D01040868 Typewritten Text 6 CHAPTER 3: SYSTEMS VS INDIVIDUALS While U.S. citizens espouse the belief in the individual, we also have people who aren’t granted the full benefits of individuality. When we look at our society, any individual who belongs to those groups that are not dominant in society, we can see that we often treat these people, not as individuals, but as members of whatever group they belong to. The difference in the way we treat the individuals who are members of the non-dominant groups, is not always easily seen, but let’s start by thinking about the difference between dominant and subordinate groups in general, in our culture. This is exactly what the scholar, Peggy McIntosh did as she uncovered a concept that has been much talked about in recent years. https://nationalseedproject.org/images/documents/Knapsack_plus_Notes-Peggy_McIntosh.pdf McIntosh, a feminist scholar at a prestigious college, was studying or rather creating the field of study now known as women’s studies when she accidently created the field of White Cultural Studies. Before women scholars of the 1960’s and 70’s there were very few sources that one could find about the ways that women have contributed to making our culture. This is one of the signs that males are dominant in our culture. Most all the heroes in our history books are/were men, most of the great artists whose works we learn about are men, most of the novels and poems taught in schools were/have been written by male authors. If you don’t believe me, try to name 5 famous women visual artists. How many can you name besides Georgia O’Keefe? Ms. McIntosh was struck by how difficult it was for women to not only find other women as role models in academia, but how difficult it was to find anything that ‘looked like herself,’ reflected in what she was learning. This idea of reflection is an important topic that we should take a minute to examine. The dominant groups in a culture are the groups that see themselves reflected everywhere. Activate Your Sociological Imagination Now! Imagine living your whole life and never being able to see your own reflection. What if when you looked in a mirror, or a pool of water, or a window, you saw someone else’s face instead of your own? How do you think that you would feel? Particularly if you knew that other people, who look different than you do always see their own reflection in the mirror. How do you think that would impact your life? Would everything remain the same as it is now? Does your race impact the way you answer this question? People of color—non-white people—have a difficult time finding themselves when they look at the world today. Most of the people on US television are white; most of the people whose faces are on magazines are white. Most movies feature people who are white. It is particularly difficult for people of color to see themselves as positive-figures-in-history-who-made-our-country-great. All the myths of how our country was built.

1. D01040868
Typewritten Text
6
CHAPTER 3: SYSTEMS VS INDIVIDUALS
While U.S. citizens espouse the belief in the individual, we also
have people who aren’t granted the full benefits of
individuality. When we look at our society, any individual who
belongs to those groups that are not dominant in society, we can
see that we often treat these people, not as individuals, but as
members of whatever group they belong to. The difference in
the way we treat the individuals who are members of the non-
dominant groups, is not always easily seen, but let’s start by
thinking about the difference between dominant and subordinate
groups in general, in our culture. This is exactly what the
scholar, Peggy McIntosh did as she uncovered a concept that
has been much talked about in recent years.
https://nationalseedproject.org/images/documents/Knapsack_plu
s_Notes-Peggy_McIntosh.pdf
McIntosh, a feminist scholar at a prestigious college, was
studying or rather creating the field of study now known as
women’s studies when she accidently created the field of White
Cultural Studies. Before women scholars of the 1960’s and 70’s
there were very few sources that one could find about the ways
that women have contributed to making our culture. This is one
of the signs that males are dominant in our culture. Most all the
heroes in our history books are/were men, most of the great
artists whose works we learn about are men, most of the novels

