4-A-3+Group+C

=Home > Activity 4-A-3: White Privilege > Group C=

Instructions:

 * 1) Click the **Edit** tab in the upper-right corner.
 * 2) Use the Summary area below to collaborate with your group to create your summary of the connections between white privilege, the colorblind perspective, and social dominance theory.
 * 3) Press **Save** on the Editor bar.

You don't need to sign your work or indicate which sections you contributed; your facilitator can see your contributions in the history of the page. Your group summary should demonstrate your collaboration rather than being a collection of unconnected individual ideas. When your group decides that the summary is finished, have one group member remove "(Draft)" below so your facilitator will know that it is ready for review.
 * Note:**

Summary
The following five privileges that Peggy McIntosh lists in her article stand out to us: 4. **I can take a job with affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.** 5. **If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.**
 * 1. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.**
 * I connected to this point due to the fact that I am moving with my kids this summer. Out of all that things that I am concerned about, it would never cross my mind to be concerned about how the neighbors will react to my family moving in the neighborhood. Just another example of white privilege that I was never even aware of.
 * My family has relocated many times. My concerns haven't been if I would be accepted in my new location, but more whether that neighborhood was acceptable to me.
 * 2. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure that I haven’t been singled out because of race.**
 * I currently live in an affluent area and travel along the main thoroughfare through the community many times a day. I can honestly say that 7 out of 10 cars being pulled over on that road are driven by African American men. According to the city website the current demographics are .02% African American. I can’t imagine being targeted due to the color of my skin.
 * This leads to the question, "Why do tax returns ask for your race?"
 * 3. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.**
 * As a parent, I shop with no concerns of locating items my children read and play that depict their race. When I taught second grade, I purchased many books for my classroom library. I tried to balance fiction and nonfiction as well as have many picture books with characters that look like my students. That was really hard to do! It took years of collecting until I felt that I had a reasonable number of appropriate books that represented the student population in my classroom.
 * While it is very easy to find books, cards, toys, etc depicting White children, it is much more difficult to find these items for other races. In my classroom, I do not have many materials for minority students and need to make a concerted effort to improve this.
 * This is thought provoking as I seek full time employment. Interestingly, at the school where I last taught the African American woman principal hired only black teachers. This caused a huge controversy among the veteran white teachers. Even with the new hires, the teaching staff remained about 90% white women.
 * No one is going to question whether I got a job because I'm White. However, since many school districts are trying to hire more minority teachers, I have not been hired because there were too many White teachers.
 * Everyone can relate to going through a difficult time in life. I cannot imagine having the extra burden of the possibility of racial overtones. I truly have not conceived until now that this is a reality for people of color.
 * Because I am White, negative situations aren't seen to have racial overtones. For minorities, this is a daily message sent to them.

We feel that social dominance theory is the conscience structure of group dominance while the colorblind perspective is the subconscious facilitator. Both of these perpetuate White dominance.