Reflection On White Like Me

First of, this class and all the readings/videos are truly incredible. I can’t say that enough. I not only love diving into my personal experiences and ideas about privilege, but I love that everyone else in the class is doing the same. We are all starting to understand how we really see the world and the ways in which we see privilege. In White Like Me, he mentioned that he saw how the teachers were treating black people differently and this made him mad. He tried to stand up for social justice and inequality while learning to see his own privilege. Privilege is ‘the rights and protections enjoyed by some while the rights and protections are denied to others’; this is what privilege means to me. Privilege means that I am going to walk with my white friends in the mall and have the store clerk follow me around. Privilege is being looked at by all my peers when talking about things like slavery in a primarily white school, as if slavery doesn’t affect those looking at me. Privilege is being able to turn your back to the issues surrounding racism just because you aren’t necessarily being discriminated against and you ‘don’t discriminate’, therefore you don’t see the racial inequalities happening all around you. I live these inequalities and there are many …show more content…
It’s easy to be blind to our own privilege while looking down, or up, upon the privilege of those around us. You can’t stop your thought process nor can you throw away or stop privilege. I think that this could distort the ways in which we look at our students, which could result in a change of how we treat all of our students. I think it’s interesting to look at the racial micro aggressions chart in the article (wing, sueetal) because I think they happen more often in the classroom than we may