Whiteness and White Privilege
Overview
On any given day, in any given place in the United States, a person is less likely to be stopped and accused of committing a crime – whether they have committed one or not – if he or she belongs to a group that has historically been defined as white for a sufficient period of time in the United States. People defined as white are also are dramatically more likely to have benefits in terms of home ownership, access to quality education and an inheritance based on previous generations’ access to those privileges of whiteness. Almost no one – white or person of color—is individually asking to be privileged or oppressed. At the same time, understanding white privilege in the context of systemic racism and doing nothing about it constitutes colluding in exactly the way the system was set up to work.
As Linda Faye Williams notes in The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America,”little or none of white privilege is maintained by blatant racists; rather institutional and structural mechanisms and public policy maintain it, both materially and psychologically. Moreover, white privilege is shared by all whites, affluent and poor, albeit to varying degrees…white skin privilege is usually less a matter of direct, referential, and snarling contempt than a system of protecting the privileges of whites by denying people of color opportunities for asset accumulation and upward mobility.”
Practices
- Detour-spotting For White Anti-racists
- How To Talk To Someone About Privilege Who Doesn’t Know What That Is
- Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building
- Working Assumptions For White Activists On Eliminating Racism: Guidelines For Recruiting Other Whites As Allies
- Identifying White Privilege in Progressive and Radical Grassroots Movements
- Witnessing Whiteness: First Steps Toward Anti-racist Practice and Culture
- Retaining Benefits, Avoiding Responsibility
- AWARE-LA Toolbox
- Developing a Positive White Identity
- White Power and Privilege
- Showing up for Racial Justice - SURJ
- The Problem with “Privilege”
- Emptying the White Knapsack
- For Whites (Like Me): On White Kids
- Decentering Whiteness: Creating Equitable Conferences Tip Sheet
- Talking to our People: SURJ Guide for Talking to White People in the Moment of Trump
- White Privilege: Let's Talk - a Resource for Transformational Dialogue
- Opportunities for White People in the Fight for Racial Justice
- When White People Are Uncomfortable, Black People Are Silenced
- Me And White Supremacy - The Workbook
- Confronting racism is not about the needs and feelings of white people
- 5 Ways White People Can Take Action in Response to White and State-Sanctioned Violence
- #EndWhiteSilence Week of Action Toolkit
- Doing the Work: Unearthing Our Own White Privilege
Research
- Dreaming of a Self Beyond Whiteness and Isolation
- The Network Economic Effects of Whiteness
- Whites Will Be Whites: The Failure to Interrogate Racial Privilege
- Framed by Privilege: Perpetuating and Resisting White supremacy in White, Middle-Class Parenting
- Understanding and Dismantling Privilege
- White Fragility
Concepts
- What is White Privilege?
- Accumulating Advantages
- The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing
- Where White Privilege Comes From?
- The Anatomy of White Guilt
- What is White Supremacy
Resources
- Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible
- Center for the Study of White American Culture
- Why Theres No Such Thing As Racism Against White People
- Jon Stewart's Priceless Response To Fox News On Ferguson
- The White Problem
- 12 Things White People Can Do Now Because of Ferguson
- From White Racist to Anti-Racist: The Lifelong Journey
- Understanding Whiteness
- Curriculum for White Americans to Educate Themselves on Race and Racism–from Ferguson to Charleston
- Finding Myself in the Story of Race
- White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies
- Decentering Whiteness
- Discussion Guide: Anti -Racist Resources for White People Taking Action for Black Lives Matter
- White Benefits
- Fighting White Supremacy and White Privilege to Build a Human Rights Movement
- Seeing White Podcast
- The Subtle Linguistics of Polite White Supremacy
- Hey White People: A Kinda Awkward Note to America
- Curriculum for White Americans to Educate Themselves on Race and Racism
- Dear White America
- A Practice in Visioning A World Beyond White Supremacy
- Reading Group Guide for White Fragility: Why is it so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism?
- What’s Missing From “White Fragility”
- What Is White Privilege?
