further
sorry that you are here, when it sounds like
you want to be elsewhere, Matthew.
However, schools want and need diversity.
Did you apply to a historically Black college
or university? If you had, you may have
been offered a free ride while your Black
friend may have had to go to his second-
choice school. It is all about diversity. By
the way, getting into any college or
university and staying in are two very
different things.
He looked at me incredulously and
said, I wanted a regular education so why
would I apply to any of those schools.
Besides, it would be weird to be the only
regular person in the class.
Welcome to my world, I thought as I
moved on to my lesson plan and passed
around the syllabus. After giving them time
to read it over, I asked if there were any
questions.
Matthew raised his hand again. I
thought this was American literature.
It is, I responded emphatically.
But why are there all these other
people on here? We should just be reading
things by regular Americans, he spat.
I said, far more calmly than I felt, I
do not understand? Every author
He burst in, Of course you dont
understand. You are not a regular American,
so how could you?
And here we go again I thought I
get so tired of taking class time to teach this
lesson. Why cant it be like the telephone
game, you tell one class and then all the
subsequent classes already know it? Do
White teachers who teach from a diverse list
of literature also have to defend why they
chose the authors they chose? And what
does regular American mean anyway?
Then it hit me, I can get mad and no one
learns, or this can be a teachable moment.
I put the syllabus and the days
lesson aside. I casually leaned against the
podium; adjusted the navy, three-quarter-
length jacket that I was wearing; clicked the
heel of my right, black, cowboy boot and
watched its peace symbol bootstrap fall into
place; and then said: How many of you are
Americans? A sea of White faces stared
back at me. All hands quickly shot up in the
air. Not only were they Americans, but they
were proud Americans. I smiled. I walked
over to a wall of three chalkboards and at
the top, in the center, I wrote the word, A-
M-E-R-I-C-A-N. I turned back to the class
and asked, Does anyone know what it
means to be an American? All hands
eagerly shot up again, good, I thought. Then
I said, For the purpose of this class, we are
going to create a working definition for this
term, okay? Once we collectively agree on
the definition, we will use it during this
class, agreed? My request was met by eager
nods and a few smirks.
I will write ALL of your responses
on the board. So lets begin. What does it
mean to be an American? I asked, very
curious as to what they would come up with,
and began to fill every space on all three
boards with things like: Your family must
have been here for at least five generations,
You must be a Christian, You must be
straight, You must own land, You must
have a job, You must not be on Welfare,
You must have a United States passport,
You must have at least four generations of
United States veterans in your family and
English must be your familys first
languageto name but a few. Remember,
three chalkboards were completely filled.
By the time the boards were filled,
students were talking amongst themselves,
very satisfied in what they had done. You
would think they had done what politicians
have failed to do since the signing of the
Declaration of Independencedefine to
whom We the People referred and, more
importantly, to whom it did not. I stepped
into the classroom so that I could really see
the board, and after briefly wishing I had a
camera to capture this truly Kodak moment,
I turned to the class and asked, How many
of you agree with this definition of
American? Hands shot up quickly,
Matthew was even patting other students on
the back, and I saw a few high-fives. I
smiled, walked back to the front of the class,
and slowly looking around the room said,
By this definition, how many of you are
still Americans?
This time only 70 percent of the
class raised their hands. I asked the 30
percent, who by the classs definition could
no longer claim an American identity, if
they were fine with their new-found status,
and they said yes. The at least five
generations rule was generally the problem.
Fine, I said, Then, first, acknowledging
that beyond the doors of this classroom,
there might be another definition for
American, like, for example, you only need
to be native to America, for the purpose of
this classand this class onlydo you want
this, as I gestured to all three boards, to be
the working definition for American? They
agreed in unison. I nodded, and walked over
to the board and wrote 70 percent of the
class, under the word American. The class
cheered, even the 30 percent who, by the
definition on the board, were now non-
Americans. When the uproar died down a
bit, under the 70 percent I wrote my name,
Dr. Hopkins and slowly turned to face the
class. The classroom was dead silent for 14
full seconds. There was just the big, black,
second hand on the classroom clock ticking
off . . . one, two, three, four, as the silence
deepened . . . seven, eight, nine, ten . . . I did
not even breathe . . . thirteen, fourteen.
On the fifteenth click of the black
second hand on the round clock facing my
lectern, pandemonium broke out: Wait!
said Matthew, What are you doing? You
cant do that!
Why? I innocently asked. I meet
all the qualifications on these boards, so why
arent I an American? I challenged. Dead
silence again, as the clock ticked off, one,
two . . . but that was okay, for I saw the
wheels were turning, some of them were
actually thinking this thought for the first
time in their lives, nine, ten. . . . Matthews
mumblings temporarily broke the silence.
Matthew would not look at me as he
continued to mumble to himself. Rather,
with head hung, nose just a few inches from
his notebook, he began to take copious
notes. I know that trick, I thought. I
invented it. I have the patience of Job. I can
wait. I am not afraid of silence in the
classroom. I looked up at the clock as the
second hand tapped out thirteen, fourteen.
Finally I saw a hand slowly being raised out
of the corner of my eye.
I turned to face a girl in the front
row, whom I will call Allison. First Allison
looked at Matthew in the back, still
mumbling to his desk top and ferociously
scribbling in his notebook, then at me and
said, Dr. Hopkins. . . ugh, you are not, you
know?
I am not what? Skinny? Short?
What? I said, a little too impatiently, but I
was weary of this game, I wanted someone
to say it to my face.
You are not White, Allison said,
almost apologetically.
I wondered, is she sorry that I am
Black or sorry that I am not White?
Regardless, there it was. I sighed, then
pointed to the board and challenged, Where
does it say you have to be White anywhere
on this board? Dead silence for the third
time, just that clock keeping time, one, two,
three, four, five . . . White privilege exists to
such an extent that Whiteness goes without
saying. It is a given, I thought. Six, seven,
eight, nine . . . Matthew started a nervous
clicking of his penopened, closed, opened,
closedhis thumb was working overtime,
the knuckles grasping the pen were white
with tension. Yes, Matthew was obviously
bothered by my name being on the board.
He kept looking up at it and looking away,
click pen open, click pen closed, but he
could not figure out how to get my name off
the board.
A battle was raging in me as I stared
at the blackboard and struggled with the
classs contention that I was unable to claim
an American identity. I, who could easily
trace my African American blood line on
my maternal grandmothers and paternal
grandfathers sides to Charlotte, North
Carolina, from this very day to two
generations before the War, which is how
my family always referred to the Civil War.
And while my maternal grandfathers family
immigrated to America, some after fleeing
and others after enduring the Holocaust, my
paternal grandmother was a member of the
North Carolina Cherokee nation. I wanted to
scream, I AM AMERICAN! But I did not.
Rather, I sighed to my soul and decided to
teach, not preach. I did not want to
antagonize them further on this point. I had
asked them what they thought American
meant and they told me. Before they could
challenge their collective definition, they
must learn to think differently: both
critically and analytically. To that end, I
decided to further trouble the water and
asked, How many of you have Native
American origins?
Matthew, glad to have an
opportunity to let out some of his frustration
over my name almost touching the word
American, said, We told you, we are all
regular Americans, or at least most of us,
he said, as he looked at the traitorous 30
percent.
Ignoring the tone of his outburst, I said,
Unless you are of Native American origins,
it means your family came here from
someplace else and I need you to find out
where your ancestors came from. That
assignment did not sit well with the students
and even some of their parents. For
example, Matthews parents sent me an e-
mail accusing me of telling their son that he
was not an American, which, of course, was
untrue. I did wonder if Matthews parents
would feel as outraged if they knew that
their son told me that I was not an
American. Probably not, and since I do not
teach in lower grades, I do not have to
answer to parents, and so moved forward
with what I thought to be an important
lesson on American identity.
On Wednesday, (second class of
week one), no one had done the assignment.
They said things like, Well, did my mom
contact you? To which I replied, You are
all over 18; therefore, legally I cannot talk to
parents about your progress in my course,
due to privacy regulations. I love that
FERPA rule! I then proceeded to share my
beliefs on why I thought the assignment was
important to an American literature class.
I am, because my ancestors were.
You guys have guessed itI am a
descendant of people who endured the
transAtlantic slave passage. What may be
less obvious, however, is that my ancestors
also endured the Trail of Tears and the
Holocaust. Class, Ubuntu is a Bantu
philosophy, which states I am who I am
because of who we all are. As a result, I
made it my business to collect all of the
familial stories I couldalways asking the
pertinent questions. Remembering and
passing on our ancestral stories, whether
their origins entailed immigration, forced
immigration, or forced relocation, it is the
story of America. And had my ancestors not
endured, I would not be here. And by
extension, my children would not be here.
But they did live through what my mother
calls their trials and tribulations;
consequently, my life is the gift of their
endurance. Again, Ubuntu: I am because
we are. I honor them by the way I treat that
giftmy life. In addition, I honor them by
remembering them and passing on their
stories, which keeps their legacy alive and
makes sure we learn the whole American
story, the good and the bad.
In addition, I added: Sankofa is an
Akan philosophy, which loosely translated
means that in order to move forward, you
must look back. Therefore, your ancestral
stories are important and you owe your
ancestors to listen and pass them on; further,
by living my life honorably, I also give
thanks to them for enduring their trials and
tribulations. You are here now, because your
ancestors were then. Honor them, first, by
remembering them and, second, by
respecting the gift they gave youyour
ancestral lifeline. I gave them the
assignment again, telling them to talk to
grandparents, great-uncles, great-aunts, and
collect their stories as gifts they would
someday pass on to their own children.
On Friday, (third and final class of
week one), students came in very animated.
They had done the assignment. Ninety
percent of the class was of Scotch-Irish
descent. They were exchanging stories of
immigration and retelling stories of
courageous relatives whose very decisions
way back when meant that they could sit
in this classroom living the American
dream, paid for on the backs of their
ancestors.
Since the first two sections of our
American literature class were called
Narrative ProseStorytellers, which would
take us to week six in the course, I asked the
class to complete a family history
assignment and tell that story, the ancestral
story that led to their lifeline. I reminded
them that their families narratives were
only one perspective or point of view on
history, like psychiatrist and human rights
activist Thomas Szaszs perspective on how
history would be changed if Native
Americans had not been called Indians.
Szasz asserts:
Had the white settlers in North
America called the natives Americans
instead of Indians, the early Americans
could not have said that the only good
Indian is a dead Indian and could not have
deprived them so easily of their lands and
liberty and lives. Robbing people of their
proper names is often the first step in
robbing them of their property, liberty, and
life (2012, June 29).
The assignment, which they had five
weeks to complete, was in two parts as
follows:
We the People Assignment
Part One: The Interview:
Try to cover as many of the questions as
possible and do so as thoroughly as you can,
while discovering the following:
Have you always been of the same
social class? What is it (working
class, middle class, business owners,
or aristocracy)?
Have your fortunes improved or
worsened?
If you are able to trace back to when
your family immigrated to America,
explain why and when they did so.
What were the push factorsthe
reasons why they left their original
homeand what were the pull
factorsthe reasons why they
chose to come to America? These
will involve research into conditions
in the country of origin at the time of
emigration and conditions in
America at the time of arrival. Pay
particular attention to important
local, national, or world affairs
happening at the time. Did these
affect the decision to move?
Why did they come? Were they
sponsored?
How did they get here? Did they all
come together?
What language did they speak when
they arrived? Did they learn English?
When?
Where has your family lived in the
United States? Where did they first
come to?
Why and when did they come to
Virginia?
How have attitudes toward the old
country and America changed from
generation to generation?
If you still have contact with
relatives in the old country, note
how your family members lives
here are similar to or different from
family members there.
What traditions does your family still
practice that can be linked to your
immigration history? (Food, religion,
music, gatherings, etc.)
Are you glad that your family made
this move? Why or why not?
Part Two: The Personal Narrative:
This assignment is important because it will
require that you talk to your elders,
particularly the oldest members of your
family. All too often we do not seek this
information until it is too late. This is how
family histories die. The next step in this
process will be to turn the information you
have gathered into a story, a story that
reflects your roots in America. The story
will be written in the first person as if it
were a memoir, based on the information
you have collected. You will take on the
voice of an immigrant in your familys
history, and describe the experience,
referencing the information from the
interview(s) you conducted. This assignment
is a creative one, and you will round out
your personal interviews with a little bit of
outside research, so you will be able to
capture the right mood (say you learn your
ancestors immigrated from a certain county
in Ireland, you might go online to get a
sense of what that place is like). The
narrative should be approximately 1,000
words, and should include description and
detail. Your goal is to personalize this
storyuse the facts and information you
have learned to help others appreciate the
story. Be sure to keep this assignment and
build your family knowledge through it.

Conclusion:
There is a saying that you cannot
teach an old dog new tricks. Well, my
undergraduate history professor, Dr.
Crawford, learned the lesson of inclusion
and not stereotyping, and in addition, I hope
she learned the problems that can arise when
you single one student out and then make
him or her speak for the group. In learning,
she taught me that she was open to new
ideaseven if those ideas challenged her
core philosophy. After all, she was a product
of her education, or mis-education, as
Woodson (2005) might say, but also smart
enough to want to do something about it.
As for my American literature
classwell, young people may be harder
to teach new tricks, for two reasons. One,
I think it is because they are not as sure of
the world, they only have this little piece of
ground to stand on and if they give up that
piece they think they may fall, or worse, lose
a piece of themselves. Two, I realized that
students may feel that the weight of all the
injustice of history is being loaded onto their
shoulders. At the end of the semester, as a
student whom I will call Cassidy was asking
me what I was teaching next, I took the
opportunity to ask her about her initial
steadfast resistance to what I planned to
teach on that first day of class. Cassidys
response was eye-opening. She said
laughingly, I thought it was going to be
another blame the Whites class. Boy did
you prove me wrong. I sat with her
comment for a long time, not appreciating
the positive, only hearing the negative. That
anyone could take what I said in a lecture
and turn it around to suggest that I blamed
anyone for anything, I found troubling. With
this thought, I felt that proverbial hoop I
must jump through in order to teach my
class raised another inch. Students may be
resistant to me and what I teach because
they feel that I am blaming them. Imagine
blaming a teenager for centuries of history
incredible! Nevertheless, I believe the
greatest gift that I can give my students is to
get them to a place where they think for
themselves. To achieve that goal, I have to
get them to stop regurgitating 12 years of
spoon-fed facts and start thinking about
what that knowledge means.
How does this apply to the American
literature class? As far as the students in the
aforementioned course, at least 60 percent,
including Allison and Cassidy would follow
me until they graduated, whether it was a
class on African American literature, the
Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights and the
Black Power Movement, Black Science
Fiction, Black Poetics, Black Literature,
film, or multicultural literaturethey were
hungry for this diverse perspective. And
watching them take a racial issue in a text
and apply it to social issues today always
brings a tear to my eyes, for I know that
means they are thinking for themselves and
seeing beyond skin color.
The problem was never really the
color of my skin. That was a red herring;
what needs to be addressed, challenged,
eradicated, is the historical dogma that
propagates the view that my skin color is
evil. Nonetheless, for some, the challenge in
that American literature class was too
insurmountable. Matthew chose to drop the
class at the end of the second week. I often
wonder where his We the People project
may have taken him. Occasionally our paths
have crossed on campus, but his dead eyes
look through me. A stanza from Maya
Angelous (1971) When I Think About
Myself, comes to mind: Sixty years in
these folks world / The child I works for
call me girl (p. 26, lines 8-9). I think, Not
only does Matthew not see me when our
paths cross on campus, he does not have to
see me. Like in the Angelou poem, White
privilege suggests it is I who must see him.
I say Yes maam for working sake. / Too
proud to bend / Too poor to break / I laugh
until my stomach aches / when I think about
myself (p. 26, lines 10-14).
Even though I wish I had the
privilege of just teaching what I was
assigned to teach and not having to go into
history or spend so much energy to get
students to see that I am a human being who
worked hard for her piece of the American
Dream, which no one gave to me. I earned
it. If they could just see beyond the package
that I am wrapped in and understand that in
all the important ways I am no different than
they are; well, they might see a phenomenal
professor, who not only knows her craft, but
is still excited about teaching it. For it has
never been about the blame Whites game,
but rather, the fill in the blanks game. I
think of the American story as a patchwork
quilt, with all its diverse colors and stories.
When I hold that quilt up, however, I see
gaping holesmissing people, missing
stories, missing voices. I want my students
to leave my class with the image of an intact
quilt (at least more intact than when they
entered my class).
Then I think about Matthew and
wonder how I could have held onto him.
What should I do differently next time? I am
just not sure. The one thing I am assured of,
however, is that there will be a next time.
Nevertheless, I wish I could have reached
him. I wish I was able to teach him. But
teach him what? Maybe, teach him to see
me. Yeah, thats it. Well, when the student
is ready I will be there.

References
Angelou, M. (1971). Maya Angelou: Poems. Reprint New York: Bantam Books, 1986. Page
reference to the 1986 edition.
Franklin, J. H. (1947). From slavery to freedom: A history of Negro Americans. Reprint 5th
Edition. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1980.
Hamilton, A. (2007, February 8). We cant be Americas friend if we act at its courtier. The
Independent.
Szasz, Thomas. (2012, June 29). A quote by Thomas Szasz on America, death, good, liberty,
names and people. [Web log post] Retrieved from
http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/thomas-szasz/35880
Tuitt, F., Hanna, M., Martinez, L. M., Salazar, M., & Griffin, R. (2009). Teaching in the line of
fire: Faculty of color in the academy. The NEA Higher Education Journal: Thought &
Action, 25, 65-74. Retrieved from
http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/HE/TA09LineofFire.pdf
Woodson, C. G. (1933). The mis-education of the Negro. Reprint New York: Dover Publications,
Inc., 2005.

Consumerism as Racial and Economic Injustice: The
Macroaggressions that Make Me, and Maybe You, a
Hypocrite

Paul C. Gorski
George Mason University

Abstract
When Gorski started to take stock of his own behaviors and how they
might contribute, even if indirectly, to racial injustice, the only
conclusion he could come to was this: he is a hypocrite, especially when
it comes to consumerist behaviors. In this essay he discusses
consumerism as a series of MACRO-aggressions that feed racial and
economic injustice in which nearly all of us, in one way or another, are
complicit.

Paul C. Gorski is the founder of EdChange. He also is an Associate
Professor of Integrative Studies at George Mason University, where he
recently co-designed a new undergraduate program and minor in Social
Justice and Human Rights. He is passionate about the intersectionality
of all forms of exploitation and liberation, and particularly enjoys
working with schools, colleges, and universities that are committed to
becoming more equitable and just.
Acknowledgement: Many thanks to Azadeh Osanloo for fantastic
feedback on this essay.

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Understanding and Dismantling Privilege Gorski: Consumerism as Racial & Economic Injustice
I am writing this essay to come clean. When
it comes to racial justice, or really any kind
of justice, I am a hypocrite.
Learning about racism, for me, has
been a continual process of the same basic
routine. Just when I think I have somewhat
of a grasp of what racism is, some new bit of
consciousness comes along and whacks me
right in the hind end, reminding me that I
dont know squat. Like many White people,
my introduction to conversations about
racism started with the assumption that it
was purely interpersonal. If we can just
figure out how different racial groups can
get along with one another, everything will
be cheery and sweet. Thenwhack!oh, its
institutional, its bigger than individual
relationships. I started to wrap my mind
around that, and thenwhack!oh, its
global, its connected to a history of
imperialism. And so on. I easily could
implicate myself at any of these levels of
racism. But recently, a couple of experiences
conspired to give me the latest whack, and it
flattened me. The gist of the whack is this:
every day I participate in pervasive systems
of oppression, not just through
microaggressing or reaping the benefits of
White privilege as they normally are
understood, but by consuming mindlessly in
ways that exploit already disenfranchised
communities.
In this essay, I describe what is very
much an emerging theoretical framework for
understanding what I have come to call
macroaggressions. Macroaggressions are
the ways I comply with these big-level
consumerist-capitalist systems that
perpetuate racism and economic injustice,
despite the fact that I do not intend to exploit
the people I exploit in my complicity.
I begin by describing two
experiences that led to the most recent
reevaluation of my relationship with
systemic racism. Then, drawing on two
important theoretical concepts
intersectionality and microaggressionsthat
informed my view of these experiences, I
introduce macroaggressions as a theoretical
framework for examining a brand of racism
and economic injustice characterized by
participation in oppressive consumerist
practices. With these theoretical tools in
mind I examine three of my own
macroaggressions, illustrating the
embarrassingly enormous gaps in
congruence evident in my life, as somebody
who identifies as an advocate for racial and
economic justice. I end by describing some
of the ways I have chosen to strive for
greater congruence.

Experience #1: Sodexo as a Diversity
Leading Light
In 2012 the InterNational
Multicultural Institute (IMCI), a nonprofit
organization in Washington, D.C.,
announced the recipients of its annual
Leading Lights awards for workplace
diversity. One awardee was Sodexo, a
company with a long and worldwide history
of human rights abuses (Human Rights
Watch, 2010; TransAfrica Forum, 2011).
The idea, I guess, is that if you have a
diverse workforce at the corporate
headquarters, it doesnt matter that you
refuse to pay workers in the field a living
wage or that you fire workers who are trying
to unionize. It doesnt matter that human
rights groups found that you were abusing
workers in Colombia, the Dominican
Republic, Guinea, Morocco, and the United
States, denying overtime pay or paying the
lowest legal wages. Even if you treat your
most disenfranchised workers as disposable,
as long as the suits in the corporate office
play nice with each other, according to the
IMCI, you deserve a diversity plaque.
That got me thinking about the
university where I work, George Mason
University (GMU). It has been recognized
and celebrated as the most diverse university
in the United States (Walsch, 2005). At the
same time, the university is full of underpaid
Sodexo workers, a vast majority of whom
are people of color and most of whom are
immigrants. Sodexo runs GMUs food
services. I hate to think about how many
times I went to a program about racism in
higher education at the university, and then
met friends on campus for lunch or dinner to
talk about the program, never thinking that
by giving our money to Sodexo we were
contributing to a worldwide system of
racism and economic injustice.

Experience #2: My Trivial Needs
The middle of last year I was editing
an essay about the exploitation of nonhuman
animals for human profit written by animal
rights activist, Jennifer Hickman. Buried in
her essay was this line: Animals dont exist
for human entertainment, sport, or utility,
and we ought not to deprive them of their
vital needs in order to satisfy our trivial
needs (Hickman, 2012, p. 3). I shivered at
that sentence. Even now, two years later, I
still shiver at it.
Try this experiment: If you have a
bag with you that has any form of cosmetics
in itmakeup or hand sanitizer or lotion or
anythingremove one item and study the
packaging. If it does not say, This product
was not tested on animals, that means
animals were tortured so you could use that
product. They were forced to ingest it. It was
rubbed into their eyes and injected into their
skin. You might look at your animal-tested
hand sanitizer and think, Thats not trivial
to me, its vital. Well, no it isnt, because
you can buy hand sanitizer that wasnt
rubbed into animals eyes. You can buy
shampoo and cosmetics that werent tested
on animals. Its less convenient, maybe, but
if you have any leisure time at all and if you
can afford to pay a little more for those
products, then that is an example of
depriving living creatures of their vital needs
to satisfy your trivial needs. I have spent my
life mindlessly consuming products that
were not essential to me, clueless that
sentient creatures suffered somewhere in the
production process.
That example was about the
exploitation of animals: how elephants or
dolphins or racehorses are tortured to satisfy
our trivial cravings for entertainment; how
farm animals are tortured to satisfy our
trivial cravings for cheeseburgers; how
foxes and other animals are tortured to
satisfy our senseless cravings for clothes
made with fur. And really, for me, that
ought to be enough to rethink much of my
behavior. Research has begun to show how
all sorts of animals have a consciousness
that is similar to the human consciousness
(Keim, 2013; Savage-Rumbaugh, Fields, &
Taglialatela, 2000). They feel fear. They feel
pain. They grieve. They know when theyre
being tortured.
But then I began thinking about
Hickmans quote in a different way. My
moms family is from poor Appalachian
stock, most recently based in western
Maryland. They, like most poor people in
Appalachia, were at one time subsistence
farmers. Two industries put a terribly violent
end to that way of life: the coal industry and
the lumber industry. (Of course, White
people in that region, including my
forebears, were, themselves, occupying land
that was stolen from Native Peoples, so
there are layers of violence in this story.)
Coal and logging companies did so much
damage to the land, with their clear-cutting
and run-off and waterway pollution, that
many poor subsistence farmers were forced
to stop farming. And what work was
available to them? They could join the
military or work for one of the industries
that were destroying their livelihoods and
eviscerating their communities. Several of
the most recent generations of men on my
moms side of the family were coal miners.
Then, like now, coal mining was among the
most dangerous, exploitive industries in the
world.
Try another experiment: Think, for a
moment, about the community that is home
for you. Now imagine that your only
employment option is work that destroys
that community: polluting it, filling it with
contaminants, causing illness in your own
family and your neighbors families. Thats
what a lot of poor people are forced to do,
from coal miners to factory farm workers,
limited, as they often are, by whatever
industry happens to be nearby.
I started thinking about my moms
peoples and the generations of men my
family lost to black lung and other ailments
associated with the coal mines. I
remembered the pristine beauty of
Appalachia and how much of it has been
destroyed right out from under poor people
of every racial and ethnic background. And
that helped me make the connection. Here, I
recognize, is part of my hypocrisy: Its
happening to my people, so suddenly my
eyes are opened and my outrage spills over.
I came to recognize that, when I
choose how Im going to live, when I
choose what Im going to consume, when I
choose which corporations and industries
Im going to support, this is what Im
choosing: the extent to which I am willing to
help deprive peopleespecially
disenfranchised people, poor people, people
of color, indigenous communities,
childrenof their vital needs in order to
satisfy my trivial needs. I am choosing the
extent to which I am willing to support the
worst of global racism and sexism and
economic injustice for the sake of
convenience or for the social cachet of
owning or consuming this or that trivial
thing: a fashionable pair of shoes, a
computer gadget, a sugary beverage, or a
stylish piece of furniture.
When I think about my choices and
their lack of congruence with what I pretend
is my commitment to racial and economic
justice, I have no choice but to admit, I am a
hypocrite. And while it is true that I have
dedicated my life to confronting some kinds
of racism and some forms of White privilege
and some acts of economic injustice, and
while I think I have done some worthwhile
social justice work in my life, it is equally
true that a basic review of how I participate
in consumer culture, the everyday ways I
live my life, would uncover a myriad of
ways I contribute to what I have come to see
as one of the most destructive forms of
exploitation: the ways I deprive
disenfranchised communities of their vital
needs in order to satisfy my trivial
consumption needs.

Cognitive Tools for Assessing Vitality and
Triviality: Intersectionality and
Macroaggressions
As somebody who tries to live his
life in socially just ways, I find that
reflecting on my consumerist complicity
forces me into some difficult cognitive and
spiritual territory. I no longer can avoid
acknowledging connections among several
types of violence it has taken me a 41-year
lifetime to start taking seriously. I have
begun to rethink much of what I thought I
knew about being a social justice educator
and activist. A couple of cognitive tools
have proved helpful in this process, allowing
me to begin making sense out of this mess
of exploitation and how it is tied to my
patterns of consumption.
Intersectionality
Kimberl Crenshaw (1991)
popularized the term intersectionality to
describe the recognition and examination of
sameness and difference within identity
groups. Other scholars, such as Nana Osei-
Kofi (2013) and Nina Lykke (2010), have
buttressed the theoretical foundations of
intersectionality, tweaking it into a robust
conceptual tool that complicates all manner
of discourse on social justice. Lykke
describes it as a
tool to analyze how historically
specific kinds of power differentials
and/or constraining normativities,
based on discursively, institutionally
and/or structurally constructed
socio-cultural categorizations such
as gender, ethnicity, race, class,
sexuality, age/generation, dis/ability,
nationality, mother tongue and so
on, interact, and in so doing produce
different kinds of societal inequities
and social relations. (p. 50)
Stepping back a few paces from this
construct, I believe that the entire sphere of
intersectional human identity and oppression
can be placed, with all its complexities
intact, into an even bigger intersectional
model that considers the relationships
between human exploitation and liberation,
environmental exploitation and justice, and
nonhuman animal exploitation and liberation
(Gorski, 2010). The thing tying these forms
of exploitation together, especially in a
corporate-capitalist context, is profit. These
are all forms of exploitation that are part of a
bigger system of economic-driven
exploitationthe violent results of corporate
capitalism.
To clarify, Im not arguing that the
exploitation of animals is equal in
importance or immediacy to the exploitation
of humansthat's a philosophical debate for
another essay. Comparing exploitations isn't
very productive, anyway, as Audre Lorde
(1983), who famously warned us against
imagining a hierarchy of oppression,
taught us. Still, I find it hard to imagine how
somebody could know something about
gross animal abuse and exploitationabout
bullfighting, say, or cosmetics testingand
not see it as part of a larger circle of
violence, as part of the same culture of
consumerist-capitalist viciousness that
includes secret medical testing on humans,
like the venereal disease research that the
United States performed on unwitting
Guatemalans in the 1940s, and other forms
of oppression. A majority of publicly traded
corporations and industries will do anything
to make a profit. They will torture animals
while construing and presenting it as human
entertainment. They will chop off the tops of
majestic mountains. They will use child
labor, then claim that a portion of their
proceeds go to childrens causes. They will
literally kill people, or at least create
conditions to all but ensure peoples deaths,
when facing the consequences of doing so is
cheaper than other alternatives. Of course, as
with intersectionality theory more generally,
the most radical thinkers when it comes to
these bigger connections, such as A. Breeze
Harper (2010), come, in part, out of a Black
feminist tradition.
As I reflect on the incongruence
between my own behavior and what I claim
to stand for I am shaken by the extent to
which I participate in each of these forms of
violence. In the end, I believe condoning
any of it by purchasing products or services
or entertainment from companies or
industries that profit from my thoughtless
consumerism is, at least implicitly, like
condoning all of it. I cant figure a way to
separate the violence rodeo animals
experience from the violence mountains
experience from the violence workers that
produce the shirts hanging in my closet
experience. The full circle is a sort of
macrointersectionality. If Im going to claim
that I stand for justice, that I desire the end
of oppression, and I put my trivial needs
ahead of the vital needs of people or of any
living creature, that makes me a hypocrite.
And this is something I do over and over
and over again.