2. and poems taught in schools were/have been written by male
authors. If you don’t believe me, try to name 5 famous women
visual artists. How many can you name besides Georgia
O’Keefe? Ms. McIntosh was struck by how difficult it was for
women to not only find other women as role models in
academia, but how difficult it was to find anything that ‘looked
like herself,’ reflected in what she was learning. This idea of
reflection is an important topic that we should take a minute to
examine. The dominant groups in a culture are the groups that
see themselves reflected everywhere.
Activate Your Sociological Imagination Now!
Imagine living your whole life and never being able to see your
own reflection. What if when you looked in a mirror, or a pool
of water, or a window, you saw someone else’s face instead of
your own? How do you think that you would feel? Particularly
if you knew that other people, who look different than you do
always see their own reflection in the mirror. How do you think
that would impact your life? Would everything remain the same
as it is now? Does your race impact the way you answer this
question?
People of color—non-white people—have a difficult time
finding themselves when they look at the world today. Most of
the people on US television are white; most of the people whose
faces are on magazines are white. Most movies feature people
who are white. It is particularly difficult for people of color to
see themselves as positive-figures-in-history-who-made-our-
country-great. All the myths of how our country was built are
based in whiteness, ignoring all of the obvious contributions of
people of color. People of color seem to be absent from the
worlds of art and science, from any of the fields that are thought
of as knowledge. There are two places in our culture where
people of color are often found: sports and entertainment. And
both these fields involve many people of color, using their
bodies to entertain a largely white audience.
White people have a different racial experience than people of
color, that many white people are not conscious of having. This

3. is because white experiences are treated as ‘normal’, as the
definition of what it means to ‘be American.’ Because this is
the case, white people often have people who look, talk, act,
think—who are like themselves—reflected to themselves when
they look at the world. This leads white people to believe that
all people have a similar experience when in fact, experiences
often differ according to racial groups.
The Privilege of Being an Individual
People of color, like white people are individuals. This is clear.
What is not so clear is that people of color are also aware that
they are members of a group as well as individuals. Black
people, Asian people, indigenous people, brown people are all
aware that they belong to a racial group. This consciousness of
racial group membership is often missing for white people.
White people are often not conscious of being white. White
people do not often think of themselves as being members of a
group of ‘white people’. People of color have what W.E.B.
DuBois called, a “double consciousness.” We are conscious of
being a member of our race as well as being an individual. This
is a complex issue.
Let me use myself as an example, so that you can begin to
picture this double consciousness. When I am perceived of as an
individual, I am assigned different qualities than I am assigned
when I am perceived of as a member my race. As an individual I
am intelligent; as a black person, I’m not supposed to be that
smart. These two opposing views of me can be both be true at
the same time; individually I am intelligent, yet as a member of
my race, I am stereotypically perceived and treated by others as
someone who is not very smart. I live in a world where these 2
opposing views of self are true, and as in individual I have no
choice in the matter. Others see me through the filter of race,
consequently, I also see myself this way, as a black person.
These different views of me have great impact as I teach
students and interact with colleagues. I have been teaching on
the college level for over 30 years, and have experience
teaching as the single teacher in a classroom, and as a member

4. of a teaching group. Group teaching experiences have been
quite an interesting for me, and are often starkly different than
teaching by myself, in terms of how I am treated and reacted to
by students; yet there are some reactions that are common in
both settings. Students often question my credentials, and my
skills. When I give lectures and ‘profess,’ as my title calls for,
students will ask me to produce proof of what I say, not because
they want to know more about the subject matter, but because
when I talk about concepts that they have not hear before, they
doubt the truth of my words. It is my strong belief that my
being black contributes heavily to this reaction, rather my ‘not
being white’ when teaching and whiteness are more socially
acceptable. This conclusion is based on my having observed
many white instructors, and having taught with white
instructors, who will say the exact same things to our students
as I say, and never have the truthfulness of their statements
questioned. The only factor that is different between the other
teacher and myself is race. Our societal beliefs about black
people do not include space for intelligence, higher levels of
education, and being able to articulate clearly and logically.
And when I act in ways that students connect to qualities of
whiteness, my students of all colors feel entitled to question and
challenge my authority. On many occasions I will say
something to the class, and the room erupts into anger, distrust
and disbelief. When a white teaching partner says the same
thing to the same group of students, the remarks are treated as
fact, and the lessons continue without incident. What these
students were reacting to was not the outrageousness of my
pronouncements, but the blackness of their instructor.
Incidentally, I am an extremely light-skinned woman, with
naturally red or auburn hair and freckles, so one does not have
to be dark-skinned to have such a reaction from the people
around them. It must also be added that it is not only white
students who have difficulties with a teacher of color; some
students of color react in similar ways. We are all conditioned
to believe that educated status is a quality of whiteness, and we

