Complicating White Privilege: Poverty, Class, and the Nature of the Knapsac
http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=16687
by Paul Gorski — February 06, 2012
Since its popularization in the 1990’s, the term “white privilege” has become, perhaps, the central focus of “diversity” and “multicultural” education discourses. Although the concept can be a critical component of understanding and undermining racial hierarchies in schools, it has been co-opted (largely by white scholars and from scholars and activists of color) and often used in overly-simplistic ways. I discuss, for instance, the enforcement of dialogic controls in conversations about white privilege, and particularly in white educator caucus dialogues, that disallow consideration for intersecting oppressions, including economic injustice, thereby ignoring tremendous differences in access to privilege, even among white anti-racist educators. As a result, the popular “white privilege” discourse in education appears to be stuck in a state of arrested development that actually further privileges white keynoters and consultants who have built economically solvent careers by writing and speaking about it, sometimes without acknowledging how their privilege operates differently from that of white people who do not enjoy the leisure time or resources to write essays about white privilege. I argue that these complexities must be explored more earnestly, especially by white people in the education milieu, including me, who have strengthened our privilege through an increasingly profitable white privilege “industry.”
Great cartoon: http://www.buzzfeed.com/michaelblackmon/17-harrowing-examples-of-white-privilege-9hu9