Second Concept: Macroaggressions
More than 40 years ago Chester M.
Pierce (1970) coined the term micro-
aggression to refer to nonphysical
aggression directed at people in
disenfranchised communities. More
recently, due largely to the work of Derald
Wing Sue and a team of colleagues, the term
microaggression has become part of the
racial justice lexicon. Sue and his colleagues
(2006) defined micro-aggressions as brief
and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral,
or environmental indignities, whether
intentional or unintentional, that
communicate hostile, derogatory, or
negative racial slights and insults toward
people of color (p. 271). It remains a
contested concept in the sense that the focus
on these day-to-day interpersonal symptoms
of systemic racism can distract us from an
analysis of the roots of systemic racism.
Still, most advocates for racial justice would
acknowledge, at the very least, that racial
microaggressions are real and damaging
manifestations of racism. Certainly, if I saw
micro-aggressive behavior, I would
recognize the need to respond; if I caught
myself participating in such behavior, I
would self-critique ruthlessly.
Some scholars have used the term
macroaggression to refer to purposeful,
overt forms of discrimination (e.g., Russell,
1998). I find this somewhat confounding, as
the prefix macro does not mean
purposeful or overt. It means large in scope,
big-picture.
I have come to use the term
macroaggression differently, to help me
understand my own mindless participation
in or compliance with big, systemic forms of
oppression rather than interpersonal forms
of bias or discrimination. It shares with
micro-aggression the quality of not
necessarily being purposeful. In other
words, when I talk about how badly I need
a piece of furniture made out of a hardwood,
I dont necessarily link that thought in the
moment to logging, to clear-cutting forest, to
destroying the habitats of millions of
animals and the communities of my own
people, Appalachian farmers, or of
indigenous communities who count on the
rainforest for their survival. When I used to
eat at KFC I didnt link that act to the
horrendous work conditions of low-income,
largely people of color, largely immigrant
workers at KFCs chicken farms. I didnt
connect my action to Greenpeaces (2012)
finding that KFC was using wood from
Indonesian rainforest hardwood trees to
make their food boxes. I certainly didnt
think of the torture experienced by the
chickens. I might have considered the poorly
paid workers at the KFC where I was eating,
but I didnt think about the people all over
the world working in horrific conditions
picking the lettuce and tomato on my
sandwich.
There are countless systems of
oppression, endless ways to macroaggress,
and Ive participated in many of them. Ive
gotten married, participated in repressive
tenure and promotion processes at two
universities, deposited money into big,
exploitative banks. In each of these cases I
didnt purposefully oppress anybody, but I
participated in systems that are very
oppressive, particularly to already
disenfranchised people. These are my
incongruences, the sorts of actions that make
me a racist, a sexist, and a heterosexist.
Many other macroaggressions, and
the ones in which I feel Ive been most
intently socialized to participate, are related
to what I consume, to how I spend money,
to the destruction Im supporting in that
way. In the next section I describe three
such macroaggressions, each of which
wreaks intersectional havoc; each of which
exemplifies the oppressive, privilege-ridden
act of putting my trivial needs ahead of the
vital needs of already disenfranchised
people as well as nonhuman animals.

The Consumerist Macroaggressions of a
Social Justice Activist
I have spent most of my life drinking
Coca-Cola products, eating meat from
factory farms, and wearing Nike apparel.
These were fairly mindless acts on my part,
not purposeful attempts to participate in
racist or economically unjust enterprises.
However, as I learned more about the impact
of my trivial consuming habits, I began to
realize that my mindless consumerism was
contributing to some of the most dreadful
human rights abuses and injustices I could
imagine. I have chosen to discuss these three
habitsthese three macroaggressionsand
their impacts in detail, although I recognize
that my choices are somewhat arbitrary. I
just as easily could discuss Pepsi-Cola as
Coca-Cola or Adidas as Nike. But theres a
price to pay for sitting atop an abusive
industry, and part of that price is
representing that industrys atrocities.

Eating Food Produced on Factory Farms
Similarly, I could have chosen to
discuss how my daily consuming choices
have profited a wide range of destructive
industries, such as coal or lumber, but
instead I discuss industrialized farming, not
because it is more oppressive, but because,
as I will detail soon, factory farming is the
biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions
in the world (Goodland & Anhang, 2009)
bigger, in fact, than all other sources
combined. But thats not all, because the
havoc factory farms wreak is varied and
extensive, and it targets some of the most
marginalized beings in the world.
Gross Violence Toward Animals
When it comes to factory farming
and industrialized meat, egg, and dairy
production, the violence faced by animals
might be more obvious than the violence
experienced by people and the environment.
Farm animalsliving creaturesare seen as
property. Despite accounting for roughly 98
percent of the animals raised and killed in
the United States, slaughtered at a rate of
about 1 million per hour (Wolfson &
Sullivan, 2005), they are not protected by
animal cruelty laws like pet dogs or cats.
The morbid abuses are many. As People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA,
2013) describes, Cows, calves, pigs,
chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, and other
animals live in extremely stressful
conditions ( 3). They are
kept in small cages or jam-packed
sheds or on filthy feedlots, often with
so little space that they cant even
turn around or lie down
comfortably;
deprived of exercise so that all their
bodies energy goes toward
producing flesh, eggs, or milk for
human consumption;
fed drugs to fatten them faster and
keep them alive in conditions that
could otherwise kill them; and
genetically altered to grow faster or
to produce much more milk or eggs
than they naturally would so that
many animals become crippled
under their own weight and die just
inches away from water and food (
4).
Uncharacteristically, PETA omitted one of
the most violent and inhumane parts of the
factory farming process. One of these
involves the alterations made to the animals,
almost never using a numbing agent. These
alternations include branding, tooth-
clipping, ear-clipping, de-beaking, tail-
clipping, and spaying or neutering.
Labor Rights Violations on Factory Farms
Factory farming also is a form of
violence against humans. At the basest level,
the people hired to commit the most
atrocious indignities against animals at
factory farms are people of color and
disproportionately migrant workers or
immigrantsoften undocumented
immigrants (Human Rights Watch [HRW],
2004)who are paid below a living wage,
and sometimes below minimum wage.
These workers work in squalid conditions,
surrounded by feces and disease. Rarely are
they provided with the kind of safety
equipment that would keep them safe from
injuries. In fact one of the racist benefits of
hiring undocumented immigrants on factory
farms is that they are less likely than other
workers to seek medical attention if they are
injured on the job. As a result, safety
hazards and workplace injuries often go
unreported. In fact, the HRW (2004)
reported that Meat and poultry industry
employers set up the workplaces and
practices that create these dangers, but they
treat the resulting mayhem as a normal,
natural part of the production process, not as
what it is: repeated violations of
international human rights standards (p.
24). That means more profits for the
corporations that own or contract with
factory farms. The latter include virtually
every fast food or big chain restaurant at
which Ive ever eaten and the food services
at the hotels at which every social justice
conference Ive ever attended were hosted.
Other labor rights concerns on
factory farms disproportionately affect the
mostly undocumented immigrants or
migrant workers who work on them. In
many cases, employers have threatened to
contact, or in fact have contacted, federal
authorities regarding workers' immigration
statuses in order to intimidate them into
dropping charges of unfair labor practices or
safety violations (HRW, 2004). Remember,
these are among the least healthy possible
jobs, due to air contaminates, use of heavy
machinery, and unsanitary conditions, so
being able to report health risks is literally a
matter of life and death for factory farm
workers. Over 5,816 farm workers and
laborers died from work-related injuries
between 2003 and 2011 (Occupational
Safety and Health Administration, 2013).
Getting a little more specific, I used
to enjoy eating at Brazilian steakhouses.
Now I know that many Brazilian cattle
farms use a form of slave labor called debt
bondage to trap workers into deplorable
working conditions (Phillips & Sakamoto,
2012)the same sort of practice coal
mining companies and other industries have
used in the United States. This is how it
works: You work for me, but I force you to
pay for rent and goods and equipment, and
before you know it, despite working for me,
youre in debt to me. U.S. companies profit
from this enslavement of the poorest
workers all over the world. In many cases,
particularly in Latin America, farms, often
contracted with U.S. or multinational
companies, hire armed guards or local
militias to intimidate workers, mostly with
the goal of discouraging union organizing
(HRW, 2004). (This will become a theme.)
If worker conditions arent amply
indicative of the human rights violations that
plague factory farming, consider the
widespread use of child labor on factory
farms around the world. Youth factory farm
workers in the United States, mostly but not
exclusively the children of migrant workers,
often are forced to work due to the poverty
wages their parents earn. According to
HRW (2010b), for these children, whether
they are toiling in the fields or in a factory
farm barn,
farmwork means an early end to
childhood, long hours at exploitative
wages, and risk to their health and
sometimes their lives. Although their
families financial need helps push
children into the fieldspoverty
among farmworkers is more than
double that of all wage and salary
employeesthe long hours and
demands of farmwork result in high
drop-out rates from school. Without
a diploma, child workers are left
with few options besides a lifetime of
farmwork and the poverty that
accompanies it. (p. 5)
To make matters worse, due to
industry-friendly agricultural labor law,
children can toil in the fields at far younger
ages, for far longer hours, and under far
more hazardous conditions than all other
working children (p. 5).
Runoff and Contamination of the Local
Community
Local communities pay an awful
price for the existence of factory farms.
Consider, if nothing else, the stench created
by the waste of hundreds or thousands or
tens of thousands of animals. Factory farms
are located almost exclusively in rural
working-class or poor areas. They would not
be tolerated in wealthier areas, given the
stench and runoff and disease.
The contamination from factory farm
waste affects the ecosystem of many square
miles around farm sites. Just like the
contamination from landfills and toxic waste
sites, which most often are located close to
poor communities of color, animal waste
pollution from factory farms causes a wide
range of health problems in the communities
that are least likely to be able to afford to
treat them, such as skin infections,
respiratory diseases, nausea, and depression
(Von Essen & Auvermann, 2005). Making
matters worse is the fact that, according to
the Environmental Protection Agency (as
reported by Karla Raettig [2007]), factory
farm runoff is the biggest source of
waterway pollution in the United States,
doing more damage than all other industrial
sources combined. This affects all of us, but
the people who experience the most
immediate, most damaging effects in the
United States, aside from the workers
themselves, are poor rural people whose
surface and ground water are contaminated.
Studies conducted for both the
World Bank (De Haan, Van Veen,
Brandenburg, Gauthier, Le Gall, Mearns, &
Simeon, 2001) and Great Britains
Department for International Development
(Heffernan, 2004), not exactly bastions of
progressivism, have shown that the spread
of factory farming is harming the poorest
people, including those in developing
countries, especially indigenous
communities, by increasing food and water
scarcity. Feeding, watering, and slaughtering
cattle, then processing meat and dairy
products, accounts for a major portion of
grain and water production worldwide, even
as growing numbers of people do not have
enough to eat or drink (Doreau, Corson, &
Wiedemann, 2012; Robbins, 2010; United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization,
2007).
Environmental Destruction
As I mentioned earlier, among the
most environmentally destructive industries,
factory farming has the highest level of
greenhouse gas emissions and plays the
biggest role in climate change. It accounts
for roughly 51 percent of greenhouse gas
emissions worldwide (Goodland & Anhang,
2009). In other words, despite all my
recycling, walking, and other
environmentally conscious practices, I could
have decreased my carbon footprint much
more drastically had I simply eaten less food
produced on factory farms.
It is important to remember, again,
that the most immediate negative impact of
climate change (Renton, 2009), food
scarcity, water scarcity, labor rights
violations, and other forms of violence that
are symptomatic of factory farming and
corporations quests for profit are felt most
harshly by poor communities worldwide,
especially poor indigenous communities,
where there are fewer resources to mitigate
the oppression or to fight back. This is what
makes participation in such a system an
example of a racial and socioeconomic
macroaggression. My intent, when I did
consume factory-farmed products, was not
malicious, but my impact was malicious. By
enjoying the convenience of factory-farmed
meat, I deprived the most marginalized
people, not to mention other marginalized
living beings, of their vital needs in order to
satisfy my trivial need for cheap ice cream
or omelets or bacon cheeseburgers.

Drinking Coca-Cola Products
When I did eat bacon
cheeseburgersand I definitely ate my
share of them over the yearsI tended to
wash them down with a Diet Coke. Diet
Coke with a slice of lime: That was my
beverage order. I stopped consuming Coca-
Cola and Pepsi-Cola products several years
ago, but I still crave Diet Coke. And that
isnt much of a surprise, because Coca-Cola
products are made to be addictive. Those
bottomless cups of soda at restaurants and
those Super Big Gulps are not just indicative
of peoples organically voracious appetites
for a nutrient-less combination of harmful
chemicals and sugar. Coca-Cola, Pepsi-
Cola, and just about every processed food
company that makes everything from sugary
drinks, to salty chips, to crunchy cookies are
in the business of accumulating addicts.
They do so in very sophisticated ways, such
as by pouring millions of dollars into
figuring out just what combination of
processing they need to do to their products
to hit what the industry calls the bliss
point (Moss, 2013): the perfect, and most
addictive, combination of sugar, fat, and
inorganic ingredients we cant pronounce.
Every consumer of these products
pays a price for consuming them, given the
health risks of eating highly processed junk
foods. However, when I drank Diet Coke
when I helped make the Coca-Cola
Company and the predominantly White men
who own the biggest chunks of the company
wealthierI also was macroaggressing
against a wide range of already marginalized
people all over the world.
Workers Rights and Racism
On April 3, 1968, the day before he
was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., called for a boycott of Coca-Cola for
discriminating against African American
workers. The company regularly has been
sued for its racist hiring practices. In 1999
the Coca-Cola Company agreed to a $192
million settlement in a class action case
charging it with discriminatory treatment of
African American and Latino workers
(Miah, 2000). Most recently, 16 plaintiffs,
all people of color, are suing the company
for racist practices in New York area Coca-
Cola plants ranging from biased work
assignments to inequitable disciplinary
practices. The lawsuit describes an endemic
culture of racism propagated from the very
top of the company hierarchy (Greenwald,
2012). Of course, when I purchased and
drank Diet Coke I was not intending to
support a company whose history is full of
workplace racism. I did not intend to
macroaggress. But by purchasing those
products, that is exactly what I did.
And that is just the tip of the
exploitation iceberg I supported by
consuming Coca-Cola products. When it
comes to boosting profits by violating, or
condoning the violation of, the human rights
of poor and working class people of color all
over the world, Coca-Cola appears to have
few peers (Zacune, 2006a).
Consider a small international
sample: In Colombia, armed guards at a
Coca-Cola contracted bottling plant,
according to workers, have imprisoned
union organizers seeking safer working
conditions and living wages. The bottling
company has been accused of using local
paramilitary to intimidate workers who have
attempted to organize. The paramilitary has
kidnapped, tortured, and even murdered
union leaders (Wilson, 2004). Just a few
years ago managers and armed security
guards at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in
Guatemala were accused of using rape and
murder against trade unionists and their
families in order to quiet demands for safer
working conditions and living wages
intimidation practices that have been
common in the companys Guatemala
operations since the 1970s (Frundt, 1987;
Zacune, 2006a). In 2005, 105 workers at a
Coca-Cola bottling plant in Turkey joined a
union and were immediately fired. When
they and their families peacefully protested
the firings, they were attacked by Turkish
riot police (Zacune, 2006a). In China, a
student-led undercover investigation in 2008
revealed that Coca-Cola bottling plants often
required 12-hour workdays, denied workers
any days off, and provided inadequate
protective equipment. They found, as well,
that worker pay often was decreased for no
reason and that workers who spoke up to
demand better treatment were beaten
(Student Coca-Cola Campaign Team, 2008).
There is more of the same in Mexico, El
Salvador, and pretty much everywhere else
Coca-Cola has or contracts with bottling
plants or other operations, especially in poor
countries.
Destroying or Privatizing Water Sources
Coca-Colas investments in racism
and economic injustice reach beyond the
treatment of its workers and workers in
plants (as well as sugar cane fields) with
which it contracts. One of its most egregious
imperialist strategies has been its ongoing
attempts to privatize water sources in poor
and developing countries (Blandling,
2011)an atrocity that contributes to water
scarcity and especially oppresses poor
people all over the world (Beck, 2004;
McKinley, 2004). For example, during his
time as president of Mexico, Coca-Cola
worked with Vicente Fox, one-time head of
the companys operations in Latin America,
to privatize water in his country (Blanding,
2011).
Meanwhile, citizens of India have
been rising in protest over the ways in which
Coca-Cola and the plants with which it
contracts are destroying their water systems
(Ciafone, 2012). By draining out
groundwater supplies for its product and the
production process, Coca-Cola has
contributed to water scarcity and spoiled
vast amounts of farming land, causing tens
of millions of dollars of damage in one of
the poorest regions of one of the highest-
poverty countries in the world. Zacune
(2006b) summed it up this way:
Coca-Colas operations have
particularly been blamed for
exacerbating water shortages in
regions that suffer from a lack of
water resources and rainfall.
Nowhere has this been better
documented than in India, where
there are now community campaigns
against the company in several
states. New research carried out by
War on Want in the Indian states of
Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh affirms
the findings from Kerala and
Maharastra that Coca-Colas
activities are having a serious
negative impact on farmers and local
communities. ( 3)
By consuming Coca-Cola products, by
satisfying a most trivial need, I become part
of this sort of macroaggressive exploitation.
Preying on the Poorest Communities of
Color
As I mentioned earlier, Coca-Cola is
in the business of cultivating addicts. In
order to do so most efficiently the company
is preying on the poorest communities.
With a little help from its operatives
fighting to privatize water, Coca-Cola
pushes its product most voraciously on poor
people (a strategy that is increasingly
common as companies seek new imperialist
ways to expand profit potentials [Karnani,
2014]), particularly in areas where a Coke is
cheaper and more readily available than
clean water. There literally are parts of Latin
America and India where you cant walk in
any direction without being bombarded with
Coca-Cola advertisements. The company
practices predatory marketing of an
addictive, unhealthy product in communities
where people already are undernourished
and have little access to health and dental
care.
Plastic Bottles
People in the United States drink
more bottled water than people in any other
country. On average, we each consume 30
gallons of bottled water each year, most of
which we drink from bottles containing a
single serving of water (Gleick, 2010). We
purchase a confounding 29 billion bottles of
water every yearmore than 60 percent of
the worldwide total. Remember, now, that
the best-selling bottled waters are owned by
the big cola companies, Coke and Pepsi.
Making the plastic for all those bottles uses
the equivalent of 17 million barrels of crude
oil annually (Pacific Institute, 2007). That is
roughly equal to the amount of fuel required
to keep one million vehicles on the road for
an entire year. If you have a bottle of water
with you now, imagine filling one quarter of
it with oil. Thats the amount used to
produce it. Roughly 1,500 of those plastic
bottles every second of every day, a majority
of which end up either in landfills or in the
ocean (Mosko, 2012). And, again, when I
consider the locations of most landfills and
the communities (and animals) most
immediately hurt by all sorts of pollution, I
have no choice but to acknowledge that by
purchasing any beverage in a plastic bottle
during times when I have other hydration
options I am macroaggressing.

Wearing Nikes
I have purchased clothes and shoes
produced by a wide variety of companies
that do a lot of damage to disenfranchised
communities, animals, and the environment.
However, Ive been playing basketball for
most of my life and until recently I always
said I needed Nike basketball shoes. They fit
best, Ive said. Ive paid outrageous amounts
of money for Nike shoes, which, I now
admit, had nothing to do with fit and
everything to do with the Swoosh logo, a
symbol associated by some people with the
athletic prowess of Michael Jordan or Tiger
Woods, and associated by many other
peoplepeople exploited for cheap labor in
developing countrieswith awful sorts of
oppression.

Thinking about how we are
socialized to macroaggress through
consumption, I reflect now on this urge: I
need Nike basketball shoes. I often have
found myself using the word need to
describe all sorts of trivial desires. Nobody
needs Nike shoes. Im reminded of when I
became a vegetarian. Like many vegetarians
I told myself I couldnt be a vegan, even
though I knew it was the just thing to do,
because I couldnt give up cheese. Given
the entire history of human existence, only a
tiny, tiny fraction of people ever have tasted
cheese. To put it in privilege terms, that
statement of need, that sense of
entitlement to something so trivial, is the
worst kind of privilege. Its the worst of
what sits right at the intersection of my
White privilege and my economic privilege.
I am entitled to this land. I am entitled to
this job. I am entitled to consume whatever I
want to consume, to wear whatever I want to
wear, regardless of who is exploited so that
I can consume it. I never needed Nikes. But
Ive probably bought 25 pairs of them over
the course of my life.
So, how does that make me a
macroaggressor?

Worker (Including Child Worker) Abuse
For more than a decade Nike has
faced criticism for slavelike child labor in
the overseas factories with which it contracts
to produce its goods (Connor, 2001; Locke,
2013). Despite promises from CEO Phil
Knight to refuse to contract with factories
that use child labor, the problem persists.
The biggest abuses tend to be in Southeast
Asian developing countries whose workers
regularly are exploited by U.S. corporations.

In fact, Nike has a penchant for doing all
sorts of damage in Southeast Asia. For
example, they continue to contract with
sweatshops where they know atrocious
forms of abuse, including physical abuse,
are happeningconditions that would be
illegal in the United States and most other
industrialized countries. Indonesian workers
at Nike factories have complained of slave
wages, physical abuse, denial of sick leave,
and violent intimidation (Ballinger, 2001;
Wright, 2011). And, as with Coca-Cola
plants, many of these factories use
paramilitary forces to intimidate workers.
Some of the most recent examples of
mass abuse have occurred in factories in
Indonesia with which Nike contracts to
produce its shoes and garments. In one
factory with over 10,000 workers, mostly
young women, workers earn the equivalent
of only about 50 cents per hour. Workers
who complain about pay or other work
conditions often are physically abused or
fired (Daily Mail Reporter, 2011). Similar
conditions have been reported in Nike
contracted factories in Vietnam, Pakistan,
and Haiti, among other places.
Polluting Water Sources
Factories producing Nike products
have been destroying local water resources
in several countries by dumping toxic waste
into rivers and lakes. Greenpeace (2011)
investigated two factories in China, the
Youngor Textile Complex and Well Dyeing
Textile Limited, that produce Nike goods, as
well as goods for several other garment
companies. It found that both were
disposing of toxic waste into waterways,
causing serious damage.
To be clear, Nike is not alone. A
National Labor Committee investigation
found several U.S. companies using child
labor in developing countries, including
Wal-Mart, Hanes, Puma, and JC Penney
(Kernaghan, 2006). Virtually every chain
retail clothing store sells clothes made in
sweatshops, including Amberbrombie &
Fitch and Kohls (International Labor Rights
Forum, 2010). Other major offenders
include H&M, The Gap (which also owns
Old Navy and Banana Republic), Limited
Brands (which owns Victorias Secret), and
Calvin Klein.
When I choose to satisfy my trivial
needs for a constant stream of relatively
cheap new clothes, falling prey to the social
coercion of the seasonal fashion carousel, I
support a massive system of racial and
economic exploitation. I macroaggress
against some of the most oppressed
communities in the world. I struggle to
understand how such an aggression on my
part is any less racist, any less exploitive,
than any one of the many microaggressions I
surely have committed in my lifetime. I
struggle to understand how I am any less the
racist, any less complicit in economic
injustice, so long as I respond vehemently to
one while participating mindlessly in the
other.

Macroaggressions, Macroprivilege, and
Macroconsciousness
I have come to believe that I cannot
rightly call myself a fighter for racial or
economic justice, a rejecter of White or
economic privilege, while I continue to
consume as I have spent my life consuming.
Buying Nike shoes, purchasing Coca-Cola
products, eating factory-farmed meat,
among many, many other ways I support
oppressive systems that largely help to make
wealthy White people wealthier, are acts
that are just as racist, just as economically
unjust, as any other kind of racism or
economic injustice. This has been a
revelation for me. It has been a difficult
revelation, because it has forced me to
rethink most everything about my life, about
where and how I live, about what I eat and
drink, about what I wear. Attempting to pull
myself out of the capitalist-consumerist
mindset has felt, in some ways, like hearing
White supremacy for the first time or
hearing that capitalism is not the same as
democracy. Now that I know what it means
to buy a Diet Coke or wear Nikes or
macroaggress in other consumerist ways, the
fact that I struggle to respond as quickly as I
would if, say, I heard somebody tell a racist
joke or knew that a colleague of color was
unjustly denied a promotion is telling of the
ubiquitous nature of systemic oppression.

On Being a Hypocrite
I do know that, when it comes to
being a hypocrite, Im in good company.
Recently I was reading a speech Gandhi
(1931) once delivered about being a
vegetarian. He said:
A vegetarian is made of sterner stuff.
Why? Because it is for the building
of the spirit and not of the body. Man
is more than meat. It is the spirit in
man for which we are concerned.
Therefore, vegetarians should have
that moral basisthat a man was
not born a carnivorous animal, but
born to live on the fruits and herbs
that the earth grows. ( 6)
But what he said later in the speech shocked
me: I know we must all err. I would give
up milk if I could but I cannot. I have made
that experiment times without number
That has been the tragedy of my life ( 6).
Gandhi called his failure to become a vegan
the tragedy of his life. So we all trip. Even
Gandhi.
That makes me feel a little better,
although no less responsible for challenging
the many consumerist incongruences
between who I claim to be as a social justice
activist and who my consuming habits
expose me to be. The trouble is that, as a
consumer in a consumerist-capitalist society,
trying to extricate myself from these
oppressive systems, from these
macroaggressions, is a little like trying to
extricate myself from White hegemony as a
White person. Considered from a slightly
different angle, these macroaggressions are
manifestations of White, capitalist
hegemony. They are the consequences of
economic, political, and social conditions
deployed to all but ensure that those of us
who are not wealthy exploit each other and
ourselves in order to further concentrate
wealth among relatively few, mostly White,
extremely wealthy families. I scarcely can
buy a t-shirt or a sandwich without being
complicit.
What is more, there are myriad
complications even for those of us who wish
not to comply. For example, soy is a popular
source of nutrients and protein for people
who have chosen to stop eating meat. But its
popularity has resulted in deforestation in
the Amazon in order to increase production
and meet the demand (Steward, 2007). As a
vegan, I refuse to purchase leather shoes.
However, it is difficult and expensive to find
shoes that are not made with animal
products and that are produced under
humane working conditions for those who
are making them.
Perhaps the most troubling
complication is that, overall, it can be
expensive to not consume in
macroaggressive ways. Fast food is
inexpensive. So are garments made in
sweatshops. Living humanely and justly can
be cost-prohibitive and inconvenient. For
working-class and poor people, it might be
impossible. They disproportionately are
trapped into consuming in ways that are
unhealthy to them and destructive to their
communities. It is, in essence, a privilege to
have within economic reach the ability to
choose noncomplicity or to be able to decide
how I will or will not comply based on
convenience. Meanwhile, it is a privilege to
comply mindlessly, unconcerned with my
impact on already disenfranchised
communities, the environment, and
nonhuman animals.
I can afford to make many changes
in my consuming habits and in my activism
and advocacy in order to shrink my
macroaggression footprint. And I have
begun to do so. Like any substantial life
change, it has not been easy. Nor should it
be. For me it started with acknowledging
that continuing to cultivate an understanding
of racism or economic injustice without
incorporating attention to consumerist
macroaggressions would be, at best,
irresponsible and hypocritical. I would be
choosing to frame my social justice work in
ways that continue to privilege me and
oppress other people.
This, then, is my challenge to myself
and my fellow scholars, educators, and
activists committed to racial and economic
justice: Let us stretch our conceptions of
injustice to include macroaggressions even
ifespecially ifwe implicate ourselves in
the process.

Paths to Macroconsciousness and
Macrononcompliance
People often have asked me for a list
of changes they should make in their lives in
order that they might better align their
consuming habits with their social justice
values. Given my own congruence
shortcomings, I hesitate. I share, instead,
what I, with all my hypocrisies, have chosen
to do in my own life. But before I do I
mention that there are no easy paths, no list
of Ten Things You Can Do to Stop Being a
Macroaggressor. Often it is a matter of
choosing the least oppressive path rather
than the nonoppressive path, and in almost
every case there is little clarity about which
path is least oppressive.
The important thing, in my view and
experience, has been training myself to be
more mindful about my consuming habits. I
have trained myself to be curious about what
is driving me to make this or that
consumerist choice. Why do I really
consume what I consume? How do I
distinguish between wants and needs,
between trivial needs and vital needs? Who
or what am I willing to destroy to follow my
consumerist urges and cravings? I
understand that the ubiquitousness of the
consumerist-capitalist system means that I
might never relieve myself of all of my
incongruences. I understand, as well, that
the choices I have made are not the right
choices for everybodythat we all must
choose for ourselves what it means to
distinguish between vital and trivial needs,
to lighten our macroaggression footprints.
I have chosen the following consumer
changes in my life, each of which makes me
a better advocate for racial and economic
justice:

1. I chose to eat less or, better yet, eat
no meat, eggs, or dairy products
produced on a factory farm. My
choice in this matter was to become
a veganto consume no animal
products at allin order to ensure I
would not contribute to factory
farming atrocities. I often use the
free Happy Cow guide to find vegan
and vegetarian restaurant options
(http://www.happycow.net).
2. Similarly, I chose to avoid
purchasing fruits and vegetables
from big produce companies known
to exploit workers, including
Chiquita Brands International. I have
used Ethical Consumers detailed
guide of other popular brand human
rights abusers
(http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/) to
help me make racially and
economically just consumer
decisions.
3. I chose to purchase clothes and shoes
made by companies that pay workers
fair wages and otherwise treat
workers humanely. Admittedly, this
is an expensive endeavor, and utterly
inconvenient, as I have found few
ways to purchase such clothes and
shoes without doing so online, not
having tried them on. It also is
expensive. So I have begun shopping
for clothes at thrift and consignment
stores whenever possible. One Green
Planet offers a helpful guide for
sustainable, fair-trade, humane
clothing
(http://www.onegreenplanet.org/lifes
tyle/a-guide-to-buying-sustainable-
fair-trade-and-vegan-clothing/).
4. I chose to be mindful of the
packaging of any product I purchase,
and especially try to avoid
purchasing single-serving,
prepackaged, highly processed
consumables such as sodas, chips,
and snack cakes.
5. I chose to avoid purchasing
consumer electronics, including
computers, tablets, and smartphones,
from companies with poor human
rights track records. I have referred
to Green Americas guide for more
responsible consumer electronics
purchasing
(http://www.greenamerica.org/living
green/computers.cfm) and have
decided to buy all such goods used.
6. I chose to refuse to spend money on
any sort of activity that requires that
animals be confined, beaten, or
otherwise tortured for trivial human
entertainment. I particularly avoid
aquatic animal shows (such as at
SeaWorld), rodeos, dog or horse
racing, bullfighting, zoos, aquariums,
horse-drawn carriages, and circuses
that feature animals. I often refer to
the Animals in Entertainment Web
guide provided by PETA to reflect
upon my footprint in this arena
(http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-
in-entertainment/).
7. I chose to learn about the labor
practices of the businesses I frequent
and, where they are problematic, I
advocate directly or take my
business elsewhere. I try to
remember that any companys labor
force is not comprised solely of the
workers with whom I interact.

My desire to respond more effectively to
my macroaggressions also has led me to
rethink the ways in which I expend my
racial and economic justice activism
energies. The fight against the globalization
of corporate capitalism is, among other
things, a fight for global racial justice. The
struggle to secure living wages for all
workers is, in part, a struggle for racial
justice. There is no racial justice without
environmental justice. And yet, until
recently, I had failed to make these
macroconnections in the same way I
understood the more immediate importance
of challenging racism in, say, the legal and
educational systems. I have chosen to start
making those connections in my own
activism, teaching, and scholarship.

