Names (White Privilege)

[Andre Cramblit]

White Privilege

by Robert Jensen Department of Journalism, University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712, work: (512) 471-1990,
[Note: This article appeared in the Baltimore Sun ]

Here's what white privilege sounds like: I'm sitting in my University  
of Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white  
student about affirmative action in college admissions, which he  
opposes and I support. The student says he wants a level playing  
field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he  
thinks that being white has advantages in the United States. Have  
either of us, I ask, ever benefited from being white in a world run  
mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is something real and  
tangible we could call white privilege.

So, if we live in a world of white privilege – unearned white  
privilege - how does that affect your notion of a level playing  
field? I asked. He paused for a moment and said, "That really doesn't  
matter." That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate  
white privilege: The privilege to acknowledge that you have unearned  
privilege but to ignore what it means. That exchange led me to  
rethink the way I talk about race and racism with students. It drove  
home the importance of confronting the dirty secret that we white  
people carry around with us every day: in a world of white privilege,  
some of what we have is unearned. I think much of both the fear and  
anger that comes up around discussions of affirmative action has its  
roots in that secret. So these days, my goal is to talk open and  
honestly about white supremacy and white privilege.

White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is complex. In a white  
supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not  
they are overtly racist themselves. There are general patterns, but  
such privilege plays out differently depending on context and other  
aspects of one's identity (in my case, being male gives me other  
kinds of privilege). Rather than try to tell others how white  
privilege has played out in their lives, I talk about how it has  
affected me.

I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of northern  
European heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the  
whitest states in the country. I grew up in a virtually all-white  
world surrounded by racism, both personal and institutional. Because  
I didn't live near a reservation, I didn't even have exposure to the  
state's only numerically significant nonwhite population, American  
Indians.

I have struggled to resist that racist training and the racism of my  
culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip  
over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the  
institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I "fix"  
myself, one thing never changes - I walk through the world with white  
privilege.

What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission  
to a university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don't  
look threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me look like me  
they are white. They see in me a reflection of themselves - and in a  
racist world, that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of  
them. I am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am  
cut some slack. After all, I'm white.

My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am white. Some  
complain that affirmative action has meant the university is saddled  
with mediocre minority professors. I have no doubt there are minority  
faculty who are mediocre, though I don't know very many. As Henry  
Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action policies were  
in place for the next hundred years, it's possible that at the end of  
that time the university could have as many mediocre minority  
professors as it has mediocre white professors. That isn't meant as  
an insult to anyone, but it's a simple observation that white  
privilege has meant that scores of second-rate white professors have  
slid through the system because their flaws were overlooked out of  
solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and ideology.

Some people resist the assertions that the United States is still a  
bitterly racist society and that the racism has real effects on real  
people. But white folks have long cut other white folks a break. I  
know, because I am one of them. I am not a genius - as I like to say,  
I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I have been teaching full  
time for six years and I've published a reasonable amount of  
scholarship. Some of it is the unexceptional stuff one churns out to  
get tenure, and some of it, I would argue, is worth reading. I worked  
hard, and I like to think that I'm a fairly decent teacher. Every  
once in a while, I leave my office at the end of the day feeling like  
I really accomplished something. When I cash my pay check, I don't  
feel guilty. But, all that said, I know I did not get where I am by  
merit alone. I benefited from among other things, white privilege.  
That doesn't mean that I don't deserve my job, or that if I weren't  
white I would never have gotten the job. It means simply that all  
through my life, I have soaked up benefits for being white.

All my life I have been hired for jobs by white people. I was  
accepted for graduate school by white people. And I was hired for a  
teaching position by the predominantly white University of Texas,  
headed by a white president, in a college headed by a white dean and  
in a department with a white chairman that at the time had one  
nonwhite tenured professor. I have worked hard to get where I am, and  
I work hard to stay there. But to feel good about myself, and my  
work, I do not have to believe that "merit" as defined by white  
people in a white country, alone got me here. I can acknowledge that  
in addition to all that hard work, I got a significant boost from  
white privilege. At one time in my life, I would not have been able  
to say that, because I needed to believe that my success in life was  
due solely to my individual talent and effort. I saw myself as the  
heroic American, the rugged individualist. I was so deeply seduced by  
the culture's mythology that I couldn't see the fear that was binding  
me to those myths.