5. react accordingly. My white teaching partners have often
expressed surprise at how much impact the race of an instructor
can have in the classroom.
Group Membership Has Its Privileges
If we go back to Peggy McIntosh, we can see how she came to
an unexpected understanding of race as she delved deeper into
feminist studies. As a White woman she could easily see that
men had advantages that women just don’t have. Men make
more money than women for the same job; boys are shown
through history books that men made our country great. The
impact of male privilege is something that Ms. McIntosh could
plainly see, and she often tells the following story. One day she
read several articles written by Black women scholars who were
not complaining just about male privilege, but about a privilege
that White women seemed to have over Black women. The
Black women said that White women were hard to work with,
and Ms. McIntosh said that she had two reactions. First, she was
offended that anyone would talk about a group of people that
she belonged to in this manner; secondly, she said that she
disagreed with what these Black women were saying. McIntosh
thought, that White women were nice, especially if they worked
with Black women. It was at this point that a whole new area of
study came to light.
McIntosh and her term: White Privilege
Let’s take a moment and define how we will use the term
privilege in this text:
Privilege: Privilege exists when one group has something of
value that is denies to others simple because of the groups they
belong to, rather than because of anything they have done. It is
unearned entitlements that only some people have access to
because of their social group memberships (dominants).
Because hierarchies of privilege exist, even within the same
group, people who are part of the group in power, (white people
with respect to people of color, men with respect to women,
binary and opposed to non-binary peoples in terms of gender,
adults with respect to children, and rich people with respect to

6. poor people) often deny people in the dominant groups deny
having privilege, even when evidence of a differential benefit is
obvious.
McIntosh put the concept of White Privilege into words that
white people could begin to understand on a large-scale basis
for the first time. Most White people who grow up in the US
are, from birth, given the privilege of being thought of not as a
member of a group (in terms of race), but as an individual. This
is not the experience that people of color in the US usually
have. While people of color know that they have an individual
existence, we are also always aware that we belong to a group
that is not accorded the same privilege as the dominant group in
our society, just as women are aware that men and boys are
given different treatment because of their gender. People of
color are always aware that while they may have lots of
individual qualities, they (POCs) and are judged by the qualities
that the dominant society bestows upon which ever racial group
they belong to. Again, we can see that privilege comes with
dominant group membership, and that the members of those
dominant groups are often blind to this impact. Invisibility of
privilege to group members is one of the ways that dominance is
kept. This is the idea that McIntosh established in her ground-
breaking article.
Most members of dominant groups are not aware of their
dominance, and do not see themselves as practitioners of
dominance. Students who question my authority in the
classroom are not conscious of the racial basis in the dynamics
that happen between us; they just know that they are bothered
by something that I said, often because it makes them question
their own thoughts and actions. McIntosh accounts for this,
when she says that her perception of self is different than the
perception of the black women who’s articles she was reading.
It is only when society’s mirror shows us a reflection of self
that we are uncomfortable with that, we begin to question the
self we see. If we are comfortable with our reflection, we think
of that view of ourselves as ‘normal,’ as how things always are.

