I teach a class entitled "Multiculturalism and Anti-Bias in Education" at Green River Community College. During our final class meeting of the summer quarter, we had a lively discussion about affirmative action. One of my students was firmly opposed to affirmative action, saying she felt that people of color who were less qualified were getting into colleges and getting jobs over more qualified white people. (Never mind that there was not one person of color in my entire class, except for me.) So I posed the question, "Isn't it a form of affirmative action when a white male whose father is an alumnus of an Ivy League school, automatically is accepted into the school, even if his grades are marginal? Isn't that a form of preferential treatment? Why aren't people clamoring to get rid of that?"
According to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Brown "admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center." Yet instead of taking him to task, Bush hailed him in Mobile, Alabama on Friday by saying, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." So not only does he get the job because of preferential treatment, when he screws up, he gets a pat on the back.
Peggy McIntosh of Wellesley College wrote an excellent article about white privilege entitled "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack", that many of us in the field of intercultural communications use in our work. Here is the link:
http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html
It is because of white privilege that many whites and people of color view the political fallout of Hurricane Katrina through very different lenses. According to McIntosh,
"The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these subjects taboo."Many whites will say that race was not an issue, whereas people of color will say that race was absolutely an issue.
White privilege is what got Michael Brown his job. If Michael Brown had been an African-American heading up the International Arabian Horse Association, with no prior experience with emergency management, he would never have had the connections, or been part of the good old boy network to get the job heading up FEMA. The appointment of Michael Brown goes to show that meritocracy is a myth. Society teaches us that if we work hard, we will get what we want, but white privilege puts certain people at an advantage while putting others at a disadvantage. As McIntosh writes,
"...obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already."
