Facing 'White Privilege'

Author: Angelica Towne

Frances Kendall, the facilitator of a March 30 workshop on "White Privilege," opened the event by asking, "Okay, firstly I want everyone tonight to talk from your heart and your gut, not your head. I know academia teaches us to try to sound smart and say what we know we're supposed to say in front of our professors. I would rather have a real conversation than a nice conversation."

Born into an upper-middle class white family in Texas, Kendall attended an expensive private boarding school. She mostly failed her classes at a wealthy private college, then found her passion and was accepted to the University of North Carolina graduate school. She described her undergraduate college as "a school in the middle of the woods for rich white kids whose parents paid for them to ski."

Kendall proceeded to use her own life to map out what exactly she meant by white privilege on an individual level. She almost failed out of college because she didn't like the large size of her classes. She didn't think, she pointed out, about shaming her family. She didn't worry that college would be her only chance at success.

She never agonized about the idea that someone might think she didn't have the ability to perform in college because of her race. She was never told that she was making her people look bad. Like many Middlebury College students, Kendall thought a college education was expected - just like a job after graduation, a family and a home of her own.

"Often people who are white do not know we are white," said Kendall. "But everyone else does! I didn't realize this until I was pushed to think about what it means to be white. We incur the privileges of being white and we can not give them up. We can not decide to be raceless."

After tackling the ways in which white privilege is apparent on an individual level, she introduced the concept of systemic privilege. The room buzzed with questions and small debates. One student argued that today's institutions and systems discriminate based on socioeconomic class rather than race. Kendall responded with a smile. "We'd like to talk about privilege as just class to make us feel better," she said. "True, there are poor whites in this country that would not have the same privileges that I had. But race always trumps class."

Kendall stressed that although white privilege is the responsibility of whites, it does not mean white people are bad. However, the recognition of white privilege is crucial to social progress, she argued. "Minorities in colleges are often expected to act like honorary white people," said Kendall. "They are asked to leave their race at the door. What does this mean? It means that we white people are trained not to see our privileges as such. Then we try to teach minorities not to see white privilege too. We teach 'the way things are.' The problem with white privilege is that it is all done by laws so none of us have to feel responsible. We teach that the system of white privilege is no one's responsibility." Citing a litany of legislation, Kendall argued that discrimination permeates U.S. history and that programs to counteract discrimination have been recent and short-lived.

Kendall said that affirmative action was implemented because corporations and the military wrote to Congress demanding diversity programs. They agitated for change, she argued, because they realized the practical value of peoples whose ideas and talents were suppressed. She urged students to contact their parents and friends to demand more diversity on our campus and in our Congress.