Conclusion
Yes, being hyper-conscious of every
way in which I macroaggress, thinking
through every consumerist habit, can be
overwhelming. But is it any more
overwhelming than learning for the first
time about White hegemony or patriarchy or
heteronormativity? It is a process. We can
start by cutting down on certain types of
consumption (recognizing, of course, that it
is a luxury of privilege to ease ourselves,
rather than sprinting, out of our complicity).
It bears repeating: It is not my
contention that we should abandon our
efforts to understand and respond to racial
microaggressions and the many other
manifestations of racism. Rather, I challenge
racial and economic justice activists,
educators, and scholars, just as I challenge
myself, to incorporate into our conceptions
of racial and economic justice the
eradication of these larger systems. I
challenge us to consider whether any
appreciable level of solidarity with the
disenfranchised communities that are
rendered further oppressed by our day-to-
day consuming habits is possible if we
continue to endanger their vital needs in
order to satisfy our trivial needs.

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What Anti-racists Stand to Gain from Greater Class
Awareness

Betsy Leondar-Wright
Class Action

Abstract
Anti-racist efforts are often weakened by professional-middle-class
cultural practices, and sometimes even by outright classism. To mobilize
more white working-class people against racism often requires changing
our diversity practices and vocabulary and building more cross-class
alliances. Strengthening the class component of race/class/gender
intersections will pay off with a bigger and more diverse movement for
social justice.

Betsy Leondar Wright is the Program Director of Class Action and the
author of Class Matters: CrossClass Alliance Building for Middle
Class Activists (New Society Publishers, 2005). She is also a coauthor of
The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the Racial Divide (The New
Press, 2006). She has led more than 100 workshops on classism and
organizational class dynamics. Currently she is turning her doctoral
dissertation in sociology at Boston College into a book, Missing Class
(Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2014) on how social justice
activists from diverse classes solve group problems differently.

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Understanding and Dismantling Privilege Leondar-Wright: What Anti-Racists Stand to Gain
It goes without saying that I don't
know most of you, but I know one thing
about youand it's a wonderful thing to
know about someone. And that is that you
are committed to racial justice. What I am
here to do today is to connect that
commitment to racial justice to issues of
class and classism. So I can talk about how
antiracists can build a bigger and stronger
movement by becoming more aware of
classism and class cultures.
Here's the story of how I came to be
here today. Eddie invited me to talk about
classism and the movement against racism.
I have been an activist for over 30 years. I
have been part of a lot of movements, and I
have watched even more movements, and
just about every social justice effort I have
seen has been split, to some extent, along
class lines.
Just a few little examples: I was a
tenant organizer with lowincome tenants,
and the tenants who had jobs, a lot of them
looked down on the tenants on welfare, and
that made their group smaller and weaker.
And during the 1990s with the global
mobilization movement, we had one great
glorious moment in this city, Seattle, in
1999 at the WTO protests, but afterwards
the unions went one way and the student and
environmental groups went another way,
and the movement withered. In the early
days of the environmental justice movement
there was a lot of leadership from clergy and
professional environmentalists and lawyers
and professors, but the movement didn't
really take off until there was also leadership
by the people who were actually being
poisoned in their neighborhoods.
I see this over and over again. And
of course, I have also seen some great cross
class alliance building, but I just kept seeing
these rifts. But even if there were no
conflicts or separations, I would see that
whatever the class of the starter group
waseven in very racially mixed groups
the class of the people who started the effort,
that's the class they would reach out to, and
so it would stay a single class, and it would
be smaller than necessary.
My passion in life is, before I die, I
want to build a mass movement for racial
and economic justice in the United States.
And a mass movement has to be a cross
class movement, as well as a crossrace
movement.
So when I started seeing all these
rifts, coalitions breaking along class lines, I
went looking for resources related to class.
And there were so few. There was
practically nothing. So in 2004, along with
a lot of other peoplesome of whom are
herewe started a national organization,
Class Action, to focus on class and classism.
And I figured that I needed to write the book
I had wished was there for me to read. So I
wrote the book Class Matters.
And I made this one claim in Class
Matters: I claimed that activist groups have
class culture differences. I said there were
activist class cultures. And that little part of
the book got stronger reactions than the
whole rest of the book. People were arguing
with me, and they were excited, and they
wanted me to get it right about their
community. And they kept asking me these
questions I couldn't answer. Like what are
the crosscultural traits, and do they really
cut across differences of race and region and
so forth?
So I thought, that sounds like a social
science research study, which I didn't know
how to do. So I quit my day job and went
back to graduate school and I did a study of
25 progressive activist groups in 5 states, all
different kinds of groups.
I learned the activists class
backgrounds and life stories and I learned a
lot about their approaches to activism. And
I made a comparison between the working-
class and poor activists, and the professional
middleclass and upper-middleclass
activists and I found out thatyesa lot of
things do vary by class.
So my next book title is going to be
Missing Class because I think we are
missing class, but it will be hopefully
subtitled Strengthening Social Movement
Groups by Seeing Class Cultures because
my research findings gave me hope that
seeing class cultures actually can help
activist groups meet their challenges. So
what I am here to talk about today is how
more awareness of class cultures and
classism can strengthen our antiracist work.
I will talk about three ways that
social justice groups sometimes blow it,
related to class. One is that we dont have
any spoken class identities. And we dont
talk about class dynamics. The second is
that we don't see classism or speak up
against classism and don't use class as a
basis of affirmative action. And the third is
that too many of our organizations are
permeated with professional middleclass
culture and fail to tap into working-class
cultural strengths. These are the three things
I will talk about today. So why do
Americans talk so little about class? And
even worse: Why do activists talk so little
about class identities?
I found almost zero explicit talk
about class identities, where people would
name their class background or each other's,
during the meetings of the social justice
groups. I would ask people, so what's the
class composition of your group? And they
would answer with the race composition. So
they were merging them, as if class and race
are the same thing. But we have to learn to
look, of course, look through a race lens and
also look through a class lens to bring things
into focus.
So I am going to give you a thought
experiment. When I told you that my
research compared all the working-class and
poor activists with all the middleclass and
upper-middleclass activists, what was your
mental picture of those two clumps of
activists? Take a second to get it clear in
your mind. If you are like most people in the
United States you pictured people like this:
The working-class and poor people were
people of color; the middleclass and upper-
middleclass people were White. And, of
course, that's because there is a correlation
because of institutionalized racism, a
correlation between race and class. But that's
not everyone's experience, so I will ask you,
did you also picture workingclass and poor
White people and middle- and upper-
middle-class people of color?
When we don't picture these folks,
we are making some people's class
experience invisible. When we do
workshops, as we will later today and on
Saturday, there are two groups of people
who often afterwards are especially
enthusiastic and come up to the facilitators
and say, Thank goodness, you represented
my reality. And one is professional people
of color, especially African Americans, who
say Yeah, everyone is always asking us to
explain the inner-city, but I have never been
there, I summered on Martha's Vineyard.
The other is White people who say, Yeah,
everyone always assumes I am middle class,
but I grew up in public housing and middle
class is a mystery to me. So we take the
race-based correlation and overgeneralize it,
and erase a lot of people's life experience.
And this is not just us, not just in activists
groups; it's how class is usually portrayed in
the media.
In editorial cartoons, the rich person
is usually portrayed as a White male; the
middle class is portrayed as being White,
and the poor person is portrayed as African
American. That's the most common
depiction in the media. But it would also be
true of a lot of people's experience if you
flipped the racial images. That also
represents part of reality. A lot of us have
much more clear-cut identities about our
race and our gender than about our class,
and we share vocabularies for those
identities. When walking into a room we
guess who's there by race and by gender.
Sometimes we guess wrong, but often we
more or less know who is there, and we use
the same vocabulary roughly to talk about
our identities. That's not true with class in
the United States.
I discovered that people were often
guessing wrong about the class backgrounds
and even the current class of people in their
groups, even people they had known for
years. So I will ask you to bring to
consciousness the assumptions about
people's class you make all the time, but
usually a lot of us unconsciously, by
practicing on me: So what class do you think
I came from? What was my upbringing?
What will you wonder about me?
You can't really think about my
clothes, because I could have borrowed
clothes to match what you would thought I
would be wearing. You can't tell by that, so
what class indicators are you thinking
about? Listening to my accent? Do I look
like somebody who's had good healthcare
and dental care in my life? Here are some
terms that Class Action has found respectful
and accurate, six terms for class identities:
owning class; upper-middle class;
professional middle class; lower-middle
class; working class; and chronic poverty
class.
So when I was a child, do you think
my family was in poverty or was rich?
Owning class or working class? Lower-
class professional? Professional middle
class? How would you know if you didn't
ask me? If you guessed professional middle
class, you would be right. My parents were
collegeeducated, homeowning
professionals. And so am I now, a college
educated, homeowning professional. I am
here in the ally role to working-class and
poor people against classism, just as those of
us here who are White are allies to people of
color against racism. I told you a little bit
about myself. What about you? Does one of
those terms fit your childhood life
experience?
At this point I don't know how much
class diversity there is in the room. I am
guessing quite a lot, but I don't know.
But without knowing you, I already
know there are class secrets in the room,
because there are class secrets in every
room. There are so many things that people
are walking around with, keeping close to
their chest. So I know there are people here
who have had hardships in their past:
bankruptcies, foreclosures, and
homelessness you often don't speak of, that
you keep hidden in many settings.
And I know there are people here
with luxuries in their life stories. Like trust
funds or seconds homes in Switzerland, and
habitually you don't tell people those things.
But at Class Action workshops we give
people an opportunity to share something
from their class life story, and do a little
cross-class dialogue. Because at Class
Action we believe that honestly sharing our
class stories and having real conversations
about class dynamics is a first step towards
eliminating classism.
So that's going to be the second point
I want to talk about; the second thing we too
often fail to do is to speak up against
classism.
Let me tell you about a flyer that was
plastered all over a town right next to mine
in Massachusetts about a tax increase
referendum. The caption says, Dont let the
rednecks ruin our schools and cripple our
library. The image is of a slovenly, dumb-
looking, White, working-class guy, with his
butt-crack showing, saying, Dont need no
schools. I don't think I need to explain to
you why this is a classist stereotype. Hes
stupid; hes antieducation and antilibraries. I
wish I could say this is rare, but it's not.
And since I am showing a picture of
a caricature of a White, workingclass man,
I want to say, White workingclass men get
a bad rap, especially from liberals and
progressives. Liberal voters tend to blame
the terrible state of our nation's politics on
White workingclass men because of the
subset of them who vote very right wing,
including against racial affirmative action.
But that is not all White workingclass men.
There are a ton of potential allies out there
who are White workingclass men. And
White workingclass men get stereotyped as
the worst racists; the stereotype is that they
are all bigots. Not only are they not all
bigots, but who is it that has the power to
enforce institutionalized racism in
institutions? It's much more often White
privileged-class people. And White working
class people are far more likely to have
multicultural relationships in workplaces
and neighborhoods than college-educated
White professionals are, so if youre on the
professional end of the class spectrum, a
little humility is in order.
But people who would never say an
outright racist slureven if they were
thinking itsuch people will unconsciously
say the most classist things. I made a friend
who was a liberal, upper-middleclass,
White woman, and she would have known
that I would have been offended if she had
said a racist slur. So in talking about a
dispute she was having with her neighbor
about a fence, she says, Yeah, he's really
lowlife redneck trailer trash. It didn't
occur to her that I might be offended by that,
so we ended up talking about it all weekend
and I was trying to convince her that she
said something offensive. And it turned out
the guy was not low income or working
class. She was insulting him by comparing
him to workingclass people.
Think how many insults are used that
compare people to workingclass and poor
people? Like that's really low class! And
White people get called white trash and
African Americans get called ghetto to
criticize their behavior. And its reversed for
compliments. If someone's behavior is
really gracious and dignified and generous,
she is a class act. That showed a lot of
class. As if workingclass and poor people
couldn't be gracious and dignified and
generous! We do a competition every year at
Class Action for the most classist comments
of the year by a public figure, and we post it
on the blog. Of course, Mitt Romney won in
2012. But its not just politicians. We have
classist comments submitted by liberals and
progressives and people in social justice
organizations. Here is a really doozy
submitted to us during the Iraq War:
In 2004, when a Halliburton worker
was taken hostage in Iraq there were literally
hundreds of posts written by liberals and
progressives condemning the man for
working for such a company, some saying
that if he were beheaded, it was his own
fault. Turns out that he had lost his farm,
and his wife needed heart surgery and they
didn't have health insurance and that was
why he had to take that job. One person
wrote that it didn't matter, he should have
found another job and paid for her surgery
some other way. There is often complete
cluelessness about the kind of financial
necessity that is faced by workingclass and
poor people of all races.
Classism is not only stereotypes and
slurs and cultural classism. Like all other
oppressions, classism has not just cultural
and interpersonal dimensions, but is also
institutional, which is the most familiar; the
most talked about. But we think at Class
Action that it's really important to connect
the three. Because the stereotypes and slurs
and disrespect are the insult that justifies the
injury.
It's the stories that get told to blame
the victim: to say it's poor people's own fault
that they are poor, and it's working people's
own fault that they are struggling. And so
you have to, again, look through the race
lens and the class lens and put it in the
context of growing economic inequality.
Economic inequality is growing and class
mobility is shrinking because the systems
are rigged. So that the people who are born
into workingclass and poor families are the
most likely by the end of their lives to be
workingclass or poor.
So poverty is both a race issue and a
class issue; again, its a matter of putting on
both the lenses and seeing what's
disproportionately true and what's majority
true.
Lets look at the dramatically
different poverty rates by race. Clearly
poverty is an issue of institutionalized
racism, because of the enormously high
poverty rates for Blacks and Latinos and
Native Americans, and smaller poverty rates
for White and Asian people (US Census,
2012). But when you look at the pool of
people in poverty overall, the majority of
poor people are White. (US Census, 2012).
So this is also an institutionalized
class issue that cuts across raceand the
same is true of just about every economic
justice issue. Who was foreclosed on in the
housing crisis? Who was uninsured?
Unemployed and homeless?
Disproportionately people of color, because
of institutionalized racism; the majority
White, because institutionalized classism
hits people of every race.
The education system is the greatest
scandalthe supposed engine of mobility.
Starting with K12 schools, education is
funded through local property taxes. This
means that if you are a richer kid, you get
better schools. So schools are rigged from
the getgo. Moving to college admissions,
most fouryear selective academic colleges
have a race affirmative action policy and not
a class affirmative action policy. That's by
far the most common situation.
So who loses out when there's race
only affirmative action? Of course, the
White workingclass and poor applicants
who usually get no priority given to them in
admissions, but also the lowincome and
workingclass applicants of color, because
the colleges that only have race affirmative
action policies try to fill their racial priority
slots with wealthy international students and
with people of color who come from upper-
middleclass families.
One study found that elite and private
colleges admit more students from the top 2
percent of the income spectrum than the
bottom 50 percent (Espenshade, 2009). So
it's a rigged system.
You might think, No, it's a
competition between race and class, and if
we give more scarce scholarship slots to
White workingclass applicants, we will
have to give less to people of color. No, not
true. Please do not fall into the scarcity
thinking, because of legacy admissions.
Legacies are the applicants whose parents
and grandparents went to the same college.
Legacy admissions are so common and so
numerous that they outnumber all the sports
scholarships and all the affirmative action
slots and every other kind of special
admissions advantage put together (Golden,
2007). There are more legacy admissions
than all those put together. And this is just
blatant classism. The people who already
have educational advantages from their
parents are more likely to get in.
This ought to be a scandal, we
should make it a scandal, because this
should not exist. It's blatant, ugly classism.
And if legacy admissions were abolished
there would be lots and lots of open slots for
workingclass and poor applicants of all
races.
So you look through a class lens, and
these kinds of institutionalized classism pop
out. And it's just essential to see them, to
name them, to speak up against classism as
part of winning racial justice. At Class
Action our vision is a world without
classism, and we know perfectly well that
you cannot get a world without classism
without eliminating racism. But similarly
uprooting racism is going to require tackling
class and classism. So that's our goal here.
And the third way that we sometimes
blow it in our antiracist work is by having
our default culture be professional middle
class culture.
Of course, there are exceptions, but
in general, who runs nonprofits? Who gets
onto boards? Disproportionately college
educated professionals. And, really,
disproportionately people whose parents
were collegeeducated professionals, too.
Management staff positions? Definitely
heavily professional middle class and upper
middle class, even in antiracist
organizations, organizations full of people of
color, with great racial affirmative action
policies, there's still often a class bias. If
there are high-school-educated people, or
people with associates degrees or less in
progressive nonprofits, it's usually as
support staff with very little say over the
policies or the programs or the messaging.
And we are losing out because of that.
And if there are lowincome people,
poor people involved in progressive social
justice groups, it's usually to give input, with
no rewards and no clout. We want to hear
your voice. Thats a red flag that says, We
are not going to pay you.
But I understand how it happens,
because I have been on hiring committees a
number of times, and you have a limited
budget and you really need some
complicated skills, such as financial
planning, or the cultural capital to relate to
the funders and the funding agencies. Those
are some really hard skills. Okay. But why
doesn't the progressive movement do more
to train people? Why don't we have a
pipeline of leadership development so that
someone coming from a poor or working
class background who doesn't go to college
can learn the skills that progressive
nonprofits need?
Class Action and my old employer
United for a Fair Economy have personnel
policies that say you cannot require a certain
degree to apply for a certain job. You can't
say, B.A. required. Of course, you can
require certain knowledge and ask for
certain skills needed to get the job done, but
if you learned them another way, good for
you. But those policies are rare.
What's the fallout? You have
organizations run with the best intentions in
the world by goodhearted, professional,
middleclass, and upper-middleclass
people. I found in my research that the way
most social justice organizations are doing
diversity and talking about antiracism is
infused with professional middleclass
culture. And thats alienating a lot of
potential working-class and poor supporters
of all races. I will give you some examples,
starting with how we talk about racism.
What is racism?
I think that we would agree that
there's something limited when you just call
it bigotry. That's the mainstream frame,
what you see in the mainstream media. I
think we share the goal of changing that and
adding all the institutional kinds of racism
that are missing from the bigotry frame. And
often social change involves frame shifts:
You are trying to get the general public to
adopt a new frame, and that's part of the
mission of the White Privilege Conference.
So who currently holds the
institutionalized White supremacy frame?
Well, I have some bad news for you.
I coded all mentions of race and
racism at 37 progressive group meetings and
in 61 interviews with activists, and I found
that it was by far the most likely that
professional, middleclass activists were the
ones bringing up the institutionalized White
supremacy frame.
And the workingclass peopleand
remember, these are activists, not the
general publicused lot of different frames,
but the most common was that mainframe
bigotry frame. And only a quarter of the
workingclass people would use the
institutionalized White supremacy frame,
and it tended to be working-class leaders
and the most politically experienced
working-class activists. Mentions of the
institutionalized racism frame by rank-and-
file working-class and poor group members
were almost nonexistent
So why do you think this is
happening? Okay, how is the
institutionalized White supremacy frame
being spread? Sometimes through
conferences like this. But mostly it's through
people learning it at college, and in
particular at colleges where there are critical
race theory professors. In my research that is
where people said they learned it; I saw so
few signs that we have reached past the
academic gated community. I ran into two
workingclass activists who had gone to the
workshops of the People's Institute for
Survival and Beyond. So that group teaches
the institutionalized racism frame outside
academia, and so does the White Privilege
Conference, and I know theyre not the only
ones. There are groups that are doing some
reaching across the class divide, but not
enough to have it reach most workingclass
and poor people.
And worse, when the professional
middleclass activists tried to promote the
institutionalized racism frame during the
meetings observed in my study, it often
backfired and alienated people. And one
way that it backfired was the language that
they used.
My former boss Meizhu Lui, the executive
director of United for a Fair Economy, had
been a hospital cafeteria worker. She had a
lot of experience talking politics with
workingclass and workingpoor union
members. So when we started working on
the project that became the Color of Wealth
book, she said to me and the three women of
color who are the other co-authors, We will
have no jargon. This is going to be in
everyday language. Of course, we have to
introduce some complicated things about
policy, but we will explain clearly and use
everyday vocabulary.
So we toned down the rhetoric and
did not use the words hegemony or
imperialism, for example. If you go to our
online bookstore (www.classism.org/store)
and get The Color of Wealth, you will see
that the term White supremacy doesn't
occur in there. And I will tell you this: The
term White privilege also does not appear
in the book.
Uh, oh. I just said something risky:
Did she just say that? Yeah, I just said
that. Clearly that phrase works to mobilize
some communities, because look, this
conference has been growing every year. So
why would you not say White privilege?
Why not say it in The Color of Wealth? Not
just because it's jargon in general, but also
because privilege sounds luxurious and
elite.
So if you hear a White working
class or poor person say, I don't have
privilege, are they denying the realities of
racism? Maybe. Probe and maybe you will
find out they are, but maybe they are not,
maybe they are just accurately describing
their White workingclass reality.
So I have a challenge for you all.
Think of someone who has helped you this
week. Like a bus driver, cabdriver, hotel
worker, or somebody who served you food
or cleaned your hotel room. And you say
you are here for a conference, and the
person says to you, Oh, what's the
conference about?
I want you to have an imaginary
conversation in your head where you answer
the person, and say what the conference is
about without using the word privilege or
supremacy, or any other terms not in
everyday vocabulary. I will be silent for
about 30 seconds and let you think, have
your imaginary conversation.
Alright. So I would be really
interested to hear how that thought
experiment went. Ill bet some of you came
up with some really great lines. So email
meat info@classism.organd tell me or
feel free to disagree with me for challenging
our shared word. Feel free to come and talk
to me.
On the Color of Wealth book tour we
had to do that message crafting a lot. We
were talking on radio and to audiences not
already convinced of the Color of Wealth
analysis of historical White advantages. And
I found that in talking to White working
class and poor people, a little empathy went
a long way.
So I would say things like, As
rough as this economy has been for White
people who have to work for a living, it's
been even harsher for most people of color.
And that would connect. That little bit of
acknowledgment of someone's experience.
And we had to really change our way
of talking. We were all people with college
degrees; the five coauthors have various
numbers of degrees, and in college they tell
to you take the emotion out of your voice
and take the first-person stories out of what
you write. And they tell you to use big
abstractionsand those are bad
communication practices no matter who
your audience is. Right?
So some of us need a little
communication help. We need an infusion
of the workingclass tradition of making
political points by telling stories, to restore
our communication ability. So we all five
put our family stories into the book, into
how we told the complicated story of the
racial wealth divide. This is something I
would say when on book tour:
Because my dad was a World War
IIera White veteran, he got to go to
college almost for free under the G.I.
Bill and got a really cheap first
mortgage. And because of those
benefits, he was able to save for my
college education and for his own
retirement, so when he got old I
didnt have to support him. But the
vets of color were almost all
excluded from those benefits by the
regulations of the GI Bill. So then
that generation of Black and Latino
and Asian and Native American
veterans, most of them were forced
to be renters in urban or rural areas.
And most of them got high school
educations or less. So then the
generations now in the workforce
have had to support, in many cases,
the elders in their family, and that
has meant less money for the college
education and down payments of
children and grandchildren, and
that's part of the explanation for the
racial wealth gap we see today.
What we need in this country is something
like the GI Bill, only for everyone this time.
So reaching across the class divide would
mean changing our vocabulary and way of
communicating and the stories we tell, but
not just about language; it's about our
practices, how we do diversity. There's some
culture building up of doing diversity that's
infused with professional, middleclass, and
upper-middleclass culture, and I saw it
backfiring with poor and workingclass
activists. Someone who has written about
this a lot is Jane Ward (2008) in her book
Respectably Queer. Jane Ward studied
three LGBTQ groups, but they could be any
groups. Two of her stories I will tell briefly.
First a big social service agency had an
annual Diversity Day, and the lowlevel
staff of color would groan when it was
mentioned. Oh, no! And one support staff
person of color asked, Why do you have to
talk about it so much? Why can't you just
start doing the right thing now? And, of
course, Diversity Day was planned by a
committee, and the committee was
multiracial, but it was all collegeeducated
professionals.
Now an even worse story from
Wards book. (This is this one that takes the
cake, I think. I didn't see anything this bad
in my own research.) So there was an all
volunteer group that planned Gay Pride
parades, and the board of directors was all
working-class, and half Black and half
White. And some of the professional gays in
the community said that this board was
unprofessional and tried to replace some of
them. In the one gay newspaper in the city
someone wrote, These people should be
working at 7Eleven not representing our
community. The longtime president of the
board was a lower-income African
American gay man, and this new crop of
board members said he didn't have the
diversity skills to represent the group to
funders and corporate sponsors and
politicians of color and organizations of
color and that a White professional guy did.
The new White guy had a lot of diversity
work experience. So they replaced the Black
working-class guy and made the White
diversity professional be the president of the
board.
This is not an unusual story. Look
who gets paid as diversity consultants. The
cultural capital to do diversity for big
institutions is cultural capital you learn at
elite universities. Which means that the
people actually most affected by the
problems are not recognized as having any
expertise on solving the problems.
In my research too, I found four
kinds of professional, middleclass cultural
approaches that sometimes bombed with the
workingclass and poor members of these
groups.
One was ideological litmus tests that
require you to use certain lingo or believe in
certain political analysis. For example, in
one group, antiracist group, there was a
proposal by an Antiracist Committee to
reject all coalitions with any group that did
not share its analysis of institutionalized
White supremacy. And the workingclass
and poor members of the group, among
others, said this made no sense and asked,
Why make ourselves smaller by rejecting
potential allies?
A second professional, middleclass
cultural mistake is looking first and foremost
inward, having all your examples of racism
be inside the group, the internal race
dynamics. Placing focused attention on an
internal critique of the group was often led
by professional, middleclass people. Not
that you shouldn't talk about those things,
but that should not be the extent of your
examples. Working-class and poor people of
all races mostly brought up racism in its
harshest forms in the wider society.
And this was connected to the third
professional-middle-class pitfall, which is
more talk than action. I learned that working
class and poor activists suspect college
educated professional activists of being all
talk, that they don't walk the talk. Working-
class activists would monitor the group and
its leaders, waiting to see if there was going
to be some action coming out of all this talk.
So overrelying on long and elaborate
special sessions and workshops is a
problem. Not that there's something wrong
with workshops, but having that be the only
place that you talk about racism is a
problem, and having an excessive talk-to-
action ratio is a problem.
And fourth, the norm of interrupting
others speech. You may have that word
interrupting or the term calling out
oppression in your vocabulary. I think that
it sounds like a oneshot speech act is
enough. You have spoken, so you have
taken care of the problem.
George Lakey, who is a lifelong
workingclass activist and author, thinks the
calling-out culture of finger pointing stems
from elite, educated people feeling like
theyre entitled to sit in the seat of judgment
and critique other people. Instead of
thinking of it as interrupting or callingout,
think of it as digging in. Build your
relationships not just with people targeted by
the oppressive speech, but build a
relationship with the offender too, and speak
to them humbly like someone who has also
said oppressive things in your life, as we all
have. In Class Action workshops, we say
connect before correct: yes, you've got to
bring it up when someone acts oppressively,
but with human connection and respect,
focused on long-term change, not just on
being right or superior.
So those were the four ways of doing
diversity that I saw infused with downsides
of professional, middleclass culture that
didn't go over well with workingclass
people. Every class culture has strengths,
but also limitations, including professional
middle-class culture.
By contrast, workingclass activist
cultures have strengths that we need in order
to do antiracism better. Workingclass
activist cultures understand that change
happens through strength in numbers, and
strength comes through solidarity and unity.
I heard that over and over and over again,
from working-class and poor activists of all
races.
So what would a more working
class way be of opposing institutionalized
racism? There were four approaches I saw
that worked well. One is to create a story
that's got an us and a them, in which the
bad guy is outside of the group. So your first
and worst examples of racism are the really,
really hurtful examples from the wider
society. Its important to start there and not
start with or focus primarily on racism
inside the group.
And all the activists I talked with
were enthusiastic about concrete action,
where the outcomes would benefit particular
people of color. Getting out on somebody's
picket line or testifying against police
brutality or whatevernobody of any class
would criticize that method of being an ally
against racism. In introducing the
institutionalized White supremacy frame at
meetings where most people werent
familiar with it, the brilliant workingclass
leaders would just weave it into the
conversation, like yeah, what the bank did,
thats an example of corporate racism. So
they wouldnt rely only on special
workshops. They would put it into everyday
language.
And last and maybe most broadly,
attentiveness to the unity of the group,
understanding that most working-class
activists see their strength coming from
solidarity. And so when they talked about
dynamics in the group, or how there's a
subset of the group targeted by a certain
oppression, working-class leaders would
stress how tackling the problem would help
the whole group reach its goals. The
message is that sticking up for the subgroup
is going to strengthen the unity and
solidarity of the whole group. The superior
callingout behavior by college-educated
activists, I saw a big contrast to how
working-class people handled incidents with
camaraderie, maybe over beer after the
meeting, saying, That was really messed up
what you said. I love you, but you got to cut
that out. It's just a really different tone from
the finger wagging.
So to conclude, if we draw on
workingclass activists' traditions and
cultural strengths, we are going to build
bigger groups and bigger movements with a
stronger unity among us.
I am talking about learning from the
solidarity ethics of the old labor movement,
where people called each other brother
and sister, and they said all for one and
one for all. And I am talking about the old
African American movement tradition,
where people feel a sense of linked fate
across class; they also call each other
brother and sister, and say, we will lift
as we climb. And I am talking about the
great community organizing tradition, where
people in low-income community groups
have an ethic of mutual aid and protection
toward each other, like a family. So when
we draw on these workingclass activist
traditions, we stand together and we say, if
anyone messes with any workingclass or
poor person, they have messed with all of
us.
And if anyone messes with any
person of color, they have messed with all of
us.
And if anyone messes with any
immigrant or Muslim or Arab or Jew, they
have messed with all of us. If they mess
with any woman or transgender person or
LGBTQ or young or old person they have
messed with all of us.
If they mess with any of us, they
have messed with all of us, because we are
not leaving anyone behind.
Because none of us is free until all of
us are free.
Thank you.

References:

Espenshade, T. (2009). No longer separate, not yet equal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Golden, D. (2007). The price of admission: How Americas ruling class buys its way into elite
colleges and who gets left outside the gates. New York: Random House.
Ward, J. (2008). Respectably queer: Diversity culture in LGBT activist organizations. Nashville,
TN, Vanderbilt University Press.

Walking the Walk:
Student Expectations of Faculty in the Classroom

Sylvia L. Mendez
University of ColoradoColorado Springs
Nancy Hernandez
Grant Clayton
Sarah Elsey
Helen Lahrman
Northeastern State University

Abstract
The purpose of this study is to explore student responses to a 2011
Student Inclusiveness Survey (SIS) and to examine students concerns
about their classroom experiences, particularly the role of faculty in
campus diversity and inclusiveness efforts. A mixed method approach is
used, employing descriptive statistics, OLS regression, and content
analysis. Specifically, the SIS constructs that relate to faculty, the Self-
Assessment of Diversity Learning Outcomes, the Commitment to
Diversity and Inclusiveness, and students open-ended responses to
campus inclusiveness prompts were analyzed. The findings suggest that
students see faculty as important brokers in diversity and inclusiveness
knowledge, and that they appreciate and learn about these issues and
concepts in the classroom. However, students expect faculty not only to
teach about diversity and inclusiveness but also to live it in the
classroom.