Like all white Americans, I was living with the fear that maybe I  
didn't really deserve my success, that maybe luck and privilege had  
more to do with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid I wasn't  
heroic or rugged, that I wasn't special. I let go of some of that  
fear when I realized that, indeed, I wasn't special, but that I was  
still me. What I do well, I still can take pride in, even when I know  
that the rules under which I work in are stacked to my benefit. Until  
we let go of the fiction that people have complete control over their  
fate - that we can will ourselves to be anything we choose - then we  
will live with that fear.

White privilege is not something I get to decide whether I want to  
keep. Every time I walk into a store at the same time as a black man  
and the security guard follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am  
benefiting from white privilege. There is not space here to list all  
the ways in which white privilege plays out in our daily lives, but  
it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day  
white supremacy is erased from this society.

  [Note: A version of this essay ran in the Perspective section of  
the Baltimore Sun on July 4, 1999. It is a follow-up to an essay on  
the same subject that ran in July 1998.   By writing about the  
politics of white privilege--and listening to the folks who responded  
to that writing--I have had to face one more way that privilege runs  
deep in my life, and it makes me uncomfortable.

The discomfort tells me I might be on the right track.

Last year I published an article about white privilege in the  
Baltimore Sun that then went out over a wire service to other  
newspapers. Electronic copies proliferated and were picked up on  
Internet discussion lists, and the article took on a life of its own.

As a result, every week over the past year I have received at least a  
dozen letters from people who want to talk about race. I learned not  
only more about my own privilege, but more about why many white folks  
can't come to terms with the truism I offered in that article: White  
people, whether overtly racist or not, benefit from living in a world  
mostly run by white people that has been built on the land and the  
backs of non-white people.

The reactions varied from racist rantings, to deeply felt expressions  
of pain and anger, to declarations of solidarity. But probably the  
most important response I got was from non-white folks, predominantly  
African-Americans, who said something like this: "Of course there is  
white privilege. I've been pointing it out to my white friends and co- 
workers for years. Isn't funny that almost no one listens to me, but  
everyone takes notice when a white guy says it."

Those comments forced me again to ponder the privilege I live with.  
Who really does knows more about white privilege, me or the people on  
the other side of that privilege? Me, or a black inner-city teenager  
who is automatically labeled a gang member and feared by many white  
folks? Me, or an American Indian on the streets of a U.S. city who is  
invisible to many white folks? Whose voices should we be paying  
attention to?

My voice gets heard in large part because I am a white man with a  
Ph.D. who holds a professional job with status. In most settings, I  
speak with the assumption that people not only will listen, but will  
take me seriously. I speak with the assumption that my motives will  
not be challenged; I can rely on the perception of me as a neutral  
authority, someone whose observations can be trusted.

Every time I open my mouth, I draw on, and in some ways reinforce, my  
privilege, which is in large part tied to race.

Right now, I want to use that privilege to acknowledge the many non- 
white people who took the time to tell me about the enduring  
realities of racism in the United States. And, I want to talk to the  
white people who I think misread my essay and misunderstand what's at  
stake.

The responses of my white critics broke down into a few basic  
categories, around the following claims:

1. White privilege doesn't exist because affirmative action has made  
being white a disadvantage. The simple response: Extremely limited  
attempts to combat racism, such as affirmative action, do virtually  
nothing to erase the white privilege built over 500 years that  
pervades our society. As a friend of mine says, the only real  
disadvantage to being white is that it so often prevents people from  
understanding racial issues.

2. White privilege exists, but it can't be changed because it is  
natural for any group to favor its own, and besides, the worst  
manifestations of racism are over. Response: This approach makes  
human choices appear outside of human control, which is a dodge to  
avoid moral and political responsibility for the injustice we  
continue to live with.

3. White privilege exists, and that's generally been a good thing  
because white Europeans have civilized the world. Along the way some  
bad things may have happened, and we should take care to be nice to  
non-whites to make up for that. Response: These folks often argued  
the curiously contradictory position that (1) non-whites and their  
cultures are not inferior, but (2) white/European culture is  
superior. As for the civilizing effect of Europe, we might consider  
five centuries of inhuman, brutal colonialism and World Wars I and  
II, and then ask what "civilized" means.

4. White privilege exists because whites are inherently superior, and  
I am a weakling and a traitor for suggesting otherwise. Response: The  
Klan isn't dead.

