I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group Essay

Through work to bring materials from womens studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed mens unwillingness to assigning that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to womens statues, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they grasst or wont support the idea of lessening mens. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from womens disadvantages. These denials cherish male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or rever chew the fatd.Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of while privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to operate one of its corollary aspects, wh ite privilege, which puts me at an advantage.I think whites are cautiously taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to select what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I scum bag count on cashing in each day, but about which I was meant to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of circumscribed provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks.Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in womens studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to break up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unc onscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are just seen as oppressive, even when we dont see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out whites are taught to think of their lives as virtuously neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow them to be more like us.