For correspondence regarding this article please email:
smartin2@uccs.edu

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Understanding and Dismantling Privilege Mendez et al.: Walking the Walk
The concern for diversity and
institutional climate has been at the forefront
of issues in higher education since the 1960s
(Thelin, 2011). Institutions that fail to pay
attention to diversity and inclusiveness
campus issues are missing opportunities to
adapt higher education practices to meet
student needs. Attention to these issues has
historically been housed in the co- and
extra-curricular work of student affairs, but
now faculty members and academic affairs
are being charged with meeting
inclusiveness campus goals. The purpose of
this study is to explore student responses to
a 2011 Student Inclusiveness Survey (SIS)
and to examine students concerns about
their classroom experience, specifically the
role of faculty in campus diversity and
inclusiveness efforts. A mixed-method
approach is used, employing descriptive
statistics, OLS regression, and content
analysis.
Transforming and diversifying the
curriculum, pedagogy, and classroom
environments are necessary to meet the
learning needs of todays college students
(Kasworm, 2003; Kasworm & Pike, 1994;
Roberts, 2011). If diversity efforts remain
focused merely on providing students with
improved access to services and support
structures in college, then the work only
scratches the surface of ensuring inclusive
learning experiences. It is not enough to
increase campus diversity (Milem, 2001) or
to offer courses on diverse groups of people
who continue to be largely excluded from
the mainstream experience of the general
student population (Anderson, 2005; Rios,
2010). To be inclusive, faculty must
transform what they teach and how they
teach. Faculty must reflect diversity and
inclusiveness practices and thinking, which
means exploring their own identity
consciousness (Alejano-Steele et al., 2011).
Central to the transformation is a need for
faculty to have safe, honest conversations
about the biases, prejudices, and
assumptions that they bring to campus and
into the classroom (Alejano-Steele et al.,
2011; Potts & Schlichting, 2011; Ward &
Selvester, 2012; Watt, 2007).
Researchers report several promising
strategies to train faculty to use more
democratically inclusive methods in the
classroom, such as Universal Design for
Learning (UDL), a pedagogical approach to
teaching that ensures access to the
curriculum for diverse learners by allowing
students to express their learning in a variety
of ways other than just high-stakes testing
(Ward & Selvester, 2012). UDL also places
a greater emphasis on service-learning
opportunities so students can work in their
communities to enact social change
(Danowitz & Tuitt, 2011). Furthermore,
faculty must adhere to culturally responsive
practices as they plan courses if they are
going to ensure inclusive classroom
environments, from the course materials to
the decisions and behaviors they make in the
process of teaching (Saunders & Kardia,
2004). Milem (2001) reported that female,
African American, American Indian, and
Chicano faculty were more likely to use
inclusive teaching styles that supported
diverse learners, such as incorporating
kinesthetic activities rather than relying on
lecturing to deliver content.
Another area of need in creating
inclusive learning environments is
facilitating heated classroom conversations.
Watt (2007) introduced the Privileged
Identity Exploration (PIE) model as a
possible facilitation tool to work through
controversial topics of power, privilege, and
oppression. From this model, faculty and
staff can learn how to address the problems
that arise when people begin to share their
biases and prejudices candidly, both in and
outside of the classroom. Additionally,
deliberate prejudice-reducing strategies in
the classroom are recommended to create
more inclusive classrooms (Berryman-Fink,
2006). Ward and Selvester (2012) have
noted that faculty members need more
opportunities to engage in professional
development that is critical, reflective, and
constructive and that is inclusive of
technology to meet diverse student needs.
Furthermore, Anderson (2005) warned that
without sincere efforts to create more
opportunities for diverse students to enter
and succeed in inclusive classrooms, the
only students to benefit from campus
diversity programs will be majority-White
students.

Method
Research Site
This study was conducted at a public
university. The university is considered a
mixed residential-commuter campus and is
one of the fastest growing institutions in the
country. The student body includes nearly
20 percent students of color and approaches
gender equity in enrollment. Additionally,
30 percent of students are eligible for federal
Pell Grants. In 2012, the University
Institutional Review Board granted approval
for the researchers to analyze the preexisting
SIS data.
Student Inclusiveness Survey
The SIS is in its second year of
administration and operates under the
direction of the chief diversity officer at the
research site. The SIS consists of 50
questions on a 5-point Likert scale, 5 open-
ended questions, and 20 demographic
questions. The Likert scale questions were
divided into six scales. The two scales used
in this study are the Self-Assessment of
Diversity Learning Outcomes and the
Commitment to Diversity and Inclusiveness.
Both scales were used in the previous
administration of the SIS and remained
relatively stable over time. The purpose of
the SIS is to improve campus life by
responding to student attitudes, beliefs, and
perceptions regarding the level of inclusion
and respect for individual and group
differences as captured in the survey. In the
spring of 2011, the research sites
Institutional Review Board granted approval
for the distribution of the 2011 SIS by the
Office of Institutional Research. Individual
email invitations were sent to all students
with a valid email address on April 18, with
a reminder sent on May 10. There was an
11.8 percent response rate (N=1003)
between the dates of April 18 and June 9,
2011. Participation was entirely voluntary,
with the typical respondent completing 77
percent of the questions. As a voluntary
survey, the instrument is not a scientific
sampling of the student body.
Sample
The demographic information
collected from the students allows us to
compare the characteristics of the survey
respondents with the student population of
the research site. Figure 1 shows some of the
noticeable differences between the
institutions student population and the self-
selected group that answered the survey.
We had an underrepresentation of males,
freshmen, and students from Arts and
Humanities, Natural Sciences, and Social
Sciences. On the other hand, Education,
Business, Engineering, and Nursing students
were overrepresented. The survey sample
closely mirrored the racial composition of
the campus. It is difficult to gauge how
representative our sample is of lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender students because
the institution does not capture these kinds
of baseline data. The full demographic
characteristics of respondents are reported in
Table 1.

Figure 1. Comparison of Survey Respondents with Student Population, Spring 2011

Data Analysis
Quantitative. The survey data were entered
into SPSS software to conduct a descriptive
analysis of the survey constructs that relate
to faculty, the Self-Assessment of Diversity
Learning Outcomes, and the Commitment to
Diversity and Inclusiveness scales. Each of
these scales had elements that relate to
faculty diversity and inclusiveness efforts.
The response options were based on a
Likert-scale of Strongly Agree, Agree,
Neutral, Disagree, and Strongly Disagree.
The data were analyzed descriptively by
collapsing Strongly Agree and Agree into
Agree, as well as Strongly Disagree and
Disagree into Disagree. Also, we
measured the Chronbach alpha coefficients
of the scales. And lastly, an OLS regression
was used to determine if there were
significant predictors for responses on the
scales. All the covariates listed in Table 1
were included with race/ethnicity, major,
sexual orientation, class level, and gender all
dummy coded. This yielded a reference
group that was male, heterosexual, business
major, freshman, studied full time, lived on
campus, not first-generation, and other racial
group. Based on the coding of variables, the
final regression formula is as follows:

Self-Assessment of Diversity of
Learning Outcomes or Commitment
to Diversity and Inclusiveness = !
0
+
!
1
(Female) + !
2
(American Indian) +
!
3
(African America) + !
4
(Latino/a) +
!
5
(White) + !
6
(Asian) + !
7
(Bisexual)
+ !
8
(Lesbian/Gay) + !
9
(Arts and
Humanities) + !
10
(Education) +
!
11
(Engineering) + !
12
(Natural
Sciences) + !
13
(Nursing and Health
Sciences) + !
14
(Social Sciences) +
!
15
(Sophomore)+!
16
(Junior)+
!
16
(Senior)+ !
17
(Masters or
PhD)+!
17
(Unclassified)+!
18
(First-
Generation Student)+!
19
(Full-time
Status)+!
20
(Live on
Campus)+!
21
(Transgender)

!"
$!"
%!"
&!"
'!"
(!"
)!"
*!"
+,-./ 012345.15,2
+36758 %!$$ +,-.15,2

Table 1
Survey Demographics
Gender Sexual Orientation
Female 60% Heterosexual 86%
Male 39% Lesbian or Gay 4%
Transgender 1% Bisexual 5%
Prefer not to Respond 5%
Race/Ethnicity
African American/Black 4% Physical Disability
American Indian 2% Yes 5%
Asian American/Pacific Islander 4% No 63%
Latino(a) 7% Prefer not to Respond 32%
White 68%
Multi-racial 6%
Other 9%

First-Generation Student Full-time Status
Yes 24% Yes 83%
No 76% No 17%

Married Children at Home
Yes 31% Yes 21%
No 69% No 79%

Military Affiliation Live on Campus
Yes 25% Yes 12%
No 75% No 88%

Employed off Campus Employed on Campus
Yes 59% Yes 19%
No 41% No 81%

Class Level Major
Freshmen 12% Arts and Humanities 16%
Sophomore 13% Business 16%
Junior 23% Education 12%
Senior 24% Engineering 11%
Masters or PhD 27% Natural Sciences 12%
Unclassified 1% Nursing and Health Sciences 11%
Social Sciences 22%

Qualitative. Content analysis methods were
used to analyze significant statements and
meanings and to develop descriptors of the
essential themes that emerged from faculty-
related, open-ended responses of the SIS
(Creswell, 2013). Responses to three open-
ended questions were analyzed: (1) What
aspects of inclusiveness on campus concern
you the most? (2) What is the most
important action the institution should take
to make the campus more inclusive? (3)
Please provide any additional comments
you would like to share about diversity and
inclusiveness at the institution. Nearly 20
percent of all responses cited faculty
(N=224). In cases where clarity of the
content was uncertain, grammar, sentence
structure, and spelling were corrected. The
researchers inductively identified significant
statements and meanings through separate
coding and then collectively compared and
contrasted the codes to develop emerging
themes, applying the constant-comparative
method of Glaser and Strauss (1967). The
researchers focused on the systematic
approach of this method for researcher
coding credibility and dependability.
To begin, the open coding of central
words and phrases was performed to
develop emerging categories by the
researchers separately; approximately 86
codes were initially developed, and through
parsimony and refinement, 16 open codes
were consensually agreed upon, and 4
emerging themes were titled through in-vivo
coding: (a) concerns regarding bias in course
materials; (b) faculty adhere to traditional
pedagogical methods; (c) faculty training
needed for facilitating difficult classroom
conversations; and (d) faculty professional
development is needed to foster an inclusive
campus community.
The researchers then consensually
agreed on an overarching idea emerging
from the data:
Although the classroom experience tends to
be inclusive and respectful, students expect
faculty not only to teach about diversity and
inclusiveness, but also to live it in the
classroom through inclusive course content
selection, pedagogy, and facilitation skills.
Students find that faculty do not always
adhere to inclusive classroom behaviors,
nor is diversity appropriately woven through
the university curriculum. Students
recommend that the university provide
faculty professional development
opportunities to ensure safe classroom
environments where all experiences and
thoughts are appreciated and welcomed.
It is important to note that in one-
third of all comments students
acknowledged that classroom diversity and
inclusiveness experiences were welcoming
and respectful, and they hoped faculty and
the institution would continue to expand
upon these efforts. See Table 2 for a code
mapping of the data analysis.

Findings
Quantitative Findings
The two SIS scales used in this study are the
Self-Assessment of Diversity Learning
Outcomes and the Commitment to Diversity
and Inclusiveness, as both related
specifically to the role of faculty in diversity
and inclusiveness efforts. The Self-
Assessment of Diversity Learning Outcomes
scale consists of seven questions with a
Cronbach alpha of .86 and .84 previously.
The Commitment to Diversity and
Inclusiveness scale consists of four
questions with a Cronbach alpha of .92 and
.93 during the previous administration.
Self-Assessment of Diversity Learning
Outcomes Scale. The Self-Assessment of
Diversity Learning Outcomes Scale was
constructed to understand how student
understanding of diversity and inclusiveness
was enhanced by various activities inside
and outside of the classroom (Table 3). The
most powerful experiences were informal
interactions with other students and with
faculty who included multicultural examples
in their teaching. Additionally, 48 percent of
students agreed with the statement that their
experiences at the institution helped them
understand diversity.


Table 2
Code Mapping: Three Iterations of Analysis for Non-Traditional Student Remarks
First Iteration: Codes from Transcriptions
General content bias
race, gender, sexuality,
religion, anti-military, etc.

Limited appreciation of
alternate world views
pro-American/Western
culture

Lack of diversity and
inclusiveness content
across the curriculum

Embrace alternate teaching
styles

Embrace alternate learning
assessment methods

Faculty display little
understanding of students
lives outside of the
classroom

Disability Certificates are
not honored

Unfairness in academic
accommodations, and lack
thereof

Faculty personal agendas
pushed in the classroom

Encourage opposing views
to be shared

Overt and covert
discrimination is tolerated
and perpetuated by faculty

Foster respectful, open
class dialogues

Train faculty on infusing
diversity in the curriculum

Excessive concern with
diversity and inclusiveness
has no academic or real
world value

Diversity and
inclusiveness institutional
values are not reflected in
the classroom

Educate faculty on being
student advocates
Second Iteration: Emerging Themes

Concerns regarding bias in
course materials

Faculty adhere to
traditional pedagogical
methods
Faculty training needed for
facilitating difficult
classroom conversations
Faculty professional
development is needed to
foster inclusive campus
community

Third Iteration: Application to Data

Although the classroom experience tends to be inclusive and respectful, students expect faculty not only to teach
about diversity and inclusiveness, but also to live it in the classroom through inclusive course content, pedagogy,
and facilitation skills. They find that faculty do not always adhere to inclusive classroom behaviors, nor is diversity
appropriately woven throughout the university curriculum. Students recommend that the university provide faculty
professional development opportunities to ensure safe classroom environments where diversity of curriculum,
thought, and experience are appreciated and welcomed.

Table 3
Self-Assessment of Diversity Learning Outcomes
Disagree Neutral Agree
My understanding of diversity and inclusiveness was enriched by . . .
informal interactions with other students 12% 21% 67%
faculty who included multicultural examples in their teaching 18% 26% 56%
taking classes that focus on diversity 20% 37% 43%
participating in student organizations 16% 54% 30%
participating in community service projects 16% 57% 27%
participating in campus activities that focus on diversity 23% 52% 25%
participating in a campus inclusiveness workshop 21% 69% 10%

An OLS regression was used to
determine if there were significant
predictors for responses on the Self-
Assessment of Diversity Learning Outcomes
Scale. All the covariates listed in Table 1
were included, with race/ethnicity, major,
sexual orientation, class level, and gender all
dummy coded. This yielded a reference
group that was male, heterosexual, business
major, and freshman. Results are displayed
in Table 4. The coefficients for the
following variables were significant: female,
married, African American/Black, Latino/a,
White, and multiracial at p ! .10. Married
approached significance at p ! .10.White
and marital status were the two strongest
standardized beta scores of .151 and -.120
respectively. White students reported higher
results of .233 on the Self-Assessment of
Diversity Learning Outcomes Scale, while
being married reduced the self-assessment
by .187.

Table 4
Regression for Impact of Selected Variables on Self-Assessment of Diversity of Learning
Outcomes
Unstandardized Coefficients Standardized Coefficients
B Standard Error Beta p
Constant 2.797 .273 .000
Female 0.114 .058 .077 .051**
Married -0.187 .080 -.120 .011
African American 0.287 .165 .081 .082**
Latino/a 0.235 .143 .085 .100**
White 0.233 .105 .151 .026*
Multiracial 0.290 .148 .097 .050*
Adjusted R
2
.007
N 19,206
* p . 05; ** p . 10

The Commitment to Diversity and
Inclusiveness Scale. The Commitment to
Diversity and Inclusiveness Scale was used
to measure the respondents beliefs
regarding the values of diversity and
inclusiveness at the research site (Table 5).
We found broad support for the idea that the
learning environment should be inclusive for
college life, as well as for professional
careers, and that community members from
all backgrounds should feel that they belong.
Similar to the previous scale, we
used an OLS regression to determine if there
were significant predictors for responses on
the Commitment to Diversity and
Inclusiveness Scale. All the covariates from
the previous regression were used along
with the same reference group. The
coefficients for the following variables were
significant at p " .05: female, having a
physical disability, and having children
under 18 at home, with gender having the
highest standardized beta of 0.207. Again,
women reported significantly higher positive
perceptions on this scale.


Table 5
Commitment to Diversity and Inclusiveness
Disagree Neutral Agree
The institution should provide learning environments that are inclusive of
students from all social and cultural identities. 8% 5% 87%
Learning from social and cultural differences should be an important aspect
of a college education. 10% 3% 87%
Learning from social and cultural differences should be an important aspect
of preparing for a professional career. 8% 7% 85%
Faculty and staff should assure that students from all backgrounds feel a
sense of belonging on campus. 5% 14% 81%

Table 6
Regression for Impact of Selected Variables on Commitment to Diversity and Inclusiveness
Unstandardized Coefficients Standardized Coefficients
B Standard Error Beta p
Constant 2.839 .652 .000
Female 0.352 .145 .207 .015*
Physical Disability 0.475 .209 .198 .025*
Children at Home 0.372 .175 .199 .035*
Adjusted R
2
.062

N 812

* p . 05

Qualitative Findings
Concerns regarding bias in course
materials. References to bias in course
content appear to shape many of the
students thoughts on the role faculty play in
brokering diversity and inclusiveness
knowledge. This perception was most
apparent among students who self-identified
as conservative in relation to their faculty,
who were perceived as liberal. One student
commented:
Most professors seem very liberal,
and although I only consider myself
a conservative independent, many
other students lean very
conservative. This conflict of interest
I feel causes friction, and a break in
connection between professor and
student. Not everyone wants to go
outside to see . . . [the trash] and
hear about how we couldve recycled
more. Not everyone goes with the
Going Green concept. Some
aspects of the idea I understand and
support. Others do not affect me that
way.
Another student shared how insulted he was
by course content that clashed with his
religious beliefs:
I dont believe the campus includes
people with different religious
beliefs. Some of the reading material
for courses is offensive. . . . It is
completely inappropriate for a
professor to think that every student
is comfortable with reading about
two females who are intimate with
each other, especially when they are
in a book that has pictures. Its
offensive.
And while there were many comments that
focused on general content bias, there were
some comments about the limited
appreciation of worldviews beyond the
Western culture. One student remarked:
I dont think that the material taught
in management classes does include
information about other cultures;
however, it seems to take the position
that the American way of doing
things is superior. The American way
is often compared to other cultures;
however, the material seems to
follow the trend that it is in defense
of our way. I think it is important to
not include bias when teaching, even
though we are taking the class in the
U.S.
With comments like this it is clear
that some students value the opportunity to
learn about other cultures in a critical
fashion rather than just comparative. It was
also apparent that students felt that their
diversity and inclusiveness content was
experienced in isolation instead of infused
across the curriculum. One student
suggested that diversity [should be]
incorporated into all schools and classes
not just in the social science courses.
Understanding inequality and differences
would enhance everyones education.
Another student explained how important it
is for faculty to introduce diverse materials
into the classroom to broaden students
inclusive perspectives:
Student population consists of hard
right evangelical persuasion and due
to their adherence to church dogma
there is a tendency of students to
brag on their beliefs, frequently to
the disparity of other religions and
the gay community. Professors try to
introduce inclusive scenarios,
materials and discussions, and these
students turn the opportunity to learn
into a perceived persecution of their
own beliefs. They dont seem to
realize that persons sitting next to
them may not agree or have the same
beliefs and are therefore thrilled to
have professors who introduce the
class to alternate world views.

Faculty adhere to traditional pedagogical
methods. Many students voiced concerns
regarding faculty adherence to traditional
teaching and learning styles, such as relying
on lectures to teach material and high-stakes
tests for assessing learning. As indicated by
one student, Only a very few instructors
allow for expressions of different
perspectives. Most professors just want to
plow through their PowerPoint slides. I
dont consider memorization of slides and
regurgitation of bullet points to be
education. And furthermore, a student
questioned the validity of measuring
learning in restricted ways:
Students should be judged on their
performance, grades, work ethic,
and experience as well as any test
that might be required. I do not
suggest that instruction be any less
rigorous or challenging; I merely
suggest that academia creates its
own form of oppression and class
level by not acknowledging learning
that does not come from a book or by
turning simple concepts into
convoluted unreadable theories.
Although most teaching and learning
comments were in this vein, there were
comments that spoke to the appreciation
students have for faculty who utilize a more
inclusively oriented pedagogy. One student
suggested that the university should
continue selecting well-rounded professors
that are inclusive and open-minded in their
instruction.
Besides the actual teaching and
learning that occurs in the classroom,
students are also interested in building
relationships with faculty, and yet students
tend to think that faculty have little interest
and understanding of their lives outside of
the classroom. There were several comments
about how little empathy is displayed by
faculty, and this is exacerbated when
students feel that they are dealing with
situations outside of their control. This lack
of consideration even extended to students
noting that their disability status was not
always honored by faculty. One student
shared:
Several professors have, in class or
privately, said out loud or directly to
my spouse that they dont believe in
learning disabilities nor that those
students should get extra help like
extra test time. One went as far as to
say he thought it was fraud. Until
you have walked a mile in someones
shoes who has to deal with this, you
need to be open-minded and keep
your ill-conceived opinions to
yourself. It seems a few professors
have an empathy disability and
inability to connect with students.
Why are they teaching? There are a
few excellent ones. Maybe the others
are either overstressed, think they
are better than everyone else, or just
plain daft and lacking in social
empathy and self-awareness.
Although there were several comments just
like this one, there were also notable
instances when students felt well cared for
by faculty. One student stated:
After transferring from schools
where I didnt fit in, [the
university] has been the most
accommodating and kind through my
transition process. I have had great
teachers who have all been flexible
with my various health issues, and it
is clear that they want students to
succeed. I believe this kind of
attitude will continue to bring
diversity to the college because all
students will feel welcomed and
respected like I have.
Several students also noted feelings
of unfairness regarding how and when
faculty made academic accommodations for
some students and not others. For example,
one student indicated:
I have encountered a professor who
was not willing to work with me
regarding family circumstances.
However, this same professor was
more than willing to work with
student athletes. Students who also
have families should not have to
choose between school and their
families.
Situations like this are intensified when
students believe and are told that
accommodations can be made for their
status as military personnel. A student
explained that sometimes I feel that the
military have a hard time with [the
university]. While arrangements state that
they can be made on several syllabi, they are
not always helped as far as their jobs are
concerned. These kinds of occurrences
leave students feeling that faculty lack
compassion when they are not responsive to
their needs and demands outside of the
classroom.

Faculty training needed for facilitating
difficult classroom conversations. Students
noted that they struggled the most in classes
with faculty who pushed their own agenda
rather than dealing with the difficult
conversation that could have occurred in the
classroom. Again, much of the concern dealt
with a perceived liberal agenda that faculty
were pushing on students, which was
troubling and made the classroom
environment uncomfortable for some
students. One student commented:
I feel as if most faculty have a liberal
political point of view and try to
push those views on students. This
makes students, such as myself, that
do not join in the liberal political
arena feel excluded and somewhat
intimidated in classes.
These types of comments were well
represented in the data, but there were also
comments speaking to racial
microaggressions made by White faculty
members. One student shared:
The only problems I have
experienced were in the classroom
where the professor made
inappropriate comments throughout
the course that offended most of the
students. Lets just say he has a pro-
White male bias that was
disconcerting to most of the
classeshe allowed and supported
the label of hybrid for President
Obama, and made remarks about
how Europeans are more intelligent
that other races.
Another student indicated that faculty
should teach students HOW to think not
WHAT to think.
Along with comments such as these,
students felt that opposing views were not
always welcomed in classrooms as faculty
levels of tolerance varied greatly, which
stunted conversations from moving forward
organically. One student explained this
point:
I love the cultural diversity classes
that you offer. I love how much you
have helped open my eyes to see
different points of view. Now that I
have matured in my cultural identity,
however, I feel unsafe in the
classroom to voice an opinion that is
not incredibly liberal. I am looked
down upon by teachers, publicly
criticized/mocked, and even graded
poorly. There is a difference between
being pig-headed and close-minded
and having an open mind while
making an informed decision about
my faith and beliefs. [The university]
is a wonderfully safe place to be
different from the cultural majority .
. . but it is not so safe to be the same
as the cultural majority. I believe
that both can and should exist
together.
Similarly, another student stated, I have
noticed that every idea and background is
accepted except from a conservative
Christian viewpoint. Traditional family
values are not encouraged. Most classes
involve discussions of situational ethics. To
deal with these kinds of power issues in the
classroom, one student remarked that
politics should be removed from the
equation, or the professors must take a
middle standing. If the second option is
chosen, then they can express their opinions,
but they must also explain why and what the
alternative view is fairly.
There were also many comments
related to overt and covert discriminatory
behavior tolerated and even perpetuated by
faculty. One student shared how difficult it
is for her to feel included by engineering
faculty:
As a female working on an
engineering degree, there is still a
problem of acceptance and respect
for potential and actual ability of
females in these types of fields.
Unfortunately, thats not specific to
here, nor to age group or experience
level; [I] find it from 18-year-olds to
60-year-olds, in school and in the
field. Its still a learned, unconscious
behavior for the most part, though
getting better. Im glad to say, most
of the time it manifests only subtly,
but it IS felt . . . Me, Ive learned to
ignore it. Eventually most come
around. But Ive had conversations
with other women here at [the
university] in my field who have
mentioned feeling it too.
Other faculty behavior was seen as less
derogatory but just as insidious, particularly
in regards to military members. One student
noted:
[There is a] lack of appreciation for
the military and their dedication to
ensure the safety and well-being of
the United States and its citizens.
The military has been talked down
about in several of my classes. The
Armed Forces provide the freedom
and safety for each of us and yet they
are belittled and disrespected.
Students want faculty to foster respectful,
open class dialogues and most believe it is
the facultys responsibility to do so if the
classrooms are going to be inclusive. One
student indicated that if the professors
teach acceptance with their words and
action, students will follow their lead.
Another student explained:
From the top down, the attitude
needs to be that all people are
accepted and valued, whether or not
you agree with them. That is, after
all, what they are trying to teach,
what they are professing with their
mouths, yet it is only being extended
to certain groups.
Comments such as these make the case that
if faculty can ensure tough conversations
occur with a respect for a diversity of
opinion and moderated effectively,
meaningful discussions and even changed
attitudes will ensue. There were many
comments that spoke to the fact that this is a
reality in many classrooms. One student
shared, The atmosphere really lends to
inclusivenessthe way professors and
students discuss ideas and how students feel
when it comes to talking about ideas and
choices that are personal.

Faculty professional development is
needed to foster inclusive campus
community. Students suggest that they
benefit from having diversity and
inclusiveness classroom experiences across
the curriculum as members of a diverse
country and global community. One student
explained:
I think every major should be
required to take a class on diversity
since we need to know how to
interact with diverse populations in
our future careers. We need to
understand the issues surrounding
different facets of our population in
order to be accountable citizens.
As noted by another student, infusing the
curriculum with diversity leads to increased
awareness and zero tolerance for hate,
discrimination, prejudice.
Several students did remark that this
kind of curriculum is tricky for students
who do not feel that they need these kinds of
course requirements:
These students who are the quickest
to jump to the conclusion that they
are being persecuted as Christians
because they may be required to
read a book about legal actions and
tolerance in the gay community, or
complain loudly that they are being
forced to read works that are
"blasphemy." I would like more of
these types of materials simply
because these very students have no
idea what the rest of the world
endures at the hands of various
majorities.
There also was noted fear that the
majority culture is overlooked when too
much attention is given to issues of diversity
and inclusiveness, even when the benefits
are understood. One student shared:
Overall, I love [the university] and I
applaud how liberally minded your
teachers are. I love the experiences I
have had in cultural classes and I
appreciate you "forcing" me to take
them. Please don't forget about us
"majority culture" students, though.
These concerns were voiced by many other
students who feel that the university is
already excessively concerned with diversity
and inclusiveness, in such a way that turns
students off from wanting to engage in these
kinds of programs willingly. One student
indicated:
I think the university has gone
overboard with trying to push the
diversity card. It's gotten to the point
where everyone is just being taught
the politically correct ideals of
today, and it isn't the university's
place to instill beliefs. It is the
universitys place to educate. Some
social awareness classes are good.
However, the majority of them are
taught by professors that have such a
strong bias that you cannot pass the
course without agreeing with them.
Additionally, the academic and real-world
value of such course work was called into
question. One student suggested that this
hypersensitive need to lower the standards in
the name of inclusiveness [is undesirable].
And another shared that it is not the
school's job to make sure students feel a
sense of belonging. It is the school's job to
educate, train and prepare students for their
future.
What complicates these issues is that
students feel that the stated diversity and
inclusiveness values of the university are not
reflected in the classroom. Many suggest
that a clear connection with measurable
outcomes is needed, such as ensuring that
students get the help they need in the
classroom. One student suggested that the
university ought to explain to the
professors why students have Disability
Certification, in order to even out the
playing field, and the importance of working
with students would be very beneficial.
Others noted the importance of having
greater diversity among the faculty to reflect
a commitment to an inclusive campus
community. One student recommended that
the university should actively recruit a
more diverse faculty. All of the Masters
level courses I have taken with respect to
diversity have been taught by White,
middle-class females. See a problem here?
In general, students suggested that
discriminatory behaviors of faculty in the
classroom, coupled with faculty power in
the classroom, leads to students feeling
detached from a university that espouses
inclusiveness ideals.
Accordingly, students believe faculty
need to be educated on serving as advocates
for students and the classroom community
and knowing how to intervene when
discussions are out of control. One student
remarked, If discussion turns into a diatribe
against certain ideas or lifestyles, then it
should be the responsibility of the professor
to remain involved in that discussion as a
mediator, and not an enabler. Students want
faculty to be accountable to building an
inclusive classroom environment and, as a
student stated, When prejudicial statements
and actions occur, it can be difficult for
observers to protest. It is the responsibility
of students, professors, and staff to avoid
being silent when they see such actions.
When students see faculty perpetuate hateful
language and behaviors, trust is lost.
Another student noted:
In one of my classes a student made
many jokes about gay people often
during class time and the professor
never said anything about it and
laughed along. I am not gay, but this
really bothered me. It was
unprofessional for her to laugh with
him.
Discussion
Students clearly see faculty as
important brokers in diversity and
inclusiveness knowledge, and they
appreciate and learn about these issues and
concepts in the classroom. Additionally,
students value an inclusive environment and
believe faculty should play a strong role in
fostering belonging at the campus level. And
this particularly holds for females, as their
responses on the Self-Assessment of
Diversity Learning Outcomes and the
Commitment to Diversity and Inclusiveness
were both significant. And although the
classroom experience tends to be inclusive
and respectful, students expect faculty not
only to teach about diversity and
inclusiveness, but also to live it in the
classroom through inclusive course material
selection, pedagogy, and facilitation skills. It
appears that students experience this more
often with faculty in social science
disciplines. They find many faculty do not
always adhere to inclusive classroom
behaviors, nor do they find diversity content
appropriately woven through the university
curriculum, but believe this is an important
piece of receiving a comprehensive, quality
education. Students recommend that the
university provide faculty professional
development opportunities to ensure safe
classroom environments where diversity of
curriculum, thought, and experience are
appreciated and welcomed. They see a need
to connect the stated diversity and
inclusiveness values of the institution with
what is happening in the academic
environment of the university but express
concern about taking diversity too far.
Several recommendations emerge
from this study, consistent with prior
recommendations, to address students
concerns about their diversity and
inclusiveness classroom experiences. First, it
is important for the university to provide
professional development opportunities for
faculty to learn about and practice inclusive
classroom pedagogy. This includes several
elements, from selecting course content
materials, to opting for progressive teaching
and grading policies, to developing ground
rules for managing difficult classroom
conversations. Becoming an inclusive
university educator takes will and
commitment, but it is not a mystery as to
what needs to be done to be effective with
todays diverse college student population
(Berryman-Fink, 2006; Kasworm, 2003;
Kasworm & Pike, 1994; Roberts, 2011;
Ward & Selvester, 2012; Watt, 2007). Much
of this kind of work begins with faculty
exploring their own identity consciousness
to connect and empathize with students
learning needs (Alejano-Steele et al., 2011).
Additionally, attention to the power
dynamics of classrooms is needed to
increase positive faculty-to-student
interactions, as well as student-to-student
interactions. Watts (2007) PIE model may
be an effective tool to begin thinking about
how these power issues can be neutralized in
the classroom as it focuses on how to
interpret and what to do when people begin
to engage in open, honest ways in and out of
the classroom environment. Increased
campus programming that brings faculty and
students together outside of the classroom
may also be an optimal way of creating
connections between faculty and students
that minimizes issues of authority and
power.
Lastly, university diversity efforts
need to be streamlined inside and outside the
classroom so all students can benefit from a
curricular and co-curricular experience built
on creating an inclusive campus community.
The data strongly suggest that there is a
disconnect between the stated institutional
values and the classroom experience.
Furthermore, a campaign to communicate
anti-discrimination policies, as well as
campus resources, would help raise
awareness of discrimination protections and
support services in place to ensure a campus
community where all participants feel that
they belong and are valued.