There is much to say beyond those short responses, but for now I am  
more interested in one common assumption that all these  
correspondents made, that my comments on race and affirmative action  
were motivated by "white liberal guilt." The problem is, they got two  
out of the three terms wrong. I am white, but I'm not a liberal. In  
political terms, I'm a radical; I don't think liberalism offers real  
solutions because it doesn't attack the systems of power and  
structures of illegitimate authority that are the root cause of  
oppression, be it based on race, gender, sexuality, or class. These  
systems of oppression, which are enmeshed and interlocking, require  
radical solutions.

And I don't feel guilty. Guilt is appropriate when one has wronged  
another, when one has something to feel guilty about. In my life I  
have felt guilty for racist or sexist things I have said or done,  
even when they were done unconsciously. But that is guilt I felt  
because of specific acts, not for the color of my skin. Also,  
focusing on individual guilt feelings is counterproductive when it  
leads us to ponder the issue from a psychological point of view  
instead of a moral and political one.

So, I cannot, and indeed should not, feel either guilty or proud  
about being white, because it is a state of being I have no control  
over. However, as a member of a society--and especially as a  
privileged member of society--I have an obligation not simply to  
enjoy that privilege that comes with being white but to study and  
understand it, and work toward a more just world in which such  
unearned privilege is eliminated.

Some of my critics said that such a goal is ridiculous; after all,  
people have unearned privileges of all kinds. Several people pointed  
out that, for example, tall people have unearned privilege in  
basketball, and we don't ask tall people to stop playing basketball  
nor do we eliminate their advantage.

The obvious difference is that racial categories are invented; they  
carry privilege or disadvantage only because people with power create  
and maintain the privilege for themselves at the expense of others.  
The privilege is rooted in violence and is maintained through that  
violence as well as more subtle means.

I can't change the world so that everyone is the same height, so that  
everyone has the same shot at being a pro basketball player. In fact,  
I wouldn't want to; it would be a drab and boring world if we could  
erase individual differences like that. But I can work with others to  
change the world to erase the effects of differences that have been  
created by one group to keep others down.

Not everyone who wrote to me understood this. In fact, the most  
creative piece of mail I received in response to the essay also was  
the most confused. In a padded envelope from Clement, Minn., came a  
brand-new can of Kiwi Shoe Polish, black. Because there was no note  
or letter, I have to guess at my correspondent's message, but I  
assume the person was suggesting that if I felt so bad about being  
white, I might want to make myself black.

But, of course, I don't feel bad about being white. The only  
motivation I might have to want to be black -- to be something I am  
not -- would be pathological guilt over my privilege. In these  
matters, guilt is a coward's way out, an attempt to avoid the moral  
and political questions. As I made clear in the original essay, there  
is no way to give up the privilege; the society we live in confers it  
upon us, no matter what we want.

So, I don't feel guilty about being white in a white supremacist  
society, but I feel an especially strong moral obligation to engage  
in collective political activity to try to change the society because  
I benefit from the injustice. I try to be reflective and accountable,  
though I am human and I make mistakes. I think a lot about how I may  
be expressing racism unconsciously, but I don't lay awake at night  
feeling guilty. Guilt is not a particularly productive emotion, and I  
don't wallow in it.

What matters is what we decide to do with the privilege. For me, that  
means speaking, knowing that I speak with a certain unearned  
privilege that gives me advantages I cannot justify. It also means  
learning to listen before I speak, and realizing that I am probably  
not as smart as I sometimes like to think I am.

It means listening when an elderly black man who sees the original  
article tacked up on the bulletin board outside my office while on a  
campus tour stops to chat. This man, who has lived with more kinds of  
racism than I can imagine through more decades than I have been  
alive, says to me, "White privilege, yes, good to keep an eye on  
that, son. Keep yourself honest. But don't forget to pay attention to  
the folks who live without the privilege."

It doesn't take black shoe polish to pay attention. It takes only a  
bit of empathy to listen, and a bit of courage to act.

How We Are White

By Gary Howard from the Southern Poverty Law Journal, Teaching Tolerance

The break is over and I am ready to begin the second half of a four  
hour multicultural curriculum workshop. Twenty-five teachers and  
staff are scrunched into 2nd grade desks, all eyes and White faces  
turned toward their one African American colleague, who has asked to  
address the group. He announces that he will be leaving this workshop  
immediately and resigning at the end of the year. He has lost hope in  
their willingness, and ability to deal with issues of race.