7. But if that reflection is at odds with how we are ‘used to seeing
ourselves, at odds with what we think of as ‘normal,’ then we
have two options. The first is to question the reflection, to
decide that there is something wrong with the mirror in a way
that makes us uncomfortable. The second response is to look at
ourselves and to decide if there is truth to the difference
between this reflection of our selves, and our ‘imagined sense
of what is normal.’ When people make the decision that the
problem is in the reflection that others are showing us, we do
not make changes in ourselves, and dominance continues.
When people make the decision to examine themselves to see if
there is any truth to the uncomfortable reflection, that is when
change is possible. When we are comfortable with ourselves,
there is no change. Change comes from discomfort. The
process of changing our racial behaviors can only happen if we
become uncomfortable with who we see ourselves to be.
SEEING OURSELVES AS ‘RACIALIZED BEINGS’: OUR
NATION IS WHITE
Almost everywhere one looks throughout the U.S., we can see
the changing demographics of our nation. The year 2015 was
the first in our national history when more people of color born
in the U.S. than white people. This is significant. For most of
our history, being white was ‘normal.’ There has always been a
majority of white people in the U.S. and not many ever
questioned the ‘rightness’ of this. And because whiteness is
seen as normal, white people are also, ‘just normal.’ It is
anyone who isn’t white who is considered ‘different.’ White
ways of acting, and moving, and thinking, and talking, dressing
and just being, became what was associated with what it means
to ‘be American,’ and has been imposed on all members of this
nation.
But ‘whiteness as normal’ did not happen accidently. Remember
that we have always been a multicultural, multiracial nation
from the beginning, despite our myths about ourselves. The
indigenous people of this land are red/brown people and they
were here before the white people came, bring black people

8. with them, and importing yellow people for more labor. And as
the nation became a formal entity, our founding fathers thought
seriously about the future generations that would populate this
land. Knowing that we would need to have others who would
come and join this nation, they took up the question of
immigration and thought about who should be allowed to
become American, and who should not. Benjamin Franklin, in
his 1751 “Observations Concerning the Increase of Man,”
argued as follows:
That the Number of purely white People in the World is
proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia
chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly
so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and
Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy
(dark)Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only
excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of
White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their
Numbers were increased.
As one can see, it was in the minds of our founding fathers that
it would be best if The United States of America were a white
nation, while taking land that was red/brown, and using
enslaved black labor to build a nation based in freedom for
whites.
By 1790, when the first law on immigration was enacted, there
were two simple qualifications that one had to meet to become
an American citizen. First, one had to be free. Second, one had
to be white. A quick look through the history of the petitions of
people longing for U.S. citizenship that was taken up by the
courts will find it full of people of color petitioning the courts
to see them as white, and will find the courts almost always
unwilling to do so. Indeed, each new arrival of white ethnic
groups spent time struggling and fighting to be recognized as
white.
This history of the normalization of whiteness in the U.S.
contributes to the difficulty that people who see themselves as
white have when it comes to them also seeing themselves as

9. members of a racial group. For most of us, including people of
color, race is something that ‘other people’ have, it does not
belong to white people. Indeed, it is often difficult for white
people to speak about their whiteness as part of their identity. If
one asks a person of color, ‘what does it mean to be black,
brown, red, Asian,’ (and Asian is used because yellow is still a
racial slur), they can talk for hours. But if one asks a white
person, ‘what does it mean to be white,’ often a puzzled look
comes over their faces, and through glazed eyes, they ask, ‘what
do you mean, what does it mean to be white?’ Being white is
not something that many white people have had to think about.
They have simply just existed as, normal. And this is one of the
many privileges that comes with being white—being ‘normal.’
MORE TERMS: PREJUDICE VS RACISM
Prejudice. Discrimination. Racism. These words that we use
when we talk about race relations often seem to mean the same
thing, in fact many of us use these words interchangeably. But
there are differences in the meaning of these words, and by
taking the time to talk about these terms and to come to a
common understanding of how to use these terms, at least as we
continue through this text, will help us to avoid talking past
each other, which so often happens as we try to talk about
issues of race. Let’s examine these terms one by one.
Prejudice is a pre-judgment or unjustifiable, and usually
negative, attitude of one type of individual or groups toward
another group and its members. Such negative attitudes are
typically based on unsupported generalizations (or stereotypes)
that deny the right of individual members of certain groups to
be recognized and treated as individuals with individual
characteristics. The important thing to remember about
prejudice is that everyone can and does have them. And
prejudice does not just cover race. One can be prejudiced
towards anyone or anything for that matter, without cause of
reason. One can have a prejudice against eggplant. One can
also have a prejudice towards something, such as chocolate
cake, or one’s favorite sports team. Prejudices give us a bias,

