Who's Got the Power?

The climate of our classroom for the past week has been…interesting, to say the least. Frustration, dissention, and negativity seem to have been at an all time high. Yet the issues we are discussing this week are no different than the issues we have been discussing for the other weeks of class. So why does everybody care all of a sudden? My opinion is that this is the first time in the class where many of the students have had the subject relate directly to their lives. They were each put into a group (white male, white female, black male, etc.), and were told what that symbolized – they were, in essence, stereotyped, and for many, the stereotype rang true. To make another generalization, what do teenagers dislike more than being told who they are and where they are going? The smallest incongruence with their “true selves” sparks an volley of retorts: “Yes, but I’m not…Not exactly…etc,” which is comical, because how many high schoolers actually have any clue as to who they are or where they are going? This week’s discussion was about who had the power in America. It was essentially declared that white males do. Statistically, it is not something that you can argue with. Therefore, my class looked to the more analytical elements of the argument, such as, “Why do we feel the need to classify people into groups like this?” and some even asked (generally outside of the classroom setting), “Who cares if white males are in power? It’s that way because there are more white males, and they historically have been in power.” It was interesting to me that it seemed to be the white males making the vast majority of these comments. Was it because there were more of them in the class? Or because they felt like they were defending our justifying their “kind”, which is an odd concept on its own.

Accordingly, we read “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” by Peggy McIntosh. Regarding white privilege, McIntosh states, “I had been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.”1 That is to say that McIntosh had been conditioned to ignore her “privilege.” Perhaps that is why the white males in my class were so frustrated. They had spent their entire lives being conditioned that there was no white privilege: that they struggled, others struggled, and skin color didn’t really play a role any more. Therefore, when this concept of white privilege was presented to them, it made them uncomfortable, and the only way that they knew how to fix it was to blame the system, and this classification system in the first place. However, sight is one of our most elementary senses. Without hearing a single word of what a person has to say, without knowing a thing about them, we immediately classify them based on what we can see: their race, their level of attractiveness and approachableness, their apparent demeanor, etc. Judging something by its appearance is a trait that evolutionarily helps us to survive; we run away from the threatening looking tiger. It is a characteristic that, no matter how much we want it to, may never disappear from human nature. In my opinion, white males are in power because they have been in power, and people are generally uncomfortable with change. So yes, that does give white males a bit of an advantage. However, can we really generalize this; can we categorize a group of people by nothing more than their skin color and gender? It makes us uncomfortable because we see it, recognize the logical flaw, and continue to do it anyways. We may speak of things such as white privilege, but we do little to correct it, because that only serves to draw more attention to it, which makes us even more uncomfortable. It’s a vicious cycle.

1 McIntosh, Peggy. "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." Essay.