After he leaves, a painful silence grips the room. I realize that my  
planned agenda is no longer appropriate. Gradually the participants  
begin to talk. Their comments are rife with guilt, shame, anger,  
blame, denial, sadness and frustration. It becomes clear there has  
been a long history leading to this moment. Together they are  
experiencing a collective meltdown over the realities of race and  
their own whiteness. One faculty member remarks, "I feel so helpless.  
What am I supposed to do as a white teacher?"

In my 25 years of work in multicultural education, I have encountered  
an almost universal uneasiness about race among White educators.  
Since the publication of my book "We Can't teach What We Don't Know":  
White teachers, multiracial schools, many people have shared their  
stories with me. A White teacher from California reports, "I realize  
that I have contributed to the failure of my students of color by not  
being able to drop the mask of privilege that I wear. Another White  
teacher writes, "I thought I was going crazy. It was helpful to hear  
that other White teachers feel similar confusion."

As White educators, we are collectively bound and unavoidably  
complicit in the arrangements of dominance that have systematically  
favored our racial group over others. In my own family, the farm was  
in Minnesota that I cherish as part of our heritage was actually  
stolen from the Ojibwe people only a few years before my great- 
grandparents acquired it. This is only one of the countless ways I am  
inextricably tied to privilege. I did not personally take the land,  
yet I continue to benefit from its possession.

But privilege and complicity are only part of the story. The police  
officers who brutally assaulted civil rights activists during the  
Selma march in 1965 were certainly White, but so were many of the  
marchers who stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge with Dr. Martin Luther  
King Jr. on that awful Sunday. It is true that three White men  
dragged James Byrd to a horrific death in Jasper , Texas, but it is  
also true that many White townspeople and a predominantly White jury  
condemned this act of racist violence.

In the course of my work and personal reflection, I have discovered  
there are many ways of being white. Some Whites are bound by  
fundamentalist White orientation. They view the world through a  
single lens that is always right and always white. White supremacist  
hate groups represent one particularly hostile form of fundamentalist  
White orientation, but there is also an uninformed and well- 
intentioned version that simply has never been exposed to other  
perspectives. This was my orientation from birth through my high  
school years, when I had never met a person who wasn't white.  
Fundamentalist White teachers often say, "I don't see color. I treat  
all my students the same."

Other Whites live from an integrationist White orientation, where  
differences are acknowledged and tolerated but still not fully  
accepted. Integrationist Whites are self-congratulatory in their  
apparent openness to racial differences, yet often paternalistic and  
condescending of people of color. In this way of being White, we  
prefer to keep the peace, avoid confrontation and maintain control,  
rather that actually get to the core of our separate truths and  
unique racial perspectives. Integrationist White teachers say to  
students of color, "I know how you feel," even when we have no real  
connection to their reality. This was my first orientation when I  
first began "helping" Black kids in the ghetto in the 1960s. I  
thought I was the answer, rather than the question.

Finally, there is the transformationist White identity, which is a  
place of humility and active engagement in one's own continuing  
growth and reformation. Transformationist Whites have acquired a  
paradoxical identity, which allows us to acknowledge our inevitable  
privilege and racism while at the same time actively working to  
dismantle our legacy of dominance. Transformationist White teachers  
know it is our place and our responsibility to engage issues of race  
and multicultural education in the classroom.

White educators do have a choice to grow beyond our ignorance,  
denial, and guilt. There is a journey, which I envision is like a  
river that carries us through many confusing currents and treacherous  
rapids, but which eventually can lead to a place of authentic  
multicultural White identity. Ultimately, good teaching is not a  
function of the color of our skin. It is much more closely related to  
the temperament of our mind and the hue of our heart. We did not  
choose whether to be White, but we can effect how we are White. This  
is both our challenge and our hope. In the last few years I have  
returned several times to work with the elementary staff who  
experienced such a painful meltdown over issues of race. With courage  
they have stayed on the river, chosen to look deeply into the  
reflective pool of their own difficult history together, and have  
come to a place of honesty and renewed commitment to a multicultural  
vision for their school. At our last meeting, when the painful event  
was alluded to in discussion, a newly hired Asian American asked,  
"What happened?" A veteran White teacher responded, "Its a long story  
we need to share with you. It will help you know who we are."

Gary Howard is currently President of the REACH Center for  
Multicultural Education in Seattle. He is the author of "We Can't  
Teach What We Don't Know", available from REACH 206-545-04977


Hue and Cry on 'Whiteness Studies'
An Academic Field's Take on Race Stirs Interest and Anger

"It's the suppressed history I'm interested in teaching," says  
University of Massachusetts professor Arlene Avakian

By Darryl Fears Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, June 20, 2003;  
Page A01

AMHERST, Mass. -- Naomi Cairns was among the leaders in the privilege  
walk, and she wasn't happy about it.