10. whether conscious or unconscious, towards one group or
another. Prejudices are attitudes, thoughts or beliefs that can be
applied to individuals or groups, or people, places or things.
Discrimination as a verb is the act of denying opportunities,
resource or access to a person because of his or her group
affiliation. As a noun, the unequal treatment of people based on
their group membership. And while discrimination happens to
people because of their group membership, it can happen on
both a group basis (an entire group can experience this action
against the group), and it can also happen to an individual
because of the individual’s membership in a group.
Discrimination is different from prejudice in that it is an action
that is done to a person or a group.
Racism. This is the most difficult of the three to talk about
because so many people want to associate the concept of racism
with the idea of hatred, or dislike. But hatred is really
prejudice, a strong dislike is really prejudice. Racism, at least
as we will use it throughout this text is something altogether
different, and at first the definition may seem to have nothing to
do with how you have always thought about the meaning of the
word. But as we define racism, think back to how the concept
of race was born in terms of its purpose. Race was born as a
justification for the use of the unpaid labor of one group, and
genocide of another that made another group benefit.
In his work, Portraits of White Racism, sociologist David T.
Wellman defines racism as follows:
…racism extends considerably beyond prejudiced beliefs. The
essential feature of racism is not hostility or misperception, but
rather the defense of a system from which advantage is derived
on the basis of race. The manner in which the defense is
articulated - either with hostility or subtlety - is not nearly as
important as the fact that it insures the continuation of a
privileged relationship. Thus it is necessary to broaden the
definition of racism beyond prejudice to include sentiments that
in their consequence, if not in their intent, support the racial
status quo.

11. When Wellman studied whites in America and beyond, he found
that so very many of them actually did not harbor ill-will or
hatred towards people of color, either on an individual or group
basis. But they participated in a thinking that ‘justified’ the
treatment of people of color that resulted in benefit towards
their own racial group. What does this mean? It means that
you don’t have to hate black people to believe that they don’t
work as hard as white people, or that they aren’t as smart. Or it
could be a belief that black people can’t appreciate the finer
things in life. One does not have to ‘hate’ or even dislike all
blacks to believe that these ideas are true. And if these ideas
are true, then white people are justified in receiving more pay,
having managerial positions and surrounding themselves with
the finer things in life. If these things are true, then white
people are justified in their superior behavior towards blacks
without having to be ‘bad people who hate others.’ *(For the
purposes of this argument, when I use the term “black people” it
will mean anyone who is not white, as our fore fathers
originally intended.) Accordingly, for the purposes of this class
we will use the following definition of the term, racism:
Racism is privilege and power granted to one group over others
based in race.
The distinction between prejudice—bad feelings or hatred—and
racism is a significant one. If we define racism as hatred, then
while it takes in to account the obvious group status of those
‘on the receiving end’ of the hatred and discrimination that
most think of as racism (people of color, non-dominant groups),
it does not take in to account the benefits and power that come
from being a member of those at the other end of racism (white
people, dominant group).
Racism functions much as a see-saw; when one group is up, the
other is down, and while we spend tons of time examining,
studying, talking about the groups on the bottom, we rarely look
at those people at the top. We often talk about groups of people
being ‘denied benefits,’ but we almost never talk about the
group that receive the benefits. While we talk about the groups

12. who are disempowered, we almost never study the group that
has received the power. As we continue through our journey to
help us become more acquainted with themselves as people who
‘live lives of race,’ we will take a closer look at those who
benefit from the privilege and power that are accorded to them
because of their race. While history, anthropology and
sociology books talk directly about what it means to be a
member of the ‘disadvantaged’ groups, this book will also help
those who are members of the privileged and empowered groups
to take a look at what it means to be a member of their racial
groups.
And as a side note, part of the beauty of our definition of racism
is that it is a formula that works to examine all of the other
‘isms’ as well, such as sexism, classism, ableism, heterosexism,
and the like. If one keeps the sentence the same and replaces
the word race, with gender, or sexual identity, or
physical/mental ability, or any of the other master statuses that
we use to empower some and disempower others, one can see
that an examination of where we grant privilege and power will
prove most helpful in examining the imbalances in our society.