White Privilege or Burden

When reading both articles for this week, I remembered the Kipling`s poem The White Man`s Burden (https://youtu.be/aHTPBjCrdpk). It might have been so because of the analogies drawn in the writings: “white privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions” (McIntosh,1988, pp. 1–2) and the description of the activities of the symbolic writing off the white privileges on the strips of paper to be put into the actual backpack (as narrated in the Lensmire, T., et al. (2013) article).

Then, I asked myself: what a white privilege is. Looking at the term through McIntosh`s (1988) perspective, it feels more like a burden rather than a privilege. According to McIntosh (1988), by acknowledging the privilege any white person grants it to those who were lacking it, while freeing herself from the “burden”; which is hardly the case in practice. So, I do agree with Lensmire, et al. (2013) critique of the white privilege pedagogy, where “little attention is given to the structural origins of privilege, and how confession of privilege seems to exhaust antiracist action” (p. 416). On a larger scale, white privilege pedagogy does not address the historic, economic, political, social, and cultural roots of the racial system that led to the creation of a category of “white” marked by privilege (Jacobson, 1998; Roediger, 1991).

However, I question the statement that “white privilege is not the cause of racial differentiation and structures; it is the effect of the socially, politically, and economically constructed system that we call race” (Lensmire, et al., 2013, p. 417). The authors mention the constructed system, but who constructed it? Race is a social construct, but society consists of humans, so humans have an impact on the society. I guess here we can look at the broader question of individual choices and how influential a person can be within the historical context. We all know of great figures, who contributed to antiracism and were on the forefront of talking about the issue (M.L. King https://youtu.be/z_ZgSK9yIbk; M. Gandhi; N. Mandela).

I definitely see advantages of the white privilege pedagogy, if taken inter-textually and progressively, using not only the McIntosh`s approach but extra teaching resources as described by the second narrator in the Lensmire, et al.  (2013) article. I also see the importance of creating a third space, a safe space to express any thoughts and ideas on difficult controversial issues as done through the Serial Testimony practices. Though criticised for the lack of further analysis and deep reflections, the participant said that it “allowed me and other participants to share our initial thoughts and be heard without response and critique from other participants” (Lensmire, et al., 2013, p. 419).

As for parallels to the Bakhtin`s notion of the authoritative discourse made in the conclusion of the Lensmire et al (2013) work, one has to understand that he was conducting his research during the time of complete censorship and other conditions hardly comparable to the context of the research on questions of white privilege. His contributions to dialogism and phenomenology, however, in my opinion are highly applicable when talking about anti-racism education (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 1975).

The concepts of white privilege and white supremacy, in my opinion, are more holistically described in the Kipling`s poem, that may be read as satire and may be read as an ode to imperialism and colonialism—readings and perspectives vary. I guess the question of what constitutes a white privilege goes wide and beyond the fifty daily effects outlined by McIntosh (1988). It left me wondering how different the answers will be if a white privilege was described by people of different ethnicity. Should the answers match? If they do match, does it mean that there is less or no more racism. Will racism ever disappear? Is there racism within people of one color based on the country they are coming from?

References

McIntosh, P. (1988). Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Available at: https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=ssl#

Lensmire, T., McManimon, S., Tierney, J., Lee-Nchols, M., Casey, Z., Lensmire, A., Davis, B. (2013). McIntosh as synecdoche: How teacher education`s focus on white privilege undermines anti-racism. Harvard Educational Review, 83(3), pp. 410-431.