“My (black) Caribbean students, as a whole, tend to perform much better than my African-American students. Well, consider it -- over the years, and particularly during slavery, the best and brightest blacks in this country were weeded out. I don’t believe that blacks are naturally inferior to whites, however, American blacks are the unfortunate end product of an enforced breeding process that has left them at a mental disadvantage.”-- Unnamed Professor Racism is often conceived as the summation of prejudice plus power. This does not have to do so much with the number of people in any group, but their access to ideological and material resources (including arms). In an American university environment, these ‘arms’ may be found in the shape of grades, scholarships and fellowships, the ability of professors to give or withhold positive reinforcement, and the self-images and convictions the students themselves, both white and minority, bring into this setting. The effects of ‘white privilege’, a little-acknowledged theory that whites enjoy “an invisible package of unearned assets,” resonate silently throughout the university system, deployed as subtle psychological hand grenades. White privilege is harmful not only to the minorities it relegates to the sidelines, but damaging to the whites who are either active or passive participants in this ideology.Here is my classroom. It is a 100 level sociology course. I am one of two white students in a class of mostly African-American and Caribbean-American students. The other white student and I, and an older African-American woman, are the only students to speak at least once every session. Our professor knows our names and listens attentively when we speak. This (white) professor has made a point of telling the class that she is politically liberal and interested and educated in many minority cultures. Yet, she rolls her eyes a...