Conclusion
Findings of this study indicate the
importance of faculty being engaged and
trained to meet campus inclusiveness goals,
as well as the needs and interests of
students. It is clear that students value
learning in an inclusive classroom, but it
appears they are not experiencing this across
the curriculum. The need to transform and
diversify the curriculum is not possible
without faculty ownership. These findings
provide some initial evidence for the need
for faculty professional development in this
area, especially in academic disciplines with
few diverse faculty members (Milem, 2001).
All too often, the responsibility of providing
diverse curriculum and student-centered
learning has largely been left to diverse
faculty (Milem, 2001). Without institutional
intervention and support for inclusive
classrooms, students may be forced to
choose between partially assimilating to a
campus or abandoning their studies
altogether (Danowitz & Tuitt, 2011; Milem,
2001). Colleges and universities of today
must understand and embrace students
diverse learning needs and wants, including
experiencing diversity and inclusiveness in
the classroom.

References

Alejano-Steele, A., Hamington, M., MacDonald, L., Potter, M., Schafer, S., Sgoutas, A., & Tull,
T. (2011). From difficult dialogues to critical conversations: Intersectionality in our
teaching and professional lives. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 125, 91-100.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/tl.436
Anderson, G. M. (2005). In the name of diversity: Education and the commoditization and
consumption of race in the United States. The Urban Review, 37(5), 399-423.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11256-005-0017-z
Berryman-Fink, C. (2006). Reducing prejudice on campus: The role of intergroup contact in
diversity education. College Student Journal, 40(3), 511-516.
Creswell, J. W. (2013). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five
approaches (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Danowitz, M. A., & Tuitt, F. (2011). Enacting inclusivity through engaged pedagogy: A higher
education perspective. Equity & Excellence in Education, 44(1), 40-56.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2011.539474
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for
qualitative research. Chicago, IL: Aldine.
Kasworm, C. (2003). Adult meaning making in the undergraduate classroom. Adult Education
Quarterly, 53(2), 81-98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0741713602238905
Kasworm, C. E., & Pike, G. R. (1994). Adult undergraduate students: Evaluating the
appropriateness of a traditional model of academic performance. Research in Higher
Education, 35(6), 689-710. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02497082
Milem, J. F. (2001). Increasing diversity benefits: How campus climate and teaching methods
affect student outcomes. In G. Orfield (Ed.), Diversity challenged: Evidence on the
impact of affirmative action (pp. 233-249). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education
Publishing Group.
Potts, A., & Schlichting, K. A. (2011). Developing professional forums that support thoughtful
discussion, reflection, and social action: One facultys commitment to social justice and
culturally responsive practice. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher
Education, 23(1), 11-19.
Rios, D. (2010). Minority status and privilege in the academy: The importance of race, gender,
and socialization practices for undergraduates, graduate students and faculty (Doctoral
dissertation). Available from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. (UMI No.
3441303).
Roberts, S. (2011). Traditional practice for non-traditional students? Examining the role of
pedagogy in higher education retention. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 35(2),
183-199. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0309877X.2010.540320
Saunders, S., & Kardia, D. (2004). Creating inclusive college classrooms. Retrieved from
http://www.crlt.umich.edu/gsis/P3_1.html
Thelin, J. R. (2011). A history of American higher education (2nd ed.). Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Ward, H. C., & Selvester, P. M. (2012). Faculty learning communities: Improving teaching in
higher education. Educational Studies, 38(1), 111-121.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2011.567029
Watt, S. K. (2007). Difficult dialogues, privilege and social justice: Uses of the privileged
identity exploration (PIE) model in student affairs practice. College Student Affairs
Journal, 26(2), 114-126.

When You Carry All of Your Baggage With You
Youre Carrying All of Your Baggage With You:
Identifying and Interrupting Equity Traps in Preservice
Teachers Narratives
James R. Carlson
University of Wisconsin - La Crosse

Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to identify common equity traps in the
narrative accounts of White preservice teachers at Great Lakes
University
1
(GLU). I outline common equity traps, or patterns of
thinking, that serve to impede the achievement of equity in schooling.
In addition to situating two specific equity traps within the narrative
accounts of White preservice teachers, I outline possibilities for
interrupting these traps. As a way to respond to inequitable schooling
conditions, I argue that it is necessary to identify recurrent problematic
perceptions held by preservice teachers and to root these perceptions
institutionally as uncritical assumptions that privilege Whiteness. I
conclude this paper with a discussion of the tasks for teachers and
teacher educators who struggle to advance understandings about power,
privilege, and prestige while destabilizing and eliminating equity traps.

James R. Carlson is an Assistant Professor of Content Area Literacy in
the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Wisconsin
La Crosse.
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Understanding and Dismantling Privilege Carlson: When You Carry All of Your Baggage
As a teacher educator who thrives on
teaching and learning that bends critical, I
was out of my seat with enthusiasm as
preservice teachers in a recent literacy-
across-the-curriculum course shared and
reflected on issues related to the topics of
censorship and critical literacy. Pulling the
easel closer to the group and uncapping a
new dry-erase marker, I scribbled onto the
board some of the key tenets of critical
literacy that could serve as a rubric for ones
teaching. I identified 4 tenets synthesized
from over 30 years of research that helped to
define critical literacy: (1) disrupting
familiar routines, (2) considering multiple
perspectives, (3) focusing on social and
political issues, and (4) taking action to
promote change (Lewison, Flynt, & Van
Sluys, 2002). The students were taking notes
and we were ruminating on recent events in
schools and our course readings that seemed
to help situate the tenets in meaningful
ways.
I cued up a five-minute scene from a
film documentary, Monumental Myths
(Trinley, 2012), to highlight the interrelated
nature of critical literacy tenets. The scene
takes place at Mount Rushmore and follows
the director, Tom Trinley, through a guided
walking tour of the monument and park.
Near the end of the tour, Trinley poses a
question to the tours guide: What is
Gutzon Borglums affiliation with the Ku
Klux Klan? Borglum is the artist and
sculptor credited with carving the famous
monument into the hills of South Dakota.
The guide conceded that she had
never read anything about the matter.
Shortly thereafter, the director was
accompanied by a park ranger at all times
and asked to refrain from posing any further
controversial questions to park staff. The
film then provides a point/counterpoint on
the Borglum issue (among other issues).
That is, park visitors respond to whether the
parks official versions of Borglum and
the controversy of sacred Sioux land are
satisfactory, or if the narratives and
monuments are in need of revisioning.
Several White visitors in the parks
parking lot did not feel misled. At least one
visitor, a White, presumably working-class
male, attributed Borglums background in
the White supremacist Ku Klux Klan as an
exercise of his freedom to hold such beliefs
while still being accepted into the melting
pot that is the United States. His
companions (also White) seemed content
with learning about superficial details, such
as Borglums birthdate, but did not feel
defrauded by not learning the more robust
and controversial version of the past.
Another park visitor, an African American
male, expressed disbelief and indignation
that the tour sweeps such details under the
rug, especially given that we live in a
democracy that values diversity.
As the film comes to a close, several
historians, activists, and authors, including
Howard Zinn, James Loewen, Lonnie
Bunch, and Adam Fortunate Eagle
Nordwall unpack many of the issues
surrounding monumental myths present in
textbooks, memorials, and other
remembrances of historical events. I turned
on the lights and the dialogue continued.
Students noted that some key tenets of
critical literacy were demonstrated in the
film. One student, Taylor, a White, middle-
class male, wondered aloud if we could be
critical of the film. Specifically, he
questioned, Was it effective to show an
angry Black male at the end of the film?
A chorus of classmates began
disrupting Taylors apparent misreading of
the scene. They did not see anger, but
instead saw concepts we had situated in
class diversity in language use and
practice, regional dialects, variations of
discourse as being prominent in the scenes
captured by the video camera. Some saw
passion and spiritedness, but there was
an overwhelming re-routing of the notion
that the film depicted an angry Black
male.
I begin with this anecdote as a way
to situate a key term for this paper: equity
traps. While I do not believe that Taylor
had malicious intentions with his question
I think he was excited about the prospect of
being given the task to be critical his
question is an example of an equity trap.
Equity traps are patterns of thinking,
whether implicitly held or explicitly
articulated, that impede the achievement of
equity in schools and society (Cohen, 2000;
McKenzie & Scheurich, 2004). Taylor was
dysconsciously (King, 1991) sustaining a
social and cultural perspective that
permeated his background and worldview as
a middle-class, White male from a
predominantly White, small community in a
Midwestern state.
In terms of equity traps, Taylor was
employing the gaze focusing on the
behaviors and language of a racial Other
while deflecting any attention from the role
of White supremacy in the Mount
Hushmore controversies. Taylors utterance
offers an opportunity to explore the
unearned privileges and benefits associated
with whiteness and ways of disrupting these
habits.
1

Pondering this scene and others like
it in teacher education courses engaging the
topics of racism, classism, and sexism and
the intersection of these oppressions with
literacy, I wondered: What are the patterns
of thinking that impede the pursuit of equity
in schooling and society? And (how) might
we interrupt these discourse practices?
Purpose of Research
The purpose of this paper is to
identify common equity traps in the
narrative accounts of preservice teachers
from a predominantly White institution in a
large, Midwestern state universitys teacher
education program. I examined 11 White
preservice teachers experiences with and
perceptions of diversity, including their own
Whiteness, while attending Great Lakes
University (GLU). This study did not
attempt to determine if preservice teachers
of color can or do share the same
susceptibility to equity traps.
This study is related to previous
examinations of preservice and inservice
teachers articulations and understandings of
Whiteness and racism (Johnson, 2002;
Kailin, 1999; Landsman, 2005; Levine-
Rasky, 2000; McIntyre, 1997, 2002;
Picower, 2009; Sleeter, 1997, 1998; White,
2011). Unlike other investigations into
Whiteness, this study consists of multiple
interviews with individuals over time and
analyzes nuanced equity traps articulated by
secondary preservice teachers.
Following the lead of McIntyre
(1997), I was interested in learning more
about how White preservice teachers were
making meaning of Whiteness in their
own lives and in relation to their multiple
positionalities. In a manner similar to White
(2011), I interviewed several White
preservice teachers who articulated a
commitment to teaching for social justice
throughout their final semesters of a teacher
education program and into their student
teaching. Further, in line with Chubbuck
(2004), I sought opportunities to observe
both the enactment and disruption of
Whiteness in the life stories of the
participants.
While inquiries into preservice
teachers understandings of Whiteness exist,
the language, grammar, and discourse of
Whiteness is constantly evolving and
dependent upon its many intersections with
(to name a few) geography, ethnicity,
gender, social class, and sexual preferences
(Conley, 2000, 2001). Further, naming and
defining Whiteness remains difficult and
challenging as a result of collective silence
on and aversion or resistance to topics of
White privilege and White power (Berlak &
Moyenda, 2001; Bonilla-Silva, 2002; Lund
& Carr, 2012; Pollock, 2004; Sensoy &
DiAngelo, 2011; Sleeter, 1998; Tatum,
1994).
I studied the values, beliefs, and
philosophies of the preservice teachers
highlighted in this paper because they each
expressed a desire to teach in ways that
challenged the status quo. As teachers just
beginning their journey into the profession,
the participants were open to learning about
how to identify and examine relations of
power in their teaching and interactions with
their students. A crucial goal for this study is
to put a spotlight on equity traps operating in
many preservice teachers, paying careful
attention to the consequences of these traps
if they are not interrupted.
Conceptual Framework
In their important work on equitable
schooling, McKenzie and Scheurich (2004)
describe four common equity traps held by
educators working with diverse populations
and students of color. McKenzie and
Scheurich define equity traps as conscious
and unconscious thinking patterns and
behaviors that trap teachers, administrators,
and others or ways of thinking or
assumptions that prevent educators from
believing that their students of color can be
successful learners (pp. 601-602). These
traps result in lowered expectations and
negative views toward students home
language and culture, and foil the
possibilities for equity in schooling.
Described as occurring individually
and collectively, equity traps are often
reinforced through formal and informal
communication, assumptions, and beliefs
(McKenzie & Scheurich, 2004, p. 603).
Equity traps lead to what King (1991) has
coined as dysconscious racism or an
uncritical habit of mind that gives
justification to inequities. Identifying and
interrupting equity traps holds considerable
potential for helping educators rethink
assumptions that uncritically privilege
Whiteness (Copenhaver-Johnson, Bowman,
& Johnson, 2007, p. 234).
McKenzie and Scheurich (2004)
identify four constructs and provide
strategies to help school leaders first
understand, and then implement strategies to
eliminate the habitual traps. Figure 1
(below) situates each of the four traps and
provides a brief description of each trap.
Importantly, each trap is not a stand-alone
category and frequently there is overlap
between the traps.
Equity Trap Brief Description of Equity Trap
Deficit View A way of identifying students language, culture, and behavior
as a liability and not a resource for schooling.

Racial Erasure Refusing to see color, taking a colorblind stance, and
switching the conversation away from race to socioeconomics.

Avoidance and
Employment of the
Gaze
Avoiding the surveillance of White, middle-class parents and
pressuring other White teachers to fit in with the norms
established in a school.

Paralogical Beliefs and
Behaviors
Shifting responsibility for ones own inappropriate behavior by
blaming students.
Fig. 1. Description of Equity Traps
For this paper, I situate the first two
equity traps outlined by McKenzie and
Scheurich (2004): deficit view and racial
erasure. Based on Valencias (1997) deficit-
thinking model, the first trap is the deficit
view trap. According to this trap, the
student who fails in school does so
principally because of internal deficits or
deficiencies (p. 2; in McKenzie &
Scheurich, p. 607). In this view, students of
color are regarded as having deficiencies
attributed to linguistic limitations,
inadequate intellectual capacity,
unprincipled behaviors, and insufficient
motivation. Also, student deficiencies are
located within the student, as inherent or
originating with the individual. Further,
individuals express the deficit view trap by
remarking on students parents and
communities as lacking in motivation,
adequacy, or family stability and attributing
this as a cultural and generational affliction.
McKenzie and Scheurich (2004)
observed that in addition to blaming parents
and individual students lack of motivation,
teachers and administrators held that the
students and their families did not value
education and that students did not know
how to behave properly (pp. 608-609).
Ultimately, the findings of this view indicate
that the teachers in their study held a strong
belief that their children of color walked in
the school door at 4 years old with built-in
deficits that the teachers should not be
expected to overcome (McKenzie &
Scheurich, 2004, p. 609).
The second trap explored here, racial
erasure, is based in part on the work of
hooks (1992) and refers to the process by
which some people refuse to see color, or
take a colorblind stance toward all
students of color (Apfelbaum, Norton, &
Sommers, 2012; Thompson, 1999). In
addition to forget[ting] about race, the
racial erasure equity trap tends to prioritize
other factors, including socioeconomic class,
as contributing to ones school performance.
Teachers in McKenzie and Scheurichs
(2004) study indicated that a students low
performance had little to do with race and
everything to do with economics or poverty.
The authors conclude that the racial erasure
or colorblind equity trap is a rhetorical
strategy to hide [individual] racism (p. 615)
and offer suggestions for eradicating the
racial erasure equity trap.
All four of the equity traps identified
by McKenzie and Scheurich (2004) and
outlined in Figure 1 (above) were evident in
this study. However, the first two equity
traps, deficit view and racial erasure
emerged with greater frequency than the
latter two equity traps in the data I collected.
As a result, I focus specifically on these two
traps to highlight the consequences of these
traps if they are not explicitly addressed in
the context of a teacher education program. I
next turn to a description of my research
methodology, including an account for data
collection and analyses.
Methodology
As a narrative inquiry study, I drew
on the work of Clandinin and Connelly
(2000) to explore how participants viewed
race, including their own Whiteness, as the
construct shaped their experiences as
beginning teachers for several reasons. I
found methods of narrative inquiry suitable
to my research aims because, as Chubbuck
(2004) notes, teaching is best understood
when contextualized in the identity of the
teacher in the context of the larger life story
rather than being reduced to specific
classroom behaviors (p. 312). Further, I
found narrative inquiry as particularly useful
in providing for a depth of complexity and
nuance necessary to work in service to
disrupt social and economic inequities.