The exercise, which recently involved Cairns and her classmates in a  
course at the University of Massachusetts, had two simple rules: When  
the moderator read a statement that applied to you, you stepped  
forward; if it didn't, you stepped back. After the moderator asked if  
you were certain you could get a bank loan whenever you wanted,  
Cairns thought, "Oh my God, here we go again," and took yet another  
step forward.

"You looked behind you and became really uncomfortable," said Cairns,  
a 24-year-old junior who stood at the front of the classroom with  
other white students. Asian and black students she admired were near  
the back. "We all started together," she said, "and now were so  
separated."

The privilege walk was part of a course in whiteness studies, a  
controversial and relatively new academic field that seeks to change  
how white people think about race. The field is based on a left- 
leaning interpretation of history by scholars who say the concept of  
race was created by a rich white European and American elite, and has  
been used to deny property, power and status to nonwhite groups for  
two centuries.

Advocates of whiteness studies -- most of whom are white liberals who  
hope to dismantle notions of race -- believe that white Americans are  
so accustomed to being part of a privileged majority they do not see  
themselves as part of a race. "Historically, it has been common to  
see whites as a people who don't have a race, to see racial identity  
as something others have," said Howard Winant, a white professor of  
sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a  
strong proponent of whiteness studies. "It's a great advance to start  
looking at whiteness as a group."

Winant said whiteness studies advocates must be careful not to paint  
white heritage with a broad brush, or stray from the historical  
record. Generalizations, he said, will only demonize whiteness.

But opponents say whiteness studies has already done that. David  
Horowitz, a conservative social critic who is white, said whiteness  
studies is leftist philosophy spiraling out of control. "Black  
studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos,  
women's studies celebrates women, and white studies attacks white  
people as evil," Horowitz said.

"It's so evil that one author has called for the abolition of  
whiteness," he said. "I have read their books, and it's just  
despicable."

Whiteness studies, said Matthew Spalding, is "a derogatory name for  
Western civilization." Its study is important only to those who think  
"black studies and Chicano studies haven't gone far enough in  
removing the baggage of Anglo-European traditions," said Spalding,  
director of the Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

"The notion that you can get rid of a historical tradition as a way  
to further current . . . concerns strikes me as intellectually  
misleading," Spalding said. "It makes certain assumptions and looks  
for certain outcomes. It's close-minded."

Whiteness studies can be traced to the writings of black  
intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin, but the field  
did not coalesce until liberal white scholars embraced it about eight  
years ago, according to some who helped shape it. Now, despite  
widespread criticism and what some opponents view as major flaws in  
the curriculum, at least 30 institutions -- from Princeton University  
to the University of California at Los Angeles -- teach courses in  
whiteness studies.

The courses are emerging at a pivotal time. Scientists have  
determined that there is scant genetic distinction between races, and  
the 2000 Census allowed residents to define themselves by multiple  
racial categories for the first time. Dozens of books, such as "The  
Invention of the White Race," "How the Irish Became White" and  
"Memoir of a Race Traitor," are standard reading for people who study  
whiteness. Recently, the Public Broadcasting System aired a  
documentary titled "Race: The Power of an Illusion."

"If you ask 10 people what is race, you're likely to get 10 different  
answers," said Larry Adelman, who conceived, produced and co-directed  
that documentary. "How many races would there be? Where did the idea  
come from?"

At U-Mass., those questions and others were raised in "The Social  
Construction of Whiteness and Women," one of two whiteness studies  
courses Cairns took last semester.

The students, about three-quarters of them white, slid into desks and  
unloaded giant book bags, which were stuffed with required reading.  
The books included Theodore Allen's "The Invention of the White Race:  
Racial Oppression and Social Control," which argues, in part, that  
the collection of European immigrants into a white race was a  
political act to control the country.

Arlene Avakian, the chairman of the U-Mass. women's studies  
department, sat on a wide desk, let her legs dangle and asked the  
class to discuss the ideas of racial privilege, environmental comfort  
and social control. Not all of her students had taken part in the  
privilege walk -- it was conducted in another course -- but many of  
them had.

Winnie Chen, 22, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, said it pained  
her to deal with race every day when her white peers seemed to rarely  
think about it. She tried to discuss race with a white friend once,  
she said, but he felt ambushed. "He said I was pulling a Pearl Harbor  
on him," she said. "It is so difficult for them to think there is  
another lens. He talked about Irish oppression. I asked, 'Have you  
ever considered why you're no longer oppressed here when Asians,  
blacks and Hispanics still are?' "

A white student raised her hand and said she and a friend had gone to  
a hall reserved for black student affairs, and the friend said she  
didn't feel comfortable. Brandi-Ann Andrade, a 21-year-old junior who  
is black, rolled her eyes. "So what?" she asked. "I never feel  
comfortable here. I'm a student at a school where most people are  
white. The only time I feel comfortable is when I'm at home." Dan  
Clason-Hook, 24, a white senior, said, "White students would never  
say that we own the campus, but [whites] feel they do."

The desire to always feel comfortable in their skin is something  
white people feel entitled to, said Avakian, who is white. The  
dominant group wants to control its environment, to own it.

The students listened without objection, but they don't always.  
Avakian said two students in an earlier semester had challenged her,  
questioning why she taught the course. After some discussion, Avakian  
recalled, they concluded her reason was white guilt.

Avakian dismissed that conclusion. "It's the suppressed history I'm  
interested in teaching," she said. "White people can't know ourselves  
and our country without knowing this history."

Although whiteness studies teachers adopt different approaches for  
different courses, they draw on the same reading of history.

That reading traces the invention of race to the time and social  
class of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in the late 18th century not  
only that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of  
Independence, but also this, from his "Notes on the State of Virginia":

"I advance it, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether  
originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and  
circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of  
body and mind."

 >From such sentiments, whiteness studies advocates say, race was  
invented, and the idea of white superiority was crucial to justifying  
slavery and, later, the dispossession of Native Americans, Hispanics  
and Asians.

"Jefferson believed in majority rule, but what majority was he in?"  
said historian James O. Horton of George Washington University. "He  
wasn't in the majority in terms of gender. He wasn't in the majority  
in terms of class. The only majority he was in was race."

Horton said poor white workers often joined black slaves and freemen  
in popular rebellions in the 18th century. For example, he said,  
Crispus Attucks, a black man, was among the first to die when an  
interracial mob confronted British soldiers in the "Boston Massacre,"  
five years before the American Revolution started.

But something happened between that time and Andrew Jackson's  
presidency in 1828, Horton said. "Property laws were struck down,  
allowing white people at the bottom of society to vote based on race  
in 1807. At the same time that was done, race laws were put into its  
place.

"There is this constant message hammered at poor white people,"  
Horton said. "You may be poor, you may have miserable lives right  
now, but . . . the thing we want you to focus on is the fact that you  
are white."

In the 19th and 20th centuries, "race science" was used by Supreme  
Court justices to deny rights, property and citizenship to various  
Asian immigrants. In the housing boom that followed World War II,  
black veterans were denied new federally backed mortgages that helped  
build white suburbs.

Avakian said that if American history curriculums "told that story,  
this would be a different country."

"Slavery and genocide coexist with democracy and freedom," she said,  
and that's what whiteness studies teaches. "President Andrew Jackson  
presided during the mass murder of Indians. If we knew in detail how  
slavery existed alongside freedom, we would have to change the  
national narrative."

After Class Chen said Avakian's course made her more aware of how the  
sense of belonging corresponds to skin color. "I would never not  
choose to be someone's friend because they are white, but I think  
it's important to have friends of color," she said.

Jya Plavin, a 20-year-old sophomore who is white, said the course  
"was really, really hard . . . both personally and as a white person,  
because you really want to take the focus off you and your whiteness."

Clason-Hook said that the class was the only one he knew of that  
explicitly spoke of whiteness, and that it helped him realize that  
"other classes, like economics, politics and history, are about  
whiteness. They are written by and are about white people." He said  
later that confronting whiteness, day to day, is challenging. "I am  
racist. It's not on the surface, but it's in me. Day to day I hear  
racist comments, and people don't even know what they're saying."

Andrade said she thought "the class was beneficial, because it brings  
to light that white people, too, are racialized."

Thinking back on the class discussion a few days later, Andrade  
wondered: "In a culture that puts whiteness on top, what is  
blackness? When you look at whiteness, blackness is always in the  
negative."

Cairns, who had sailed through the privilege walk, said whiteness  
studies helped her understand race a little better. "My social group  
has always been white," she said. "I've noticed that, and I've  
started to look beyond my group."

© 2003 The Washington Post Company