Data Generation and Collection
For this project, I collected multiple
types of information to aid in data
triangulation: documents, interviews, and
observations (Creswell, 2007). To begin, I
interviewed 11 prospective teachers from a
variety of disciplinary backgrounds on three
occasions.
2
The semistructured interview
protocol encouraged participants to narrate
their schooling experiences and was flexible
enough to pursue individual story threads.
The protocol encouraged participants to
narrate their experiences in a teacher
education program advocating a
philosophical and pedagogical mission of
teaching for social justice through
multicultural teaching (Grant & Sleeter,
2007) and critical reflection (Zeichner &
Liston, 1996) (see Appendix A for protocol
questions). In addition to individual
interviews, seven participants took part in a
two-hour focus group interview. I audio-
recorded and transcribed all interviews.
Data Analyses
I began the analyses of preservice
teacher narratives by creating interim texts
(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). The interim
texts became amalgamated sites of different
genres (interview transcripts, field notes,
course assignments) on one canvass.
Creating the interim texts encompassed a
process of crafting a portrait out of the
words (spoken and written), stories, and
intent of the participants (Lawrence-
Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). One goal of the
interim text was to situate the participants in
the social, cultural, and personal contexts
out from which their histories appeared to
unfold as told (and retold) through select
stories. The interim text task enabled me to
condense, abbreviate, summarize, rearrange,
and reinterpret texts generated throughout
the length of the study.
I utilized both inductive and
deductive methods of reasoning.
Inductively, I labeled recurring themes and
equity traps from stories that were narrated
by the prospective teachers and from my
observations of participants narratives. For
instance, themes related to talking about
ones self as raced, classed, or gendered (or
not), attending to diversity in teaching and
learning settings (or not), and developing
cultural competencies emerged as categories
in initial coding (see Appendix B for
additional themes). Deductively, I connected
themes from the professional literature
related to White teachers talking about (or
avoiding talk about) race and McKenzie and
Scheurichs (2004) descriptions of equity
traps within the stories narrated by the
prospective teachers in this study.
Specifically, I employed McKenzie and
Scheurichs (2004) deficit views and
racial erasure as deductive categories for
analysis.
Context and Setting
At Great Lakes University (GLU),
approximately 85 percent of the student
body (over 30,000 students) identify as
White, 7 percent identify as Asian
American, 5 percent identify as African
American, 3 percent identify as Latino, and
about 1.5 percent of the total student body
identify as Native American. Out of 31
students in a course I taught on diversity, 29
students self-identified as White. Such
numbers are reflective of previous and
current cohort demographics in GLUs
elementary and secondary education
programs.
All participants grew up in the state
where GLU is located. According to the
U.S. Census (2010), nearly 90 percent of the
states 5 million inhabitants identify as
White, less than 7 percent identify as
African American or Black, just over 6
percent of the population identify as
Latino/a, and fewer than 3 percent of the
population identify as Asian. At the time of
this writing, at least one secondary school in
the state was the center of a controversy
regarding an un-named White parents
objection to her 17-year-old sons learning
about White privilege in a high school class
titled The American Dream (Starnes,
2013).
According to the U.S. Census
(2010), over 230,000 people populate the
city of Great Lakes, where the research was
conducted. Approximately 79 percent of the
city identify as white (U.S. Census, 2010).
In contrast to city demographics, the school
districts demographics provide a different
snapshot of the citys racial, ethnic, and
cultural diversity, as 50 percent of the
districts 25,000 students are White, 24
percent are African American, 15 percent
are Hispanic American, 10 percent are Asian
American, and 1 percent are Native
American (District Website, Introduction to
the District). Teachers of color account for
less than 10 percent of the districts teachers,
and district administrators are predominantly
White. Historically, students of color in the
district have struggled to receive equitable
teaching and learning experiences. In recent
times, addressing the graduation rates for
African American males (approximately 50
percent graduate) and Latinos (fewer than 60
percent graduate) and closing the racial
achievement gap between students of color
and their White and Asian counterparts has
become a focal point in the districts search
to hire a new superintendent.
Beginning in the fall of 2011,
another relevant situation one that had
been simmering for some time occurred on
campus that further helps to contextualize
this study. The controversy centered on
GLUs diversity initiatives and the
universitys holistic admissions approach. A
conservative think tank, the Center for Equal
Opportunity (CEO), released a report that
stated severe discrimination related to race
and ethnicity was occurring in the schools
admissions. Specifically, the CEO group
charged that White and Asian students were
discriminated against in the admissions
process, while African Americans and
Latino/as had a greater chance of being
admitted. While this public debate occurred
after the conclusion of this study, the
situation underscores the racial tension that
continues to permeate the social, cultural,
and institutional contexts in which data was
collected.
Participants
As for the 11 participants in this
study, 4 students grew up in mostly rural
contexts. Six of the participants grew up in
suburban settings, and one participant grew
up in the metropolitan city of Great Lakes.
Nine of the participants described their
elementary upbringing as predominantly
White in terms of their peers and teachers.
Few participants had a teacher or school
leader of color in their K-12 schooling
experience. All participants described their
schools curriculum as Eurocentric, and only
in high school did some participants
encounter classes focused on multiple
perspectives of issues of power and
privilege. Seven of the participants in the
study were enrolled in talented and gifted
programs or in advanced placement or
honors courses during their K-12 school.
Accordingly, this situation lessened their
likelihood of interacting with racial, cultural
and linguistic Others in their school.
I began collecting data for this study
in the spring of 2010 and continued data
collection through the summer, 2011. The
participants all were 21 to 24 years old, born
between 1986 and 1990. All were at the
same stage of GLUs two-year teacher
education program through the duration of
this study. I followed the participants
through their second (spring 2010), third
(fall 2010), and fourth/final (spring 2011)
semester of GLUs secondary teacher
education program. Students complete their
liberal studies and minor requirements
before applying to GLUs secondary teacher
education program and they progress
sequentially through the program in
consecutive semesters within one of two
cohorts (n!25-30).
Researchers Positions and Reflexivity
My own subjectivities as a
researcher play into the conclusions drawn
and limitations of this study. As an
instructor/supervisor to the participants, my
role as the researcher was not as one in
traditionally or clinically defined terms. It is
difficult for me to claim objectivity as the
researcher. In addition to my status as an
instructor, which I do believe tempered the
stories narrated by participants as much as
their perceptions of the studys audience(s),
other aspects of my identity and
socialization as a White, middle-class male
have conceivably limited, altered, and/or
constrained the interpretations I make.
Equity Traps in Preservice Teacher
Narratives
Deficit View Equity Trap
According to the deficit view equity
trap, students of color and students from low
socioeconomic backgrounds do not perform
as well as White, middle-class peers due to
inherent deficiencies related to their social,
cultural, and racial upbringings. The trap is
expressed in beliefs about students
improper language use, inappropriate
behaviors, and lack of motivation as factors
that contribute to a lack of success in
schooling. In addition to locating
deficiencies within individual students,
the view places blame on parents who do not
value education or who are unsupportive or
said to be uninterested in their childrens
school lives.
Miranda Heistand, a secondary
preservice mathematics teacher, attended a
predominantly White Catholic elementary
school. As an honors student in secondary
school, she had little interaction with
students of color in high school. The deficit
view equity trap emerges in her recollection
of an occurrence at the middle school where
she did her student teaching. Miranda
described the following scene,
[T]here was one [African American]
girl who was talking about how she
was going to get in a fight with this
other girl because she had to like
stand her ground which I dont
get at all. I was like, Why would
you fight? Like, Why? She was
like, Well, Im going to fight this
girl. Im gonna do it. Why would
you do that? I dont get it. I still
dont. Its one of those things I dont
get. And, maybe its because of her
upbringing, or where she grew up, or
who she the kinds of people she
was around when she grew up
around. But this sense that
everything can be solved through
fighting is something that I see a lot.
They are always talking about it.
And its probably over something
stupid, like a boy. Its just, I dont
get it.
Miranda begins by describing an individual
female student as having inappropriate
conflict resolution skills. However, by the
end of the anecdote, she has attributed the
unbecoming behavior to a group of
individuals (they), presumably African
American females, all of whom are always
talking about fighting. As Miranda stated,
she did not get it, that is, she did not get
the behavior of the student, but she did have
some ideas about where the student learned
such unseemly aggressive behavior.
Miranda attributed the students behaviors to
their upbringing, where she grew up,
and the kinds of people she was around. In
other words, Miranda perceived the
students misbehavior as emanating from the
students home life.
In a second example, Elaine
Merchant, a secondary English major who
attended K-12 schools in her predominantly
White suburban hometown, attributed
student behaviors at school as related to
students really rough home lives. Elaine
described the students in her practicum
placement at a Great Lakes high school as
predominantly people of color in a special
education core. In Elaines schooling
experiences, she had never witnessed
skirmishes in the hallway or a police
presence in her school. She explained, I
had never experienced a fight in the middle
of the hallway or numerous people being
arrested [in school]. However, at the high
school of her practicum, she said, I
experienced it numerous times throughout
the course I was there. Elaine explained
that such experiences had never happened
in her hometown, so witnessing such actions
and behaviors as a practicum student caused
dissonance. In her words,
I have never experienced that.
And so it just really opened my eyes
to the populations of people that I
was working with and the
backgrounds that they were coming
from and allowed me to kind of look
at that and say, Okay, this group of
students is kind of from a really
rough place. A lot of them are
coming from a really rough place
and from really rough home lives.
How am I going to make what I am
doing relevant to them?
In a new environment, Elaine focused on
individual student behavior as attributable to
students really rough home lives. Instead
of questioning the schools disciplinary
policies and procedures and in lieu of
inquiring into the effect of low teacher
expectations and zero-tolerance policies on
students who have been historically
marginalized (Christensen, 2012;Fuentes,
2012), Elaine ascribed students lack of
achievement to the really rough place[s] in
which the students grew up. Like Miranda,
Elaine located student deficiencies as
rooted in students social and cultural
backgrounds and communities.
In addition to positioning students as
having deficiencies related to their
behaviors, home lives, and language use,
while overlooking structural factors as
crucial to understandings of the achievement
of all students, several participants located
student achievement in school as correlated
to their parents involvement (or perceived
lack thereof) in their childrens educations.
Eric Van de Kamp, a secondary
preservice mathematics teacher from a rural,
predominantly White (K-6 Catholic grade
school) schooling background, described
what he saw as a general disengagement
from school in another example of the
deficit view equity trap. Eric related such
disengagement to the alignment of a
students and her/his parents attitudes and
levels of (dis)engagement. According to
Eric,
[S]ome of the parents who havent
received as much schooling, maybe
dont quite value it as much or see
the importance of it, and because
they are not directly paying for [their
childs education] they are
forgetting about like where that
money is actually coming from. And
it also allows them to be a little bit
less engaged with their childs
learning. And because there [are]
two disengaged people on education
in that household now, they are
going to come to school and they are
going to not be as willing to engage
in the learning.
For Eric, student success in school is
dependent upon factors related to their home
lives. According to Eric, parents who did
not value or see the importance of
education contributed to student
disengagement from school. This
disengagement was described as
compounding in a household where multiple
generations live together and uphold a
tradition of devaluing a free education.
Underlying Erics sentiment is his belief in a
meritocratic society where the maxim
equal opportunity for all is skewed by a
conviction that we all depart from the same
concourse or that we all embark from the
same port (McNamee & Miller, 2009).
In the final instance of the deficit
view equity trap examined here, Eric
attributes negative outcomes of a student of
color to an inescapable condition. Eric
illustrated this trap through the following
anecdote:
[T]here was a student of mine when I
was at [Great Lakes Middle School],
a young African American male,
[and] he moved from [another city]
because he was in a gang there. And
his mom obviously [did not] want
that kind of life for him, [so she]
moved him out and they both
came over here, and very quickly he
found a new gang. started right
where he left off. And yeah the mom
she wants good things for him, but
because they are in a way like
bringing their problems over
picking up and moving is not the
answer. You know, it may help, but,
its when you carry all of your
baggage with you youre carrying
all of your baggage with you.
The metaphor of carrying ones baggage
implicitly calls for an unpacking of sorts
regarding this illustrative story that Eric
told. Using a deficit lens, Eric refers to a
students baggage (e.g., gang affiliation)
as following the student wherever he moves.
An assets-based lens might instead identify
traits and characteristics of this student and
his mother in a more redeeming manner
(e.g., charisma, leadership potential,
intrapersonal skills). Further unpacking
Erics depiction of problems springing from,
or preceding from, a students social,
cultural, and racial origin, reveals an
underlying belief in endogenous or inherent
problems as braided into the DNA of
various cultural groups. Of course, such a
perspective is the result of uncritical, or
unmindful, consideration of the role that
antecedent historical conditions and
institutionalized forms of racism play in the
maintenance of contemporary inequities
(Schmidt, 2005).
Racial Erasure Equity Trap
A common (mis)conception in the
United States maintains that having elected
and re-elected an African American
president, the nation has moved beyond
race (and its legacy of racism) and entered
an era as a post-racial nation (Bonilla-
Silva, 2009). The stance holds that the
United States and its people have moved
beyond, or rather overcome, various forms
of racism, mostly conceived as individual
acts of hate to the exclusion of other forms
of racism, including cultural and
institutional. While comforting to many,
such beliefs must be examined and
interrupted given the social stratification that
continues to exist along racial and ethnic
lines in contemporary society. Examples of
the stratification can be observed in health
care and poverty statistics, arrest and
conviction rates, graduation and
employment rates, zero-tolerance
occurrences and repercussions,
overrepresentation of students of color in
special education and disproportionality of
students of color in talented and gifted
programs, and further exist in areas related
to residential housing and segregated
schooling (Gamoran, 2001; Green, 2010;
Lipman, 2004; Winn, 2010). In other words,
racism is embedded in social, cultural, and
economic practices and policies. People
refusing to see color as part of an effort to
forget about race (hooks, 1992) perpetuate
racism, even if this is not their intention.
As McKenzie and Scheurich (2004)
discovered, even when people profess to
erase race as a meaningful category
providing structure (or not) to their
interactions with others, they still refer to
race through subtle phrases or code words
that indicate that they do see race. To no
avail, assertions of color-blind or racial
erasure discourses attempt to hide racism.
Through silence(s), pretending not to see
consequential identity markers, and shifting
the conversation to socioeconomics, the
racial erasure equity trap serves the
interests of Whites, who benefit socially,
economically, and culturally from the un-
naming of race. Such views serve the
(White) self by perhaps freeing one from
guilt or responsibility, yet the same view
conveniently overlooks existing realities and
possibilities for collective action toward a
more justice-oriented society.
In the first instance of the racial
erasure equity trap, a preservice secondary
English teacher from a predominantly White
suburban K-12 schooling experience, David
Jones, held firmly to his beliefs in a
colorblind and meritocratic society. David
questioned whether race or skin color was
consequential or not: I always viewed it as:
Does the color of their skin really matter? Is
that just sort of an incidental thing? Deep
down, were all humans, so we should all be
treated as such. While many may read
Davids belief that ones race or skin color is
incidental as an insult, under the illusion
of a colorless society a society where
ones race has no bearing on interactions
with cultural Others such discourse is
both tolerated and presumed.
Davids poetic, were all humans,
can be seen as an attempt to erase race as
a factor in schooling and as a factor in his
daily performances (instructional style,
dress, gestures, expectations, reading and
writing assignments, and assessments) in
schools with students from diverse cultural,
ethnic, and racial backgrounds. Considering
himself a skeptic of the critical race theory
tenet that racism is a normative aspect, a
permanent fixture to life in America (Bell,
1992; Delgado, 2000; Solrzano & Yosso,
2009), David did not agree, despite claims to
the contrary, that there necessarily is that
deep-seated racism in the United States.
In the case of Miranda Heistand
(mathematics teacher introduced above), she
did not think about herself as having a race
until attending college at GLU. Living in a
predominantly White setting, race had been
erased from her upbringing through a silence
on and avoidance of the topic at home and in
schools. Miranda didnt see it [race] as an
issue at home, and stated, it wasnt
something you had to deal [with]. In this
view, race is something that people who are
not White have to deal with. While
Miranda was surrounded by friends and
family who were White, she did not perceive
her surroundings to be permeated with race.
According to Miranda, race
was hard to come into contact with. I
mean if we go into [urban center]
that makes sense but it was just
something that was not dealt with on
a daily basis. You know? If you dont
see it, you dont think about it kind of
thing.
Mirandas socialization in a predominantly
White setting led her to believe that race is
something that is dealt with on a daily
basis by colored Others, but that Whites
did not have to think about it because they
were not in possession of a race.
The racial erasure equity trap also
was visible in some of the experiences that
Miranda detailed from her experiences
working in diverse schools throughout GLU.
Miranda prefaced her story with a
disclaimer, I dont want this to come out
negatively, before continuing, but I think
sometimes [students of color] use [the race
card] when Im not ever trying to act in a
negative light toward them. Miranda
recalled instances while working with
students of color when the students felt
slighted for one reason or another by the
instruction or attention they were receiving
(or not) from the teacher.
The students in these instances
ascribed the perceived rebuffing as
attributable to their race. In response,
Miranda was quick to erase race as a factor
in the instance, telling the students, Its not
because its a racial thing, its because what
you are doing is wrong, and thats why I am
talking to you. When students in these
instances flip into a mode of raising the
issue of race, even though Miranda was not
intentionally paying attention to her own or
the students race as she interrupts
inappropriate behavior, Miranda stated, I
feel like you have to handle [such instances]
lightly. In other words, Miranda was in
favor of dismissing students claims of
unfairness as not legitimate because she was
not acting in a negative light toward them
or singling students out for their race, but for
their unsuitable behaviors.
Miranda stated that in situations
when students play the race card, she finds
it hard as a White teacher and conceded
that she was somewhat at a loss for things.
What made these situations so difficult for
Miranda? She explained, Because I cant
really, Im not an African American. I have
no idea what your life has been like or how
people treat you. I can guess at it, but not
having those experiences, I cant relate.
Growing up in a society in which she was
never made mindfully aware of her
racialized status as a White person, Miranda
was at a loss for how to empathize or
relate to her students of color, specifically
African American students, who it can be
presumed were made aware of their status as
raced early on in life. In the same way that
Miranda did not see it that is, race
growing up in a predominantly White
setting, she seemed unable or unwilling to
see that her expectations, beliefs about
behavior, and interactions with students and
staff continue to be saturated with race and
power.
Elaine Merchant (secondary English
teacher introduced above), echoes many of
the sentiments of Miranda as she narrates
interactions with racial Others that were
not at all in relation into race. Elaine
worked in a supervisory role in the
dormitories on the campus at GLU. During
her junior year, Elaine reported an African
American resident assistant (RA) to her
supervisor about an incident related to poor
work performance. Elaine stated that she
didnt necessarily get along with her
supervisee, but that this detail was not at all
in relation to race but more in relation to
how she performed her job. ...
Like Miranda, Elaine did not
categorize her expectations and assessments
of others behaviors or accomplishments as
having anything to do with race, yet the case
could be made that the situations actually
had everything to do with race. In both
Mirandas and Elaines narratives, they are
in positions of power as a result of many
centripetal forces, race being prominent
among the coagulants.
Elaine described the situation with the
African American RA as follows:
[I]t came down to me kind of
overseeing this whole series of
events, and me feeling like she
hadnt upheld there were
numerous individuals who hadnt
upheld their responsibilities in taking
part in these events and I then had
to report to my supervisor about,
okay, No these things werent done,
and these were the people that were
responsible for them. And so she
[the African American RA] sat me
down to have a conversation where
she felt like I had targeted her as a
result of her race. Which was
something that absolutely floored me
because it was never at all in
relation to her race.
In this instance, Elaine was absolutely
floored by the suggestion that race may
have played a factor in her targeting
someone for disciplinary action. That is,
Elaine was perplexed by the allegation that
race played a factor in reporting sub-par
performance. Due to the racial erasure
trap, Elaine maintained a colorblind stance,
which holds that individual interactions are
completely unstructured by socially
constructed categories including race. When
confronted by the African American RA
with her impression that she was unfairly
targeted due to her race, Elaine maintained
her belief that she was targeting
unacceptable behavior, and not the RAs
race. The racial erasure trap, thus, allows
individuals to perpetuate an outlook that
simplifies individual interactions by taking
race, and other social constructs, out of the
equation. Making race irrelevant, or at least
setting it aside when it becomes
inconvenient, serves to keep intact White
privilege and ultimately upholds White
supremacy.
Discussion
In this inquiry project, using a lens
that accounts for equity traps has revealed
some of the discursive ways that preservice
White teachers reinscribe or rearticulate
existing scripts that diminish the
significance or interrogation of Whiteness.
Through the deficit view equity trap,
students language, abilities, behaviors, and
family/home lives were conceived as
liabilities that resulted in lowered
expectations from the preservice White
teachers in this study. The deficit view
equity trap rendered students of color and
students from low socioeconomic
backgrounds as not performing as well as
White, middle-class peers due to deficits
related to their social, cultural, and racial
upbringings. Frequently, this trap allowed
preservice teachers to place blame on
students and their parents, all the while
concealing institutional factors, including
White supremacy, as contributing to the
plight of students of color and low-income
students.
Instead of attributing the designation
of African American students in a special
education core as the result of an
institutional fault or flaw, Elaine Merchant
situated her students predicament to the
students rough home lives. That is, while
Elaine could have questioned the schools
culture and its role in disproportionally
placing students of color in special
education classes, she chose instead to
blame the students cultures as leading to
their lack of access to a fair education.
The deficit view equity trap tripped
up Eric Van de Kamp when he located
gaps in achievement in family structures
and cultural baggage. For Eric, student
disengagement in school was compounded
at home, where students parents were also
disengaged from the process of schooling.
Instead of examining the structures and
institutions of school and society as out-of-
step with the needs of students of color and
low-income students, Eric found students
and parents conditions and expectations as
in conflict or incompatible with the
credibility of the school.
The racial erasure equity trap
captured discursive attempts to diminish the
importance of race by claiming some
variation of (a) were all members of the
human race, (b) everyone is equal, and (c) I
judge others by the content of their
character, not the color of their skin. Such
views obscure and trivialize lived
experiences and ignore and deny social,
economic, cultural, and historical facts that
speak to existence of oppression(s) then and
now. Contrary to the subtext of being
colorblind, race still matters (West, 2001). A
critical analysis of race, class, and gender
disrupts notions that the United States has
lived up to its promises or that there exists a
level playing field or common starting place
for all peoples in the country (Andersen &
Collins, 2010).
Despite Davids marginalization of
race as something incidental, for many
students of color, race is far from a
peripheral identity marker in terms of their
family, history, and culture. Further, race
also is important to Whites. Even if Whites
choose not to reflect on the histories of
oppressed groups, these histories exact
consequences on the descendants of both the
oppressed and the oppressors (Goodman,
2011).
When it comes to teaching, it is not
possible to avoid teaching or talking about
race, privilege, and power. Race is
embedded in the institution of schooling
from the construction and sustaining of the
building(s) and social networks to the
expectations, norms, values, standards,
and priorities emphasized in brick-and-
mortar and virtual schools. The seduction of
erasing race allows many well-intentioned
Whites to avoid the necessary dissonance
associated with having a role in the
maintenance of White supremacy.
Meaningful analyses of privilege, power,
and equity traps though destabilizing as it
may be for powerful groups cannot be
absent if the end goal is equity. In other
words, White preservice teachers should
have to deal with their Whiteness.
Whiteness is a space that Whites inhabit 100
percent of the time (Singleton & Linton,
2006).
Conclusion and Implications
In this research, I have examined the
stories of White preservice secondary
teachers as they articulated their experiences
and beliefs about learning to teach in
environments that differed widely (at least
demographically and culturally) from the
environments in which they were schooled.
By sharing valuable lessons that I have
gleaned from my analysis of preservice
teachers narratives, it is my hope that
conversations on equity traps and other
obstacles to achieving equity move others to
action beyond the four walls of the
classroom. In addition to discerning equity
traps from ones own and others vernacular,
it is important for teacher educators to offer
direction and counsel for problematizing
existing structures and our places within
them (Foss, 2002).
This narrative inquiry into the
experiences and understandings of
preservice secondary school teachers from a
predominantly White institution in the
Midwest holds several implications for
teacher educators. Central to the task of
unsettling the settled is working toward a
mass of teachers and preservice teachers in
various stages of developing and refining a
critical stance (Lewison, Leland, &
Harste, 2008). A critical stance is an
outlook, an attitude, a way to think, and a
way to teach (Pennycook, 1999). A critical
stance allows students and teachers to
question authority and to stand their
ground, to develop opinions that are
consistent with deeply held values, and,
when conscience requires it, to act against
consensus or the crowd (Kohl, 1995, p. 18).
Such a stance subverts the traditional model
of teacher-as-transmitter or disseminator of
knowledge, positioning practitioners as
learners and inquirers. A critical stance
requires interrogations into equity traps or
patterns of thinking that decelerate the
possibilities for equity in schooling.
It would be a fault to address,
through teaching and assessment, the skills
and abilities necessary for ones proficiency
as a teacher while disregarding the values
that we must be working toward as well
(democracy, justice, equity). Enacting such
values, programmatically and individually,
however, cannot be a comfortable space for
everyone at all times. The topics of privilege
and equity traps make many preservice
teachers (and teacher educators), particularly
Whites, uncomfortable and vulnerable
(Dozier, Johnston, & Rogers, 2006;
Leonardo & Porter, 2010). However,
individual growth is only possible if we
experience discomfort.
While the task of questioning ones
own privilege, equity traps, and role in
maintaining dominance is uneasy and
uncomfortable, all changes require one to
experience dissonance. This dissonance
should not be avoided, but rather attended
to. Indeed, if we do not experience
discomfort and many of the preservice
teachers we teach have always been
successful in doing school we can expect
our teachers to replicate the conditions under
which they thrived. If teachers are to go
against the status quo, we must equip them
with tools for recognizing and acting on
unfairness in its discrete and indiscrete
packaging.
To address the deficit view, teacher
educators must reframe preservice
teachers perspectives from a deficit-based
to an assets-based way of thinking about
students, parents, and communities of color
(McKenzie & Scheurich, 2004). Dignifying
students cultures by recognizing students
funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff,
Gonzalez, 1992) or abilities, ideas, and
strategies brought from home/community to
school is one way to validate and support
students. The neighborhood walk or home
visit strategy is one way for teachers to
establish rapport and get to know their
students and families on a deeper level.
Community oral history projects and even
three-way conferencing (teacher-parent-
student) have also been identified as
strategies for transforming the deficit view
equity trap (McKenzie & Scheurich, 2004).
It is important to be mindful, however, that
such practices, when done without critical
reflection, have a tendency to reinforce
existing stereotypes or beliefs, rather than
disrupting or challenging them.
In order to interrupt the racial
erasure equity trap, one strategy to shed
light on the ways that Whites view and talk
about racial Others is to create book study
groups that facilitate such conversations.
Another powerful tool for creating
conversation on the inequities within a
school or district relates to the equity audit
(Groenke, 2010; Skrla, Scheurich, Garcia, &
Nolly, 2004). An equity audit provides
school leaders and even future teachers the
means to disaggregate school data by race in
order to identify problematic areas and to
make plans for equalizing inequities. For
instance, through an equity audit, school
leaders are likely to find that students of
color are underrepresented in advanced
placement (AP) and honors track courses
and overrepresented in special education
when compared to their White peers
(Artiles, 2009; Waitoller, Artiles, & Cheney,
2010). As well, the audit may point out
inequities in terms of which students are
taught by the most- and least-experienced
teachers in the school. The cycle of the audit
analyze the data, discuss its meaning, and
devise solutions (McKenzie & Scheurich,
2004, p. 618) allows educators to focus on
the ways in which schools produce
inequities along racial boundaries and
invites teachers to see systemic inequities
and have a hand in dissolving them.
As Gomez, Allen, and Clinton
(2004) posit, [t]here are no recipes for how
one might replace an existing set of cultural
models and practices with other, better
ones (p. 487). However, teacher education
programs can explicitly outline and interrupt
discursive representations of equity traps in
large group settings. Examining a variety of
beliefs, values, and assumptions in a
reflective manner is one way for preservice
teachers to critically review and question the
ways in which particular worldviews enable
and constrain a more equitable and just
society
3
. Further, teacher education
programs must encourage the development
of critical perspectives through attunement
to institutional inequities resulting from the
intersections of privileged positions.

1
Having introduced the concepts of equity traps and privilege, I must exercise caution in order to avoid conflating
the two terms. The two terms appear to be intimately related and compatible with one another; that is, they are not
necessarily mutually exclusive. Specifically, privilege (acknowledged or not) appears to enable, foster, and
perpetuate equity traps. The inverse also appears to be true: equity traps maintain systems of privilege.
2
I first met each of the participants in this study through a 3-credit, 15-week course I taught during the spring of
2010. The class was focused on teaching diverse learners and consisted of 31 preservice secondary students from
each of the core subject areas (English, Math, Science, Social Studies) of the Great Lakes University (GLU)
secondary education program. Following the course, I recruited students in the class to participate in the narrative
inquiry project in which we met every three to four months over the course of their final semesters of student
teaching to discuss the role of Whiteness in relation to the encouragements and constraints of enacting multicultural
education, teaching for social justice, and equitable teaching practices.
3
I first met each of the participants in this study through a 3-credit, 15-week course I taught during the spring of
2010. The class was focused on teaching diverse learners and consisted of 31 preservice secondary students from
each of the core subject areas (English, Math, Science, Social Studies) of the Great Lakes University (GLU)
secondary education program. Following the course, I recruited students in the class to participate in the narrative
inquiry project in which we met every three to four months over the course of their final semesters of student
teaching to discuss the role of Whiteness in relation to the encouragements and constraints of enacting multicultural
education, teaching for social justice, and equitable teaching practices.

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Appendix A
Interview Protocol Questions

Interview 1: Background/Family
1. What were some important characteristics of your neighborhood(s) growing up?
2. If you were aware of your familys socioeconomic status, how were you aware of this?
3. What, if any, challenges did you or your family face with discrimination of any kind (racial,
ethnic, socioeconomic, gender, sexual orientation, etc.)?
4. Did you have friends or family members of other races growing up?
5. Who (or what) would you say has had an influence on you and your beliefs about race?
6. How would you define racism?
7. Sometimes people act in ways that are interpreted as racist. Have the ways you have acted
ever been interpreted as racist? Please describe.
8. When did you first realize you were White?
9. Can you remember a time when you were treated differently because of your Whiteness?
What happened?
10. As a child, were you exposed to situations where people from different social classes mixed?
Please explain the circumstances.
11. Growing up, how did your identity as a White, gendered person affect your relationships
with people from other races, genders, and/or social backgrounds?
12. How were you perceived by people in your community as a White person?
13. Do you think being White has made any difference in your life?
14. What are your thoughts on Affirmative Action?
15. Can you describe any relevant, salient, or critical moments from our class this past semester?
What were some important readings, conversations, activities, discussions, or disagreements
that you can recall? Why do think these things stand out?

Interview 2: Elementary, Middle, and Secondary Schooling

1. What were you like as a student? Describe your strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies.
2. How would you describe your peer makeup throughout schooling?
3. How would you describe the diversity of the students and teachers in your school district?
4. Did you ever observe teachers or students treating students of color as different from
White students?
5. Do recall being instructed in or learning about any languages other than English in your
schooling?
6. How were students who spoke other language(s) than English looked upon or treated?
7. Did you ever learn about or experience White privilege in school?
8. How did multiculturalism, or the promotion of understanding, appreciation, and
acceptance of cultural diversity, present itself in your schools curriculums? Please
describe the efforts made by your teachers and schools.
9. In what ways did you examine social justice, injustice, culture, and/or diversity in the
world or your community as a student in school?
10. Are there any other experiences from your schooling years that seem pertinent to this
study on Whiteness? Can you elaborate?

College Experience (Winter 2010/2011)
1. How have you experienced diversity on campus? Have your experiences been encouraged
or constrained?
2. Are you involved in any organizations or extra-curricular activities on campus? How are the
topics of race, privilege, or social justice discussed or talked about?
3. As a student at GLU, have you observed in dormitories, in classrooms, or on campus
instances of injustice that you would attribute to a persons race or class?
4. Describe any experiences in which your race or social class was given prominence or
emphasized as privileged.
5. How has your background as a White person impacted your experience as a college student
at GLU? Do you think you have benefitted from or been constrained in any way(s) due to
your Whiteness?
6. How would you describe your identity as a student at this university? How has this identity
developed over the past few years?

Interview 3: Teacher Education
1. How would you describe the evolution of your relationship(s) to your peers in your cohort?
In what ways do you consider yourself different from or similar to your peers?
2. In what ways have you developed an awareness as a prospective teacher who believes in
teaching for social justice?
3. How has your course work or field work influenced your thinking about social justice? Can
you elaborate upon what you mean or provide an example?
4. Have you witnessed schools or teachers interrupting injustice(s)? What have you observed in
schools related to social justice?
5. Think back to an experience as a tutor, practicum participant, or student teacher. Can you
describe a lesson or time in which you intentionally tried to impress upon students the
importance of cultural differences? Were you successful or not in terms of your intended
outcomes?
6. What experiences or critical moments have had the most significant impact on how you
think of yourself and your role as a multicultural, antiracist, socially just-minded
practitioner?
7. In what ways have you had to question your own experiences in terms of race and class
as a prospective teacher?
8. What does teaching for social justice mean to you? How does it play into (or not) your
future role as a teacher?
9. Do you think Whiteness, or any teachers race, plays a role in the methods a teacher uses to
teach a class, the curriculum, or his or her effectiveness with difference populations?
10. What have you learned about yourself and your Whiteness through your experiences in the
teacher education program?
11. How has participating in these interviews impacted your thinking about race and class, if at
all?

Appendix B

Table 1
Data Themes Generated
Time Data Collected Themes Generated
Spring 2010
(Jan.-May)
Course syllabus, lesson
plans, instructor field notes
Critical moments in class
Relationships among students
Initial impressions of individual participants

Summer
2010 (June-
August)
Course assignments
(Reading response papers,
teaching story, action
research project)
retroactively collected

Initial interviews conducted
with 11 participants from
various disciplinary
backgrounds (Math, Social
Studies, and English)
(focus: Personal
background)
Positionalities in terms of race, class, and gender
(Dis)agreement(s) with course readings
Biographical details

Characteristics of home community/ies
Academic accomplishments and academic literacies
Eye-opening experiences
Realizations of race and social class
Definitions of (individual) racism
Influential models for thinking about race, class, and
gender

Fall 2010
(Sept. Dec.)

3 observations of secondary
English teachers (collection
of lesson plans, reflections,
observation field notes)

Student teaching placement context
Lesson reflection themes
Patterns of classroom discourse
Teacher and student roles in classroom

Spring 2011
(Jan- May)
2nd round of interviews
conducted with each
participant (focus: K-12
schooling and college)

Comfort/discomfort in race dialogue
Identities as a student
Signature moves as a teacher
Family politics
Forced conversations on diversity


3 observations of secondary
English teachers (collection
of lesson plans, reflections,
observation field notes)

2-hour focus group meeting
with 7 participants

Critical literacy in lessons
Ideological and autonomous models of literacy
Ways of reading
Disrupting the Western Canon

Discourses on Whiteness (e.g., individualism, meritocratic
thinking, colorblindness)
Equity traps (e.g., racial erasure, deficit view)

Summer
2011
3rd round of interviews
conducted with each
participant (focus: Teacher
education program and
student teaching)
Struggles with learning to teach for social justice
Observations on social injustices in schools (e.g.,
disproportionality and overrepresentation of students of
color in special education)
Saying versus Doing social justice work
Critical teaching and learning incidents
Benefits/Constraints of Whiteness
Multicultural issues (e.g., multicultural awareness,
growing multiculturally)
Decision(s) to become a teacher

Signified Honkey: Stories In The Key of White

William Ryan Blosser, MA., Ed.S.
James Madison University

Abstract
In Signified Honkey, I invite the reader into my personal history as a
White emerging counselor and then provide a framework for thinking
about my experience. I have opted for an approach both personal and
interdisciplinary as a means of exploring White privilege. My approach
can best be identified as auto-ethnographic, and in using this approach I
have tried to discover and remain true to my own voice throughout the
narrative. The reader may find this voice to be sharp at times, including
profanity and a degree of mercilessness that Tony Hoagland refers to as
poetic or metaphysical meanness. I have chosen this approach as a way
to demonstrate my understanding of my personal journey through White
privilege and to contribute my voice to the conversations around racial
identity initiated and continued by previous academics and counselors
both White and of color. My hope is that after having read my paper,
you, the reader, will have a perspective of how this White thinker and
professional approaches his life and work based on the study of White
privilege, and that White readers will be challenged to go beyond the
identity models when thinking about their own history and life.
The audience for this piece would be graduate students and
professionals who have already been exposed to fundamentals of White
privilege and professors seeking ways of integrating the White privilege
discussion into various graduate training programs.

After a semester studying creative writing at the University of Hawaii,
Ryan moved to the East Coast where he began training in Clinical
Mental Health Counseling and received his MA., Ed.S. in 2010 from
James Madison University. He currently works as a staff counselor at
the counseling center at James Madison University.
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Understanding and Dismantling Privilege Blosser: Signified Honkey
Introduction
Meanness, the very thing which is
unforgivable in human social life, in poetry
is thrilling and valuable. Why? Because the
willingness to be offensive sets free the
ruthless observer in all of us, the spiteful
perceptive angel who sees and tells,
unimpeded by nicety or second thoughts.
There is truth-telling, and more, in
meanness.
Tony Hoagland (2003, p.13).
Intense introspection is a
mothafucker. It can creep up from behind
and smack you upside the head like a water
bottle at a Pistons game. Last September, in
fact, I was trying to recover from one of
those psychic hold-ups, you know, the kind
when the meaning youve planted your feet
on has just dropped out from under you. A
real Kierkegaard-I-stuck-my-finger-into-
existence-and-it-stunk-of-nothingness type
trip. Now, if youre anything like me, then
this recovery can be a bit of a painful
process, cause Im severely lacking in
mental bootstraps. And strapping myself up
is what I needed.
You see, as a result of a multicultural
counseling class during my training, I finally
began to view myself as a White person.
The discovery ground through the digestion
tract of my consciousness as though I were a
lifetime vegan who just glutted out on some
ill-prepared tripe. And, just when I thought
my free-falling identity might find itself
stuck in the abyss forever, I wandered into a
used bookstore.
Arent they all the same? Patchouli
choking, Miles playing, with a twenty-
something anorexic behind the counter with
dyed hair, rocking secretary porn star
glasses and talking UFO conspiracies with
an overweight, bearded, and barefoot
Viking, looking like he just stepped out of
Middle Earth.
Ignoring the obviousness of the
environs; I scooted into a random aisle and
scanned the shelf. Sitting next to a tattered
copy of The White Boy Shuffle by Paul
Beatty, was a copy of Memoir of a Race
Traitor by Mab Segrest. Being firmly aware
of the general belief in the field that
counselors who examine their racial
privilege and the active role it plays in the
therapeutic relationship are less likely to rely
on racial stereotypes and impose their own
ethnocentric values, I thought the book
might be a valuable resource (Neville,
Worthington, & Spanierman, 2001). Really
though, I was drawn to the John Brown
posturing of the title, so I bought it.
Needless to say, the book and the
dumbstruck experience of racial awareness
inspired me. For me, this awareness has
been a 20-year becoming, an emerging
perspective on self that was launched into
warp speed by the evolutionary slingshot of
a counselor training program. What follows
is my account of a journey through my own
Whiteness blended with some thoughts and
ideas of other thinkers on what it means to
be White and become aware of ones own
privilege. The trick will be communicating
my experience and my thoughts in a
cohesive manner without sacrificing much
of the spirit of my journey to academic
niceties.
But few, if any, want to get their
hands dirty these days, and it costs
us. Consider, just for an example,
the subject matter of race in
America. Why hasnt racial anxiety,
shame and hatredsuch a large
presence in American lifebeen
more a theme in poetry by
Caucasian-Americans? The answer
might be that Empathy is profoundly
inadequate as a strategy to some
subjects. To really get at the subject
of race, chances are, its going to
require some unattractive, tricky
self-expression, something adequate
to the paradoxical complexities of
privilege, shame and resentment. To
speak in a voice equal to reality in
this case will mean the loss of
observer-immunity-status, will mean
admitting that one is not on the
sidelines of our racial realities, but
actually in the tangled middle of
them, in very personal ways
(Hoagland, 2003, p.14).
Like Hoagland, Im after unattractive
and tricky self-expression. Therefore the
voice and tone of this project will be as
equal as I can make it to my experience of
reality; the effort will be at removing me
from observer-immunity status.
I hope that through this account I
may add to the conversations taking place
around White privilege and assist other
White helpers (and those seeking to
understand us) to grapple with the madness
of the funhouse some of us find ourselves in
when faced with the reality of our own
privilege.

Honkey See Honkey Do
I am staring at a white word
document-blank and trying to put as many
black letters on it as I can. This is what
white meant to me before I understood what
it meant to be White. White was a blank
slate to fill with the other. In the eighth
grade, I hadnt read Mailer, The Beats
(minus Amiri Baraka), or the other White
cultural theorists trying to provide elegantly
worded excuses for White folks trying to
steal Black culture. Back then, the term was
simply Wigger; and thats how I identified.
I was trying to put as much black over me as
possible; I was pretty fly for a White guy;
aka a wannabe. Through basketball, I
gained access to Black culture and, from the
moment I got my first taste, I was hooked.
I wanted to be Black, or at least the
Black stereotype that I had internalized. I
wanted the music, the style, the walk, the
talk, etc. Thus began a deliberate and
focused effort to construct my adolescent
identity based on Black stereotypes. I was a
Wigger by choice and wore the marks with
pride.
Fortunately, I ended up being pretty
good at basketball, which made the cultural
shift easier for me than many other White
kids. The story smacks of embarrassment
when I have to admit this. Basketball was
my in, my access to the Black community of
my town and I exploited this fiercely.
Like some starry-eyed
anthropologist, I got myself invited to
Thanksgiving dinners, to church, watched
Aunt Birdie catch the holy spirit, listened to
lectures on the historical and dietary
importance of collards. I loved every
minute of the experience. Be it eager youth
or sheer persistence, somehow, I wasnt seen
as a threat like most of the White people in
town at least not yet.
Throughout this experience I came to
identify myself through the Black
community as a White boy. Which is to say
I had a pass, I was accepted; White boy
being a term of endearment signifying me as
not so different as to be unfamiliar. I was
the down-ass White boy, I was cool. I even
learned to hate White people like many of
my friends.
Like when I got my license I became
the taxi for my crew. On the way to play
ball every day we would drive by the golf
course and shout out the window while
some old man was in his back swing, Fuck
you, White people!
Years of this trajectory set the stage
for what would prove to be a significant
blow to my identity. The summer between
my junior and senior year, I was invited by
my hero Cory Alexander, who at the time
played for the San Antonio Spurs, along
with a couple of my friends, to work a
basketball camp for at-risk youth in
Richmond, Virginia. I arrived at camp
excited and ready to soak up the urban
experience from the distance and immunity
my all-state talent afforded me. I had
reached a point in the social life of my town
where I didnt have to put so much effort
into identity presentation. I made it. I was
accepted by the Black community and even
had extra pull due to my status as a Division
I recruit. I was the cool White boy who got
game.
In the beginning of basketball camp,
most camp coordinators like to open the
week by introducing the staff to the
campers. This is a time when introductions
are accompanied by a lot of hype from the
presenter (in this case it was Cory) and are
met by campers with applause, enthusiasm,
and excitement.
At an early age I developed the habit
of counting the White people in the room. I
took pride in being the only White boy and
if another was present, I would size him up.
I would think. Imposter, poseur, if a fight
breaks out Im gonna fuck that White boy
up. I viewed White people as a threat to
my own authenticity and felt relieved on this
day to find myself once again the only
White person in the room.
On this particular day, Cory cruised
through the introductions with the expected
hype and a very enthusiastic crowd. When it
came time for Cory to introduce me he did
so with flair, hyped me up, and I walked out
in front of the campers to bask in this
acceptance, to soak up the experience of
having a camp full of young Richmond City
Black youth captivated in awe by my talent
and general presence. In the split second
between when the introduction was finished
and applause usually erupted, I spanned the
audience and thats when my eyes met a
little 6-year-old named Na Na.
The moment our eyes met, Na Nas
face turned to a big smile and he shouted:
Check out this honkey yo. The campers
erupted in laughter; some were indeed
rolling on the floor. I expected Cory to stop
this and so I looked in his direction and he
was doubled over laughing, too. I then
looked to my friends for some sort of rescue
or sympathy and they were laughing.
There I stood, signified honkey,
being laughed at by everyone in the gym
I dont remember how I got out of
the moment. I probably slinked back to
where my friends stood. Throughout the
day they kept laughing and saying things
like: Bloss just got carried by a hood rat.
Not even years of intimate friendship could
fill the empty space I felt between them and
me.
The story ends on a darker note. At
lunch the first day of camp, I, using my
parents money, took my friends out on the
west side of Richmond while Na Na sat
eating free lunch provided through the free
lunch program with the city. The difference
struck me as appropriate. I could even sense
a whiff, a hint of resentment deep in my
psyche towards both my friends and Na Na.
Now, after articulating this
sentiment, it takes no large leap for me to
view the action of buying lunch for my
friends as the expression of this resentment.
At the time I just thought, Na Na should be
so lucky to find a rich honkey to take care of
him. I tucked the thought deep into my
soul as quickly as it bubbled up and spent
the rest of the week nursing my cracked
identity and trying to forget that word
honkey.
I have not forgotten the word or the
experience. The memory has since taken on
a much larger meaning to my development.
The story of how I came to be called a
honkey is in fact an entry point into
understanding who I am and what it means
to be White and privileged. Spurred on by
the recognition of my personal meaning tied
up in the word honkey and a yearning to
become comfortable with my emerging
identity, I went searching for a way to name
the experience.
Clarence Major (1994) in his book
From Juba to Jive, A Dictionary of African-
American Slang defines honkey as deriving
from the West African Wolof word honq,
meaning a pink man or woman; it is a
derisive term used to identify a White
person. Through Na Nas choice of word, he
was carrying on a verbal tradition going
back more than 500 years to preAmerican
slavery West Africa. Na Na was also
participating in another tradition, the art of
signifyin. There are probably as many
definitions to the word signifyin as there are
writers who write about it. Majors
dictionary defines signifyin as
Performance talk; to berate someone; to
censure in twelve or fewer statements;
speaking ironically (Major, 1994).
Daryll Dickson-Carr (2000) in his
book on African American satire titled:
African American Satire: The Sacredly
Profane Novel, describes signifying as
verbal behavior used in African American
vernacular communities to describe verbal
jousting, consisting of insults and trickery
used to create a critique of a person, idea, or
object.
When viewing my experience
through this lens not only was Na Na
identifying me as an imposter via
vocabulary, he was also twisting the act of
signifiyin on its head. While for me the
situation may have felt ironic, Na Nas
invective needed no ironic encoding or
persuasion. Signifyin? No sir. I was
signified. In doing so, Na Na managed to
identify me as outsider not only in language
but in tradition and technique as well.
Assimilation Happens
And all the girlies say, Im pretty fly for a
white guy.
The Offspring
I was born White to a mom and dad
who paid lip service to the civil rights
movement of the 60s from the comfort of
their dorm rooms and went on to receive
advanced degrees in human service fields.
They then moved to Charlottesville,
Virginia, bought a Volvo, joined the
Unitarian Church, and decided to have kids.
From there, my life can be read like a movie
script written for one of the Osmonds by a
Jimmy Carter speech writer. My childhood
was spent being serenaded by Harry Chapin
and Jim Croce, playing neighborhood
soccer, eating green onions over sea bass,
and having family game night where we
laughed for hours over an edgy game of
Chutes and Ladders. When I was nine, the
family moved to a small working-class
suburb in Virginia. Soon, I gave up soccer
for basketball and everything changed.
Writing about his own childhood in a
segregated town in 1950s New Jersey,
professional counselor Mark Kiselica (1999)
noted that Black and White children rarely
mixed, except on the basketball court, where
sporting events brought the town together
for superficial contact. My home town fit
Kiselicas description, despite integration 30
years earlier. After school, Id leave the all-
White public school of the country club
neighborhood to go to the YMCA and
experience integration for the first time.
When my world was integrated it
went something like this:
May I please play?
Fuck you talkin bout?
Can I play?
Sitcha ass down.
Of course I sat down, and everyone
started laughing. Damn dude, you a bitch.
You gonna do everything I say?
Thus began my adolescence and
maneuvering of a cultural landscape I had
previously never known existed. Within a
year the differences melted away into jump
shots and a local version of the dozens
fondly remembered as holdin up the
porch or jonin.
You get to know people well when
you spend five hours a day with them, and
hey assimilation happens. My parents
did what they could to prevent me from
forgetting all of the straight English Id
learned. But soon, basketball increasingly
took over my life; I chose to refuse to put
band on my school schedule and dropped
both Latin and geometry. The high school
didnt know what to do with a country club
kid who didnt want to pad his college
application with meaningless
extracurriculars and AP courses. As a
result, the only classes available to me were
all remedial. Suddenly I found myself in
classes with kids from neighborhoods with
nicknames like The Hill, The
Quadrangle, Philipines, and
Maupintown.
The remedial track granted me even
more pull in the black community, although
it was a status that created a great deal of
inner turmoil. In Paul Beattys (2000)
novel, Tuff, there is a White character
surrounded by a cast of Black characters.
Beatty illustrates this characters position in
the following passage:
Charles Whitey OKoren was an
American anachronism, the last of a
dying breed: the native, destitute,
inner-city white ethnic. It was the
neighbors who revived the old
Anglo-American sobriquet and
dubbed the boy Whitey. Whenever
a stranger asked Charles whether he
found the ethnic blatancy of his
nickname a hindrance, the hard-
hearted, freckled boy of nineteen
replied, It makes me no
nevermind. In private he preferred
to be called C-Ice or Charley O.
(pp. 52-53)
When I was first told that I had a
Hill pass granting me immunity in the
black neighborhood, I felt like a small-town
version of Whitey. And like Whitey, it was
the old heads or old-timers that greeted
me with the sting of condescension.
Around the same time I got my Hill
pass, my parents gave up fighting my social
transformation and the breezy middle-class
liberalism they had inherited from residual
hippy sensibilities left over from their own
cultural revolution and eventually turned our
home into what on the surface seemed to be
a suburban center for racial harmony,
despite the frustrations of our neighbors and
the harassment of our citys finest.
One summer between my freshman
and sophomore year, I met Matt Williams.
Matt was the only other youngn at the
YMCA evening open gyms and Matt is
Black. In addition, Matt was not from my
town. Matt grew up on the streets of D.C.,
where he lived with his mom and spent
summers in town with his dad. Being from
out of town and my age, Matt overlooked
the dark potentials my skin color might
mean and we became close friends. This
friendship set the stage for my first real-time
experience with flagrant old-school racism;
a racism with the nobility to drop all
subtlety, though the power to cause great
pain.
Soon we were spending every
minute together. One night Id spend the
night at Matts house where we would drink
Sunny Delight and eat microwaved
miniature hot dogs bought pre-packaged in
bulk 40 at a time. The next night wed
spend the night at my house and drink fresh-
squeezed orange juice and eat grilled steak
with asparagus something-or-other. Matty
often tried to tell me that White folks
cooking was bad for his digestion.
One day we managed to find a ride
home from the Y for lunch and an afternoon
swim before heading back for open gym.
When we arrived at my house, sitting in the
driveway was my mothers mother, Grace.
At an early age I picked up on the
tension between my dad and Grandma
Grace. Add to it the myth that grandma
hated men and this was one woman that I
just didnt feel like being in the same room
with. She was nurturing like the praying
mantis that eats the weak offspring so the
others can thrive its nurturing. She is the
pink Cadillac the MaryKay lady wins for
selling more products in a month than any
other employee only to find out the Cadillac
needs new tires and wont start when its too
cold. She had a scary old lady grump face
and liked to save her scowl for me.
On this day, Matty and I were
unusually hungry and we hopped out of the
vehicle to run into the house before the full-
on blood sugar crash. I knew Grandma was
home because of her old maroon Reliant K
car, smelling of Red Door perfume and
parked in the driveway. As I approached the
door I saw the curtain in the window close
quickly. When Matty and I stepped into the
house, it was silent and still. We went
straight to the fridge and scarfed down pizza
left over from the night before. After
finishing off the pizza, we drank about a
gallon of orange juice and then decided to
go swimming. At this point there was still
no sign of life at the house with the
exception of the family golden retriever
outside barking.
After the swim, we came into the
house and I went upstairs to get a change of
clothes for Matt and myself before heading
back to the Y for more workouts. Still a
little confused about where Grandma and
my sisters might be, but not really putting
any effort into worrying about it, I tried to
open the door to my parents room to see if
Mom had finished the laundry to be put
away. The door was locked. When I
knocked on the door, nothing happened.
Curious about why Mom and Dads
bedroom door was locked in a house that
didnt even lock the front door and thinking
that it might have been a mistake I got a
clothes hanger from my closet and jimmied
opened the door.
When I pushed the door open it felt
heavy and I was able to get my head in the
door. On the other side was Grandma Grace
leaning with her ear stuck flat to the door.
Our eyes connected and her first question
was; Who is that boy? I ignored Grandma
and asked my sisters what they were doing
in the bedroom. In unison they stated:
Grandma made us.
At first I shook this behavior off as
more eccentric old lady stuff. Matty and I
changed our clothes and I yelled upstairs
that I was going back to the Y to work out
and would be home by 9:30 that evening.
At this announcement I heard a door open
and shut and little feet rush down the steps
knocking off pictures on the wall and
knocking over a bell on the table in the
Hallway. Grandma Grace reached us out of
breath and with a look of terror in her eyes.
Holding one finger out and propping herself
up with the other hand on her knee we
waited for a full minute for her to catch her
breath.
When she was finally able to make a
sound, she shouted for us both to stop right
there. Which of course we didnt have to
do, seeing as how we were already standing
there staring at her to make sure she wasnt
going to pass out. She then proceeded to
make Matt empty out each of his pockets
and turn them inside out before we could
leave for the Y. I told Matt he didnt have to
do it, but Matt did anyway.
That was the first time it dawned on
me what the look of anger and
embarrassment in a Black persons eye
might mean. The gesture triggered
something dark and violent in me and I
flipped out. I threw an explosive tantrum
crashing through the house breaking the
nearest things I could find. This, of course,
validated all of my grandmothers fears but I
didnt care. I was embarrassed and pissed
off. The tantrum ended with me using my
size to physically intimidate Grandma out of
the door of our house and into her car. I
screamed at her before going back to the Y
that she was never allowed back into our
house again.
Mom and Dad came home that
afternoon from work to a mess. I dont
know if Grandma was there or not, I stayed
at the Y until closing and then spent the
night at Mattys house. When I got home
the next day, Grandma was gone and my
parents were furious. I didnt care and tried
punishing Mom and Dad with silence for
tolerating this behavior. Being a teenager,
my every attempt to contextualize her
worldview didnt work. I wrote her out of
my life forever. And for the next couple of
years if she came over to the house, I either
stayed far away or made sure to roll up to
my house deep with a crew of friends to
terrorize her.
A few years later, my grandmother
out of the blue called Mom up and asked if
she could come see me play basketball. It
turns out we were playing a game near her
town and she came to watch us play. She
had a great time cheering for us. While I
know better than to think that her racism
was cured, in fact it could have just been
reinforced, she also got excited to see Matt
and a third member of my close friends,
J.R., on the court.
Grandma soon became a huge fan of
us and when our games were written up in
other nearby print, she would clip them out
and save them. After one game in
Lynchburg, Grandma insisted we come over
for a late dinner. I agreed to come over for a
couple of minutes but when we got to the
house she grabbed Matt and J.R. by the arm
and escorted them into the house. We sat
around the table that night while Grandma
cooked for us. Matt acted like the
humiliation three years before never
happened, and when it came time to leave,
Grandma gave all three of us a hug. She
then asked Matt if she could call him Dark
Chocolate and dubbed J.R. Milk Chocolate.
While I wanted to cringe at this
oblivious old woman disrespecting my
closest friends in the world, it was known by
all of us that this was a huge turning point
for her. And Matt and J.R. handled her shift
from anger and fear to curiosity and
condescension with grace and forgiveness.
After the dinner, she would seek Matt and
J.R. out when she came to the house.
Grandma Graces shift didnt stop here; she
joined a church committee that started
organizing fellowship socials meant to
create a bridge between her all-White church
and traditionally Black churches. Grandma
even went out and bought a church
crownonce again meaning well, but in
her curiosity and enthusiasm reducing the
Black experience to a stereotype: Black
church ladies in big hats. In Black culture,
Grandma found a bridge to connect with me.
As Im writing this my fingers are
shaking over the keyboard; knuckles white
with tension. How sick and fucked up and
condescendingly beautiful it is that my racist
grandmother found in Black culture a way to
connect and heal the broken relationship she
had with her grandson. And how
inappropriate and embarrassing to realize
that in doing so, Grandma and I turned my
best friends into some twisted version of
magic Negroes. Whats worse to realize is
that my whole life Ive been guilty of the
same curiosity and enthusiasm, the same
exotic otherness that defined Grandmas
shift.
There are many questions and levels
to examine about the above anecdote. For
now, Id like to continue to position my
personal narrative as a lightning rod for
racial confrontation and volatility. Of the
many anecdotes to pull from, the previous
demonstrates that well. There is one episode
however that has left a lasting impression on
my life, my relationship to my wifes family
(and my wife), and my experience around
people of color.
The story ends with a marriage, so
relax; its got a happy ending. Joy and I
were married in a blur of festivities,
excitement, and drama. For our wedding we
were attempting to integrate wealthy White
Long Island Catholics with working-class
Black Baptists with suburban middle-class
White Lutherans with Southern White, rural,
and poor Methodists. A couple of kegs were
added just in case things already werent
interesting enough, and for the most part we
pulled it offwith one huge exception.
Two days before our wedding, Joys
family threw a party for us out in the
country. Naturally everyone in the wedding
party was invited and the party began low
key and fun. As the evening progressed so
did the drinking and folks whom neither Joy
nor I knew were showing up to the party.
It didnt take long before tensions
spilled out in conversation and after a couple
of racially charged comments were made, a
friend of a member of Joys family
addressed J.R., a Black member of the
wedding party as boy and threatened to go
get his shotgun. My tensions escalated by
the guilt I was experiencing for putting my
friends yet again in a situation where they
would feel the flagrant sting of racism and
the fear I was experiencing around the
memory of my college teammate being shot
in a Baltimore bar by a White boy from the
county just eight months before, I asked
everybody to get in their cars in order to
avoid a fight.
I then exploded at Joys family with
a verbal tirade of accusation and poorly
aimed comments about meth-addled
toothless hillbillies. The tantrum ended with
me in a scene perfect for a comic book.
Drunk on Hennessey and adrenaline, I stood
in front of the bonfire, ripping the shirt from
my chest like some pasty pathetic hulk and
declared as loud as I possibly could to my
wifes family, soon to be my family,
Youre all fucking racist rednecks.
We left without a fight, but the next
day Joys family came to my parents house
to announce that they were boycotting the
wedding because of the damage I might
cause some of the other family members
with my slander. The logic around the
boycott was that many of them own
working-class businesses and if people
found out that I accused them of being
racist, then none of the Mexicans would
work for them. Thats not a joke; by the
way, this was actually presented to me in
this manner.
That night I wrote an apology letter
to the family connecting the threat of the
shotgun to the event of my teammate being
shot. The letter worked, and Joys family
decided it would be safe to participate in our
wedding.
The wedding went smoothly and all
seemed to enjoy themselves. I could still
sense the tension at the reception, though I
possessed neither the wisdom nor self-
awareness to understand it. Nor had I
considered the emotional toll all of this
might have taken on my Black friends.
Towards the end of the reception, after most
of the people had left, somehow an
argument erupted between Joy (remember
we were married only hours before) and J.R.
(the target of the shotgun threat). Pissed off
over the racial drama of the week and
feeling guilty, angry, and pressure to take
my wifes side, I blew up at J.R.
We traded blows before being
broken up. A couple of days later, Joy and I
flew to Hawaii to start a new life. I havent
seen or spoken to J.R. since. I was married
nine years ago this month. I cant find any
other way to think about this event than to
view it through the lens of my own
privilege. Ive shifted from hating him for
creating trouble on my wedding day to
wanting to apologize to him and having to
accept that I may never get the chance.

Welcome to the Panopticon
Earlier in the paper, I mentioned
briefly the deflating experience of engaging
the White privilege material for the first
time in a multicultural counseling class. In
many of the previous anecdotes, I have
written myself into the hero role, the savior
out to fight or convert any racists I sense on
the horizon. This held true the first day of
class when I sat among my cohort feeling
superior because I knew that I had
multicultural clout.
In fact, I had the gall to compare my
own personal narrative around race to the
story of the poet Gary Snyder when he was a
young anthropology student at Reed College
and attempted to join the spiritual tradition
of the Hopi tribe he was studying. The story
goes that the Hopis rejected Gary because he
was White. Gary, feeling frustrated with
this rejection, fled the United States and
joined a Buddhist monastery in Japan where
he studied Buddhism for seven years before
returning.
As I shared the story, the professor
eyed me with what I interpreted then as
suspicion. Now, the memory of the
professors expression has softened into a
gentle and worried look. I believe that she
was seeing my blind spot and witnessing my
own obliviousness to racial grandiosity. Its
a grandiosity that can be read throughout the
first two sections of this paper in my
personal episodes. Its the grandiosity that
puts me as the central character in a racial
conflict out to smash racism wherever I find
it, while also being ignorant of my own
racist transgressions.
Shannon Sullivan (2006), in her
book Revealing Whiteness, describes this
grandiosity as ontological expansiveness.
She defines the expansiveness as a
relationship between self and the
environment in which the self assumes that
it can and should have complete mastery of
its environment. Sullivan develops the idea
in the following passage.
To be a white person means that one
tends to assume that all cultural and
social spaces are potentially
available for one to inhabit. The
habit of ontological expansiveness
enables white people to maximize the
extent of the world in which they
transact. But as an instance of white
solipsism, it also severely limits their
ability to treat others in respectful
ways. Instead of acknowledging
others particular interests, needs,
and projects, white people who are
ontologically expansive tend to
recognize only their own, and their
expansiveness is at the same time a
limitation (p. 25)
Slowly the material and the very idea
of White privilege grabbed onto my psyche.
The experience and paper for that matter can
best be described as an attempt to define or
better yet to identify. As I dug deeper into
the literature, definition after definition
bubbled up into my consciousness.
To be white means to be
insensitive to the possibilities for
oppression within ones self,
therefore out-of-touch, for
opportunistic reasons, with who one
is and who others are. If white
meant all-inclusive, like white the
color of light containing all colors,
then white would be a term of love
and life. But the white I am
talking about is a whiteness of
exclusion, an absence of color, an
absence of responsibility and self-
awareness. Whiteness is a death
trip. And the attempt to break out of
it is an attempt to gain life. (Eakins,
1996, p. 88)
This particular passage blew me away, what
with the whole Whiteness is a death trip
rhetoric. Was this the self-loathing Ive
been experiencing most of my adolescence
and young adult life? At this point I started
to understand myself not through who I was,
but rather through who I wasnt. I wasnt
Black, but I certainly wasnt White. And
right on cue, I discovered Tim Wise (2008)
and he had a thought to offer up on my
thought process around racial privilege.
To define yourself, ultimately, by
what youre not, is a pathetic and
heartbreaking thing. It is to stand
denuded before a culture that has
stolen your birthright, or rather,
convinced you to give it up. And the
costs are formidable, beginning with
the emptiness whites so often feel
when confronted by multiculturalism
and the connectedness of people of
color to their various heritages.
That emptiness then gets filled up by
the privileges and ultimately forces
us to become dependent on them.
(p. 171)
I wasnt empty, was I? Is this what I really
meant when I so proudly proclaimed to be a
cultural orphan because of my own drab
interpretation of my White heritage?
Furthermore what does this mean for me as
a professional helper?
My definition of what it means to be
White took on an evolutionary trajectory
that, if graphed, might serve as a great
model for the latest design of a thrilling
theme park ride. Simply put, I was existing,
and to some extent continue to exist, in a
state of racial crisis.
The material and my own fear that I
have been acting out a racist script on
autopilot for two decades launched me into a
chaotic state. And remembering that both
neurosis and creativity are attempts to solve
the same problem, I understood that I would
fluctuate from neurotic to creative states.
However, I wanted to take the Creative path.
I want to make something new from the
situation. And so, much like before, I set
out to name the experience of my own
personal crisis (Echterling, Presbury, &
McKee, 2005).
This part of the journey led to, of
course, the White racial identity models.
The common goals of White racial identity
models include acceptance of and
appreciation for diversity, greater interracial
comfort, openness to racial concerns,
awareness of one's personal responsibility
for racism, and an evolving nonracist
identity (Parker, Moore, & Neimeyer, 1998).
Seeing these goals as noble, I sought to
position myself within a model in hopes of
becoming clearer as to where I was and
where I wanted to be.
The model that at first glance seemed
to work the best for me was Helmss (1993)
White identity model. White racial identity
statuses described by Helms are Contact,
Disintegration, Reintegration, Pseudo-
Independence, Immersion/Emersion, and
Autonomy.
For me, and I suspect for many
White helpers, encountering this material in
a counselor training program changes the
game a bit. It is no longer about positioning
oneself on Helmss developmental model.
Its this objective and cool, detached
approach to understanding myself on which
I have spent so much of my life relying. In
fact, most likely I would be tempted to place
myself either on the full-on autonomous side
of the model or place myself in a step in the
model that implied I was not racially aware
of self. This is performed with the explicit
function of winning the hearts of those with
whom I might be at the time. And yes, this
is greatly influenced by the racial profile of
the other people in the room.
Thinking on this, I experienced a
pull of paranoia. In trying to present myself
as if I was in a certain stage, yet also trying
to be honest with myself, a dissonance
developed. Every movement and every
thought spoken was first passed through a
filter before being acted on. I felt as though
I was in jail, being watched by a thousand
jailers at every angle waiting for me to make
a mistake.
And then there was French theorist
Michelle Foucault (1984). I went
investigating further a word that stuck out
from his writings: panopticism, which is the
panoptic modality of power. Foucault
describes panopticism as a technique of
power created to make it possible to bring
the effects of power to the most minute and
distant elements. Foucaults work on
panopticism stems from a much earlier idea
known as the panopticon.
Panopticon is a plan of management
using construction first developed by Jeremy
Bentham in 1787. The panopticon was
proposed to be used with any houses where
inspection is required. These include:
prison, houses of industry, work-houses,
poor-houses, mad houses, and schools.
The panopticon was designed as a
sphere with the inspection house in the
center with the area reserved for the
prisoners on the grounds inside the sphere
below. The idea was that the workers,
prisoners, or patients would not know when
the inspectors were watching, but would
know that at anytime and from any angle
they could be watched. This type of system
created an experience of paranoia and
anxiety in many of the prisoners.
The panopticon is a concept that I
felt immediately; more so than Helms
identity models. I am stuck in a liminal
space, a space where I have to make the
creative choice or the fear choice. This
betwixt and between is the meta-experience
of mind placing itself smack in the middle of
the idea; the emotional expression of the
Oroboros where the snake eats its own tail.
It is the obstacle the White person must
overcome in order to be a competent
multicultural counselor.
The panopticon of privilege is the
overwhelming attempt of the White helper
to wrestle with Sullivans paradox of
ontological expansiveness; the moment
when a decision is made to creatively strike
a new path or make the fear choice and
return to the homeostatic moment.

Chewing on a Worn Out Chuck Taylor:
Was that a micro aggression, or did you
just stick your foot in your mouth?
I do not think that this realization should
lead to despair, although it does snuff out
any Pollyannaish dreams of the easy
elimination of racism.
Shannon Sullivan
When I first named my experience
and understood it through the lens of the
panopticon, I was angry. I didnt need this
shit. It was as if I had been de-skilled. Prior
to taking the multicultural class and even
joining a counseling program, I thought that
I could coast by in multicultural settings on
the strength of my own history. Now
however there was something new to worry
about. My gigantic goddamned privilege.
At first there were obvious
ramifications. I had trouble sleeping and
whenever I found myself encountering a
person of color I would fall quiet. The
ridiculous and grandiose part of me that
views me as savior of Black folks reasoned
that I was protecting them from me. When I
really put some thought to it, the truth
around it was that I just didnt want to look
stupid. I didnt want to blow an image I
spent years trying to construct. Soon,
however, I started noticing mistakes I was
making.
A big one is the need to rewrite my
own history. The reader probably noticed
my puffed-up posturing and positioning as
anti-racist hero, converter of grumpy racist
grandmas. I will have to reconstruct this
narrative from a new perspective; one that
rather than denying my own privilege sets it
up front and center. This of course presents
a new problem, the paradox of privilege.
Sullivan (2006) writes that:
The very act of giving up (direct)
total control over ones habits can be
an attempt to take (indirect) total
control over them by dominating the
environment. The very act of
changing ones environment so as to
disrupt white privilege paradoxically
can be a disruption that only
reinforces that which it disrupts.
(p. 10)
Aggh! By actively taking on White
privilege I must act as a White privileged
person. I may be able to broach the topic of
race by opening up a session with a Black or
Latino client by asking Whats it like to
work with a White counselor? This may be
helpful, and then again, it may not be. In
my effort to open up the racial tension in the
room, I may just be caring for myself and
using my privilege to push the client into
talking about race.
Armed with the intent to use my own
ontological expansiveness to confront my
own ontological expansiveness and spinning
from the zero gravity effect the panopticon
of privilege was having on my psyche I dove
into my training. And stepped on a few
landmines in the process.
During my training, I had the
opportunity to work under the structural
family therapy model. Eventually, I was
asked to become a lead counselor where it
was my task to put together a team of
therapists to best serve each family, based
on my impressions from the initial
assessment.
Following one of these assessments,
I was thinking about putting together a team
and it struck me that, with this particular
family, a Black therapist would be more
helpful than a White therapist. So I made a
decision that I wanted a Black therapist to
work with me to help the family. The
agency that I was doing my training with
lacked diversity and when thinking about a
Black therapist for my team, this meant that
there was only one choice. Upon realizing
that my choice was limited to only one
person, it hit me how ridiculous it might
seem for me to invite this counselor onto the
team.
I was nervous about how to broach
the topic without seeming racist or
communicating that I saw this counselor as a
token in an all-White system. Secretly, I
had always wanted to ask the counselor
what it was like to be a token in an all-White
system.
Even as I write this now, Im unsure
as to the most appropriate approach to the
situation. At the time, based on my
experience with White privilege literature, I
was going to share with the counselor that I
was interested in this counselors help
because of the counselors potential ability
to get to issues of the family quicker based
on the position of the family as Black and
struggling with issues of racism. When I
finally was able to ask the counselor to join
the team, my upper-middle-class White
politeness and privilege reared its ugly
head and what came out of my mouth was,
So, how do you feel about multicultural
counseling?
The counselor looked perplexed and
I stumbled deeper into micro aggression
territory in my effort to back away from my
original idea. I cant remember the words
that guided me deeper into dangerous
territory, though I do remember that as my
anxiety increased, my tone of voice grew
increasingly smug. I may have even been
trying to front with a calm smile. The
conversation ended with the counselor
looking at me and stating, I dont want to
work on this case with you.
I carried around the shame of this
moment with me for the rest of the day. I
dont know what may have been the best
approach and even now, despite spending a
couple of years reading, and thinking
through my own privilege I dont know if it
is appropriate to assume that a Black
counselor can help a Black family through
their community struggles with racism any
better than a White counselor. What I do
know is that the moment I asked that
question to my colleague, I sent a message
to my colleague that race was not a topic
that I was open to exploring. I was an
armchair anti-racist.
Another training story took place
between me and a client. I had been
working with a family of color for several
months and through this work had
developed what felt like a positive
therapeutic relationship. On one occasion in
a family session the energy of the session
turned to the identified client in the room
and the parents focused on the changes in
language and self-expression the client was
going through. At first the mother and
father seemed to approach these changes
with a light and joking manner. I can
remember sitting in the room and feeling
happy and even proud that I was able to sit
in the kitchen of a Black family as a White
professional counselor in training and have
the family participate with me in such a
comfortable manner.
At this moment the father turned to
me and made a statement that sent my pride
through the roof. The father opened a
question by stating, Ryan, I got something
to ask you and I know, I can tell, youve
been around a lot of Black folks your whole
life. I was feeling good about this
statement. It was for me a mark of
acceptance. As if Id been given props and
welcomed into the club of cool-ass White
people that can be trusted. My ridiculous
glow came crashing to a halt when the father
followed the statement up by asking me,
What do you think of when you hear the
term niggerish?
The question struck me like a blow
to the stomach. I stuttered my words and
muttered something to the effect of, I cant
begin to know how to answer that. The
room filled with silence on the tail of my
response and members in the family,
including my client, actually backed up.
I am a firm believer in the wisdom of
the master counselors in my training
program that taught me that feedbacknot
failureis a constant in the counseling
process. In most situations, the fractal
patterning of the therapeutic dance proves
this to be true. When it comes to this
familyand, for that matter, multicultural
counseling in generalthe pattern of
therapeutic dance seems too chaotic, too out
of balance already, and feedbacknot
failureis no longer a helpful mantra.
There are ruptures in multicultural
counseling from which the relationship
cannot recover. When I refused to respond
to the family I was helping out of my own
fear and baggage tied up in the word nigger,
I sent the message to them that when it came
down to the real work, the uncomfortable
work of helping, I was useless.
On another occasion, I was
transporting a client to a treatment team
meeting involving several social workers,
therapeutic foster parents, counselors, and
psychologists. The individual was
presenting as nervous through pressured
speech and rumination around what might
be the outcome of the meeting. I wanted to
try and join with the client by naming the
clients experience without the client having
to verbalize it. I took my time to carefully
construct a short wondering about what it
must be like for the individual to enter a
room full of professionals. The individual
looked at me with disbelief and proceeded to
school me around making poor assumptions.
The client stated; Intimidated? By
professionals? When you say professional,
do you mean White? Man, what kind of shit
are you talking? I put my pants on the same
way everybody in that room does.
Another rupture I wont be coming
back from. The remainder of the trip was
completed in silence. And once again, the
panopticon of privilege failed me. How did
I miss such an obvious mistake?

The End: This One Cant Be Tied Up
with a Tidy Conclusion
The above is my attempt at
conceptualizing my own experience in
struggling to become a competent
multicultural counselor. I have told my
stories in order to invite witness to this
struggle. I am, and indeed remain, deep
within the panopticon of privilege.
In revisiting an earlier passage in my
paper when I wrote that feedbacknot
failureis a mantra that doesnt fit in the
multicultural arena, I was wrong. It doesnt
fit in the interpersonal immediate experience
of the multicultural arena. Where it does
seem to be most appropriate, however, is in
the lifetime of the White helper. Feedback-
not-failure. Every time a mistake is made,
the White person must stick around and
experience, even become sensitive to, the
consequence of the rupture. When one can
stomach this, and humble oneself in the
moment of unconscious racism, when one
can sit comfortably in the panopticon of
privilege while the fires of self-doubt rage
around, when one can tolerate, even enjoy
this bewildered and hyper-vigilant state,
perhaps it is here, through the exhausting
lens of racial self-consciousness that
appropriate and lasting personal
transformation can be made. And this
perhaps is how White helpers can be helpful.
References

Beatty, P. (2000). Tuff. New York, NY: Anchor Books.
Bentham, J. (1995). The panopticon writings. M. Bozovic (Ed.). London: Verso.
Dickson-Carr, D. (2001). African American satire: The sacredly profane novel. Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press
Echterling, L., Presbury, J., & McKee, J. (2004). Crisis intervention: Promoting resilience and
resolution in troubled times. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault reader. P. Rabinow (Ed.). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
Garvey, J., & Ignatiev, N. (Eds.). (1996). Race traitor. New York, NY: Routledge.
Gates, Jr., H. L. (1988). The signifying monkey: A theory of African-American literary criticism.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Hays, D., Chang, C., & Havice, P. (2008). White racial identity statuses as predictors of white
privilege awareness. Journal of Humanistic Counseling, Education, and Development,
47, 234-246. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-1939.2008.tb00060.x
Helms, J. (1992). Race is a nice thing to have: A guide to being a white person or understanding
the white persons in your life. Topeka, KS: Content Communications.
Hereniko, V., & Wilson, R. (Eds.). (1999). Inside out: Literature, cultural politics, and identity
in the new Pacific. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield.
Hoagland, T. (2003). Negative capability: How to talk mean and influence people. American
Poetry Review Mar/Apr2003, Vol. 32 Issue 2, 13-16.
Jordan, J. (2002). The new literary blackface. Black Issues Book Review, 26-29.
Kiselica, M. S. (1999). Confronting my own ethnocentrism and racism: A process of pain and
growth. Journal of Counseling and Development, 77(1), 14-17.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6676.1999.tb02405.x
Lander, C. (2008, January 20). #11 Stuff white people like. Retrieved from:
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/20/11-asian-girls/
Major, C. (1994). Juba to jive: A dictionary of African-American Slang. New York, NY: Penguin
Books.
Segrest, M. (1994). Memoir of a race traitor. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Sullivan, S. (2006). Revealing whiteness: The unconscious habits of racial privilege.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Wilson, P. L. (1993). Sacred drift: Essays on the margins of Islam. San Francisco, CA: City
Lights Books.
Wise, T. (2008). White like me. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press.

1

UNDERSTANDING WHITE PRIVILEGE
by Francis E. Kendall, Ph.D., 2002

We need to be clear that there is no such thing as giving up ones privilege to be
outside the system. One is always in the system. The only question is whether one is
part of the system in a way that challenges or strengthens the status quo. Privilege is
not something I take and which therefore have the option of not taking. It is something
that society gives me, and unless I change the institutions which give it to me, they will
continue to give it, and I will continue to have it, however noble and equalitarian my
intentions.
Harry Brod, Work Clothes and Leisure Suits: The Class Basis and Bias of the Mens Movement,
in Mens Lives, ed. Michael S. Kimmel and Michael Messner (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 280.

What Is White Privilege?

Privilege, particularly white or male
privilege, is hard to see for those of us
who were born with access to power
and resources. It is very visible for
those to whom privilege was not
granted. Furthermore, the subject is
extremely difficult to talk about because
many white people dont feel powerful or
as if they have privileges others do not.
It is sort of like asking fish to notice
water or birds to discuss air. For those
who have privileges based on race or
gender or class or physical ability or
sexual orientation, or age, it just is- its
normal. The Random House Dictionary
(1993) defines privilege as a right,
immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a
person beyond the advantages of most.
In her article, White Privilege and Male
Privilege, Peggy McIntosh (1995)
reminds us that those of us who are
white usually believe that privileges are
conditions of daily experience [that
are] universally available to everybody.
Further, she says that what we are
really talking about is unearned power
conferred systematically (pp. 82-83)
For those of us who are white, one of
our privileges is that we see ourselves
as individuals, just people, part of the
human race. Most of us are clear,
however, that people whose skin is not
white are members of a race. The
surprising thing for us is that, even though
we dont see ourselves as part of a radical
group, people of color generally do see us
that way.
So given that we want to work to create
a better world in which all of us can live,
what can we do? The first step, of course,
is to become clear about the basics of white
privilege, what it is and how it works. The
second step is to explore ways in which we
can work against the racism of which white
privilege is a cornerstone.
White privilege is an institutional (rather
than personal) set of benefits granted to
those of us who, by race, resemble the
people who dominate the powerful positions
in our institutions. One of the primary
privileges is that of having greater access to
power and resources than people of color
do; in other words, purely on the basis of
our skin color doors are open to us that are
not open to other people. For example,
given the exact financial history, white
people in the United States are two to ten
times more likely to get a housing loan than
people of color access to resources.
Those of us who are white can count on the
fact that a nations history books will our
experience of history. American Indian
parents, on the other hand, know that their
children will not learn in school about the
contributions of their people.
All of us who are white, by race, have
white privileges, although the extent to
which we have them varies depending on
2

our gender, sexual orientation,
socioeconomic status, age, physical
ability, size and weight, and so on. For
example, looking at race and gender,
we find that white men have greater
access to power and resources than
white women do. The statistics from the
1995 Glass Ceiling Commission show
that, while white men constitute about
43% of the work force, they hold 95% of
senior management positions in
American industry. Looking purely at
white privilege, white women hold about
40% of the middle management
positions, while Black women hold 5%
and Black men hold 4%. Unless we
believe that white women or African
American men and women are
inherently less capable, we have to
acknowledge that our systems are
treating us unequally.
White privilege has nothing to do
with whether or not we are good
people. We who are white can be
absolute jerks and still have white
privileges; people of color can be the
most wonderful individuals in the world
and not have them. Privileges are
bestowed on us by the institutions with
which we interact solely because of our
race, not because we are deserving as
individuals. While each of us is always
a member of a race or races, we are
sometimes granted opportunities
because we, as individuals, deserve
them; often we are granted them
because we, as individuals, belong to
one or more of the favored groups in our
society. At some colleges and
universities, for example, sons and
daughters of alumnae and alumni might
have lower grades and test scores than
other applicants; they are accepted,
however, because their parents
graduated from the institutions. That is
a privilege that the sons and daughters
did nothing to earn; they were put ahead
of other possible applicants who may
have had higher test scores and grades
because of where their parents had gone to
school.

The Purposeful Construction of
White Privilege: A Brief History

Often it is not our intent, as individual
white people, to make use of the unearned
benefits we have received on the basis of
our skin color. Most of us go through our
days unaware that we are white or that it
matters. On the other hand, the creation of
a system in which race plays a central part
one that codifies the superiority of the
white race over all others has been in no
way accidental or haphazard. Throughout
American history white power-holders,
acting on behalf of our entire race, have
made decisions that have affected white
people as a group very differently than
groups of color. History is filled with
examples of the purposeful construction of
a systemic structure that grants privileges
to white people and withholds them from
others.
The writing of the U.S. Constitution which,
in ten articles, very intentionally confirmed
the holding of Black people as slaves, as
property.
White peoples believing that our destiny
was to own the land on which we all
currently live, even though that required
forcibly removing the native people who
had lived here for centuries.
Our breaking apart of Black families
during slavery, sending mothers one
place, fathers another, and babies and
children yet another.
Choosing to withhold from African
Americans the ability to read so that they
could not reproduce any of their culture or
function well enough in our literate society
to change their status.
The removing of American Indian children
from their homes, taking them as far as
possible from anything they knew, and
3

punishing them if they tried to speak in
their own languages.
The passing of laws that were created
to maintain the legal separation and
inequality of whites and African
Americans (Plessy v. Ferguson)
The making of politically expedient
decisions by many (if not most) white
suffragists to align themselves with
white Southern men, reassuring them
that by giving the vote to women (read
white women since at that time
about 90% of the Black women lived
in the South and were not by law, able
to hold property and thus vote) the
continuation of white supremacy was
insured.
The manipulation of immigration laws
so that people of color, particularly
Chinese and Mexican as well as
European Jews, were less free to
immigrate to the U.S. than Western
and Eastern Europeans.
The removing of American citizens of
Japanese ancestry from their homes
and taking their land and their
businesses as our own during World
War II.
The using of affirmative action to
promote opportunities for white
women rather than for people of color.
It is important to know and
remember this side of American history,
even though it makes us extremely
uncomfortable. For me, the confusion
and pain of this knowledge is somewhat
eased by reminding myself that this
system is not based on each individual
white persons intention to harm but on
our racial groups determination to
preserve what we believe is rightly ours.
This distinction is, on one hand,
important, and, on the other hand, not
important at all because, regardless of
personal intent, the impact is the same.
Here are a couple of examples. For
many years, it was illegal in Texas for
Spanish- speaking children to speak
Spanish at school. This meant that every
individual teacher and principal was
required by law to send any child home for
speaking his or her own language whether
the teachers and/ or principals believed in
the law or not. Based on the belief that
people who live in the United States should
speak English, mixed with racial bigotry
against Mexicans, the law was passed by a
group of individual white legislators who
had the institutional power to codify their
and their constituents viewpoints. Once a
particular perspective is built into law, it
becomes part of the way things are.
Rather than actively refusing to comply with
the law, as individuals we usually go along,
particularly if we think the law doesnt affect
us personally. We participate, intentionally
or not, in the purposeful construction of a
system that deflates the value of one
peoples culture while inflating the value of
anothers. More recently, this same kind of
thing occurred in a county called Georgia
that was experiencing a large influx of
Mexican immigrants. By saying that
firefighters might not speak Spanish and
would therefore not be able to find the
grocery store that was on fire if the sign
outside said Tienda de Comida, the
county officials made it illegal to have store
names in languages other than English.
However, the bakery, Au Bon Pain, was not
asked to change its sign. Presumably, the
firefighters speak French better than they
speak Spanish.
As we see from these two examples, the
patterns set in history are continued today.
Not only in the on-going pervasive and
systematic discrimination against people of
color in housing, health care, education,
and the judicial systems, but also in the less
obvious ways in which people of color are
excluded from many white peoples day- to-
day consciousness. Think, for example, of
how regularly you see a positive story about
an American Indian or a Latina/o on the
front page of the newspaper you read. How
long would it take you to name ten white
4

heroes? Could you name ten women of
color, other than people in sports and
music, who have made major
contributions to our society? The
freedom not to notice our lack of
knowledge about people of color is
another privilege that is afforded only to
white people. All of us, including
students of color, study the history of
white, Western Europeans everyday in
our schools unless we take an ethnic
studies course or a course consciously
designed to present the many other
threads of the American experience.

Privilege from Conception

White peoples privileges are
bestowed prenatally. We cant not get
them and we cannot give them away, no
matter how much we do not want them.
For example, if I walk into any drug
store in the country that carries hair
products, I can be sure that I will find
something that was designed for my
hair. Black hair products are much
harder to find; often African Americans
have to drive for miles to buy what they
need. Further, I know that when a
Band- Aid box says fresh color, it
means my skin color, not those of my
Asian or Latina friends. If, in an attempt
to give back my privileges, I said to the
drug store clerk, I dont want the
privilege of always being able to get
shampoo for my hair when my Black
friend cant, the clerk would think I was
nuts. What we can and must do is work
daily to combat our privilege by bringing
to consciousness others and our own,
the system in which we are living.

White People:
Taking Racism Seriously

Far too many of us who are white
erroneously believe that we do not have to
take the issues of racism seriously. While
people of color understand the necessity of
being able to read the white system, those
of us who are white are able to live out our
lives knowing very little of the experiences
of people of color. Understanding racism or
whiteness is often an intellectual exercise
for us, something we can work at for a
period of time and then move on, rather
than its being central to our survival.
Further, we have the luxury of not having to
have the tools to deal with racial situations
without looking incompetent.
I was working with a college at which
senior administrators were trying to decide
how to move forward with diversity intake.
One of the vice principals said, There are
so many people who want diversity to fail.
The conversation seemed theoretical and
removed to me. What an odd thing to say:
There are so many people who want
diversity to fail, with the attitude of, well,
we tried, it was an interesting experiment,
now lets send all of them back to the
countries they came from. Too bad it was
an exciting thought. If, instead, someone
had said, There are so many people who
want diversity to fail. Im afraid we wont
succeed, an action plan would be drawn
up in a heartbeat and monitored daily to get
the school back on track. Or would that be
the response? Is there a sense that, at the
root, We dont need to worry; we will
always be here? I think the underlying
sense is there: for some eliminating racism
is life and death, a question of survival,
being seen as opposed to being invisible.
For others, this is an interesting intellectual
exercise from which we can be basically
removed.

5

Making Decisions for
Everyone

White privilege is the ability to make
decisions that affect everyone without
taking others into account. This occurs
at every level, from intellectual to
individual. The following story could
look simply like an oversight: Oops, I
forgot to ask other people what they
thought. However, it is typical behavior
for white women who want women of
color to join them in their endeavors.
During a visit with an out-of-town
friend another white woman and a
librarian we began to plan a
conference for librarians on racism that
we named Librarians as Colleagues:
Working Together Across Racial Lines.
We talked and talked, making notes of
good exercises to include, videos to
use, materials that might prove helpful.
It was absolutely clear that we needed a
diverse committee to work with me, the
facilitator, and we created one that
would include all voices: two white
women (one Jewish), a Latina, a
Chinese American woman, straight
women and lesbians, and several
African Americans. By the end of our
conversation, I was extremely excited
and couldnt wait to contact the women
on the planning committee.
At the first meeting with these
women, during the introductions, I talked
about my twenty-five year history of
working on issues of racism and
particularly my own work on what it
means to be white and Southern. Then
I presented what my friend and I had
thought up as the plan for the
conference and all of us talked about
the particulars. (In other words, I
presented my credentials as a good
white person and then proceeded to
create a conference that was exactly
what my friend and I had planned without
any input from people of color.)
A couple of weeks later, at our second
meeting, the women of color pointed out
that I had fallen into the classic trap of white
women: the come-be-part-of-what-were-
doing syndrome. If you truly want us to
work with you to create a conference, we
will. But it means starting over and building
a plan together. If you want us to enter the
planning process in the middle and add our
ideas to yours, were not interested.

White People Dont
Have to Listen

Being white enables me to decide
whether I am going to listen to others, to
hear them, or neither. As one of those in
what Lisa Delpit calls the culture of power,
I also silence others without intending to or
even being aware of it. For example, a
colleague of mine, and African American
woman, attended a conference on the
process of dialogue. Of the forty-five
people there, she was one of four who were
not white. The whites were of the
intellectual elite: highly educated, bright,
and, for the most part, liberal people. As
the meeting unfolded, it became
increasingly clear that, if the women of color
didnt mention race, no one would. The
white people were not conscious enough to
the fact that race their race was an
integral aspect of every conversation they
were having. When the women of color did
insert the issue into the dialogue, the white
people felt accused of being racist. In this
instance, silencing took place when the
planners were not clear that race was
present at the conference even if no people
of color attended; the white participants
didnt include the reality of others in their
plan; and, when the issue was raised by my
colleague, she was made to feel that she
was the one who was causing trouble.
6

In her article The Silenced Dialogue:
Power and Pedagogy in Educating
Other Peoples Children (Harvard
Education Review, Vol.58, Number 3,
August 1988), Delpit includes the
profoundly disturbing comments of an
African American teacher that illustrate
how we silence dialogue without being
aware of doing it or meaning to.
When youre talking to White people
they still want it to be their way. You can
try to talk to them and give them
examples, but theyre so headstrong,
they think they know whats best for
everybody, for everybodys children.
They wont listen. White folks are going
to do what they want to do anyway.
Its really hard. They just dont listen
well. No, they listen, but they dont hear
you know how your mama used to say
you listen to the radio, but you hear your
mother? Well, they dont hear me.
So I just try to shut them out so I can
hold my temper. You can only beat your
head against a brick wall for so long
before you draw blood. If I try to stop
arguing with them I cant help myself
from getting angry. Then I end up
walking around praying all day Please
Lord, remove the bile I feel for those
people so I can sleep tonight. Its funny,
but it can become a cancer, a sore. (pp.
280-281)
As Delpit says, these are not the
sentiments of one isolated person who
teaches in a particularly racist school.
The feelings are representative of a vast
number of people of color as they
interact with white people on a daily
basis.
The saddest element is that the
individuals that the Black and American
Indian educators speak ofare seldom
aware that the dialogue has been
silenced. Most likely the white educators
believe their colleagues of color did, in
the end, agree with their logic. After all,
they stopped disagreeing, didnt they?
(p.281)

White privilege allows us not to see race
in ourselves and to be angry at those who
do. I was asked to address a meeting of
white women and women of color called
together to create strategies for addressing
social justice issues. Each of the women
had been working for years in her own
community on a range of issues from health
care to school reform. As I spoke about the
work that is required for white women and
women of color to collaborate authentically,
the white women became nervous and then
resistant. Why was race always such an
issue for women of color? What did I mean
when I said it was essential for white
women to be conscious of how being of
their race affects every hour of their lives,
just as women of color are? They were all
professionals, some said, why did it matter
what color they were? The silencing of
dialogue here occurred because the white
women didnt see the race of the women in
the room as an issue. It did not occur to
them that their daily experience was
different from that of the African Americans,
Latinas, and Asian Americans in the room.
Had I not been asked to raise the issue, the
possibility of doing so would have been left
to the women of color, as it usually is.
Believing that race is N.M.I (Not My
Issue) and being members of one or more
groups that also experience systemic
discrimination, we use the privilege of
emotionally and psychologically removing
ourselves from the white group, which we
see as composed either of demonically
racist people who spout epithets and wear
Ku Klux Klan robes or white, straight,
healthy males. For those of us who are
white, and are also disabled, gay, lesbian,
or straight women, our experience of being
excluded from the mainstream hides from
us to the fact that we still benefit from our
skin color. By seeing ourselves as
removed in some way from the privileged
group, we may be all the more deaf to our
silencing of people of color.

7

Discounting People of Color

As white people, we have the
privilege and ability to discount the
worth of an individual of color, his or her
comments and behavior, and to alter his
or her future, based on our asses-
sments. One of the most frightening
aspects of this privilege is that we are
able to do enormous damage with a glib
or off-hand comment such as I just
dont think shes a good fit for our
organization. Promotions have been
denied on the basis of such comments.
There are many ways in which our
comments are given inflated worth
because of the privilege we hold.
For example:
Seeing those most affected by
racism as wounded or victims and
somehow, then, as defective.
Identifying a member of an
oppressed group as wounded is
patronizing, particularly when done
by someone with privilege.
Mis-hearing the comments of
people of color so that their words
are less important, not understood or
fully appreciated, and thereby
heightening our sense of superiority.
Rephrasing or translating for others,
as if they cannot speak for
themselves, without appearing rude
to others like us.
Being allowed, by others like us, to
take up most of the airtime without
saying much of substance.
Suggesting that people of color need
to lighten up, not to take things so
seriously.
Saying or implying that, as a woman
(or gay person or a working class
person, and so on), you know what
the person of color is going through.
I know just how you feel. When the
children in the playground made fun
of me because I was fat (I am not
suggesting that race is the only cause of
pain and discrimination. I am pointing
out one of the ways in which white
people suggest that someone elses
experience cant be any worse than
what we ourselves have experienced or
can understand).
Asking why people of color always focus
on the negative, as if life cant be that
bad. A similar way of discounting
someones experience is to say, You
always focus on race. I remember at
two meetings last year
Commenting, I know we have a way to
go, but things have gotten better.
(Read, Stop whining. What do you
want from me, anyway? Didnt we fix
everything in the 60s? Or I know what
your reality is better than you do.)
Seeing and keeping ourselves central,
never marginal. For some years know,
writers of color have been discussing
the experience of living in the margins
while white people are living in the
center. In one of her early books,
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
(Boston: South End Press, 1984), Bell
Hooks defines it:
To be in the margin is to be part of
the whole but outside the main
bodyLiving as we did on the edge
we developed a particular way of seeing
reality. We looked both from the outside
in and from the inside out. We focused
our attention on the center as well as on
the margin. (p.ix.)

Seeing White as Normal

Another element of this privilege is the
ability to see white people as normal and all
the others as different-from-normal. In
describing heterosexuals privilege, Allan G.
Johnson also identifies a white privilege.
They have the privilege of being able to
assume acceptance as normal members
of societylive[ing] in a world full of cultural
8

images that confer a sense of legitimacy
and social desirability (The Gender Knot:
Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1997, p. 149.)
White people express this privilege
in many ways:
We use ourselves and our
experiences as the referent for
everyone. Im not followed around
in the store by a guard. What makes
you think you are?
We reinsert ourselves into the
conversation if we feel it has drifted
to focus on a person of color or an
issue of others race. I dont really
think the issue is race as much as it
is class.
We bring a critical mass with us
wherever we go. Even if I am the
only white person in a room of
university administrators of color, I
know that most of the other
administrators in the nations schools
look, relatively speaking, like me.
We believe that we have an
automatic right to be heard when we
speak because most leaders in most
organizations look like us.
(Obviously, this privilege in particular
is significantly altered, though not
eliminated, by the intersections of
socioeconomics class, gender,
sexual orientation, etc.)
We have, as a racial group, the
privilege not to have to think before
we speak. If what we say is
upsetting to others, our thought-
lessness, rudeness, anger, and so
on, are attributed to us as individuals
rather than as members of our race,
as is the case for others. I cant
believe Bill was such a jerk in the
meeting today, as opposed to,
Latinos are so passionate; they just
dont think before they speak.
We use the pain and experience of
being deprived in our lives to keep
us central and lessen our
responsibility for the privileges we
receive as white people. The pain and
sense of being less-than, often based
on reality, may emanate both from our
personal life experiences my father
died when I was four and our
membership in groups from which
privileges are systematically withheld
being poor or Jewish or gay or deaf. In
our minds, this sense of struggling
somehow lessens or removes our
responsibility for our receiving or
colluding in systematic white privilege.
For example, I often hear, I dont have
white privilege because Im working
class. White working class people do
not have the same socioeconomic
privileges as white upper-middle class
people. But, while class privileges are
being withheld from them, they are
given the same skin color privileges.
We shift the focus back to us, even
when the conversation is not about us.
A classic example of this is white
women crying during conversations
about racism and women of color having
to put their pain aside to help the white
women who are crying. (African
Americans and gays and lesbians, in
particular, are expected to take
responsibility for other peoples
responses to and discomfort with them.)
We use our white privilege to define the
parameters of appropriate
conversation and communication,
keeping our culture, manners, and
language central by:
o Requesting a safe place to talk
about race and racism. This is often
translated as being safe from
hearing the anger and pain of people
of color as well as being able to say
racist things without being held
accountable for them.
o Establishing the rules for standard
English and holding others to our
rules.
9

o Setting up informal rules for
communicating in the
organizations and then failing to
share those rules with people
who are different from us.
o Creating institutions that run by
our cultures rules but acting as if
the rules are universally held,
such as what time meetings start,
how people address one another,
the appropriate language to
use.

If History is White

The privilege of writing and teaching
history only from the perspective of the
colonizer has such profound
implications that they are difficult to
fathom. As white people, we carry the
stories we were taught as the truths,
often failing to question those truths and
discrediting those who do. There are
many embedded privileges here:
We are able to live in the absence of
historical context. It is as if we are
not forgetting our history, but acting
as if it never happened. Or, if it did,
it has nothing to do with us today.
For most of us who are white, our
picture of the United States, both
past and present, is sanitized to
leave out or downplay any atrocities
we might have committed. Our
Disneyland version of history is that
our white ancestors came here, had
a hard time traveling west, finally
conquered those terrible savages
and settled our country, just as we
were supposed to do Manifest
Destiny.
We are taught that we are the only
ones in the picture. If there were
others, they obviously werent worth
mentioning. An example of this is
the white crosses at the Little
Bighorn Battlefield indicating where
white men died, as if no indigenous
people had been killed there.
We are able to grow up without our
racial supremacys being questioned. It
is so taken for granted, such a
foundation of all that we know, that we
are able to be unconscious of it even
though it permeates every aspect of our
lives. Charles W. Mills describes this
phenomenon in his book The Racial
Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
white misunderstanding, misrepre-
sentation, evasion, and self-deception
on matters related to race
arepsychically required for conquest,
colonization, and enslavement. And
these phenomena are in no way
accidental, but prescribed by the terms
of the Racial Contract, which requires a
certain schedule of structured blindness
and opacities in order to establish and
maintain the white polity. (p. 19, italics his)
While we are deprived of the skills of
critical thinking by being given such a
rudimentary view of our heritage, our
ignorance is not held against us. We
are taught little complicated history to
have to sort through, think about,
question, and so we have few
opportunities to learn to grapple with
complexities. We end up with simplistic
sentiments like America love it or
leave it because we have only been
taught fragments of information. Were
told that George Washington couldnt
tell a lie, but we arent told that he
owned African people who were
enslaved or that he most likely has
descendants by those slaves. We dont
often have to wrestle with the fact that
one of the biggest fights in framing the
Constitution was over maintaining
slavery.
We have the privilege of determining
how and if historical characters and
events will be remembered. From the
Alamo to the Filipino-American War to
the Japanese internment to Viet Nam to
10

training the assassins at Fort
Benning, GA, who killed nuns and
priests in El Salvador: we retain an
extremely tight hold on what is and is
not admitted and how information is
presented. We do this as a culture
and we do it as individuals.
We control what others know about
their own histories by presenting only
parts of a story. Because we all go
to the same schools, if you will,
everyone, regardless of color, is told
the white story. Japanese
Americans are told that their families
internment was purely a safety
precaution, just as white children
are. American Indian students see
Walt Disneys Davy Crockett
alongside their white schoolmates,
learning that their great grand-
mothers were squaws and their
ancestors were savages. We all
learn the tomahawk chop during
baseball season. None of us sees a
whole picture or our nation that
includes the vast contributions of
those who are not white. All of us
are given a skewed picture of reality.
This is part of what Charles Mills is
writing about in The Racial Contract.
We are able, almost always, to forget
that everything that happens in our
lives occurs in the context of the
supremacy of whiteness. We are
admitted to college, hired for jobs,
given or denied loans, cared for by
the medical profession, and we walk
down the street as white people,
always in the context of white
dominance. In other words, part of
the reason that doors open for us is
our unearned racial privilege. But
we act and often believe that we
have earned everything we get. We
then generalize from our perceived
experience of deserving the opportu-
nities we receive to thinking that , if a
person of color doesnt get a job or a
loan, its because she or he didnt earn
it.
We are able to delude ourselves into
thinking that people of all colors come to
the table having been dealt the same
hand of cards. We act as if there are no
remnants of slavery that affect African
Americans today, that the Japanese
didnt have to give up their land, their
homes and businesses, or that the
Latinos werent brought back into what
had been their country to do stoop labor.
We can disconnect ourselves from any
reality of people of color that makes us
uncomfortable, because our privilege
allows us to believe that people
basically get what they deserve or we
feel helpless to do anything about
another groups pain. So we have kind,
good people who, because of race and
class privilege, are so removed that they
dont have to see or experience others.
Without that personal experience, they
have no understanding of or motivation
to address others lives.

Inclusion and Collateral

We have the privilege of being able to
determine inclusion or exclusion (of
ourselves and others) in a group.
We can include or exclude at our whim.
She would be great here, but her
research doesnt focus enough on Latin
America even though shes a Latina.
And, moments later, She would add a
lot to our department, but shes just
soChicana!
I have the ability as a white woman to
move back into my gender and
commiserate with other women about
men if I dont want to be aligned with
other whites.
We are able to slip in and out of
conversations about race without being
questioned about our loyalty or called an
Oreo or a Banana or a Coconut.
11

We can speak up about racism
without being seen as self-serving.
In fact, we can even see ourselves
as good at standing up for others
and mentally pat ourselves on the
back.
We expect and often receive
appreciation for showing up at their
functions the Multicultural Fair, the
NAACP annual fundraising event,
the Asian Women Warriors awards
celebration as if they dont really
pertain to us. If we arent thanked
profusely by people of color, we give
up because we feel unappreciated.
We have the privilege of having our
race serve as a financial asset for
us. We are beneficiaries of a system
that was set up by people like us for
people like us so that we can control
the critical financial aspects of our
lives more than people of color are
able to. There is much research that
shows that race, when isolated as a
variable, overrides the variables of
class and gender in impacting
institutions financial decisions. I am
able to count on my race as a
financial asset, if I have nothing else
to offer as collateral. For example,
as a white person I am far more
likely to have access to expensive
medical procedures, particularly
pertaining to heart disease, than
people of color. Statistically, the
likelihood is that I will pay less for a
new car than a Black woman will.
Examples of this element of white
privilege are plentiful. For a more in-
depth discussion of whiteness as
financial collateral, see Cheryl I.
Harriss article, Whiteness as
Property (Harvard Law Review, 1993,
Vol. 106.)

Ongoing Excavation

We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect
us nor seduce us into settling for anything
less than the hard work of excavating
honesty
- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider,
Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press,
1984, p. 128.
For those of us who are deeply
committed to social justice work, the
purposeful crafting of systemic supremacy
of whiteness is one of the most difficult and
painful realities to hold. It would be more
comfortable to believe that racism
somehow magically sprang full-blown
without our having had anything to do with
it. We would rather remain unconscious of
decisions that reinforce white privilege that
are made by a few on behalf of all white
people.
However, if we are truly to understand
the racial context of the twenty-first century,
we have to grapple with our dogged
unwillingness to understand the patterns of
discrimination for what they are. We must
ask how we participate in not seeing the
experiences of people of color that are so
very different from white peoples. We
should question our resoluteness to identify
class rather than race as the primary
determinant of opportunity and experience,
particularly when there is so much evidence
to the contrary. In short, white people can
continue to use unearned privilege to
remain ignorant, or we can determine to put
aside our opacities in order to see clearly
and live differently. As Harvey Cox said in
The Secular City, Not to decide is to
decide.

Frances E. Kendall, Ph.D.; 960 Tulare Ave.; Albany, CA 94707; 510-559-9445
CPT 6/09

15th Annual White-Hates Aka White Privilege Conference

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At the annual meeting of the White-haters of

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