A Punch in the Gut

What delights me most about this year’s summer school is the diversity of its participants. Although I live and work in a racially and ethnically diverse city, rarely am I in a room in which there are so many women of color and so much diversity of labor. And although I work in a community college in which there is a plurality of students of color, the professors and professional staff with whom I work do not reflect the diversity of the student population.  

But along with this delight comes the painful, visceral recognition of my own white privilege. Of course, I have been cognizant of this privilege; yet, I have not confronted it with the kind of immediacy I experienced yesterday. In the workshop “Organizing for Racial Justice,” sisters were given a brief history, and learned a host of statistics about, mass incarceration. I was familiar with some of the history and with most of the statistics and knew well the racial and racist imprint of this history. However, when we were asked to identify a time when we felt oppressed, dominated, or restricted in economic or social opportunities, I was astonished that I could not identify any time in my life that I, personally (as opposed to vicariously), felt such subjection.

As sister after sister testified to her own racist and sexist subjugation, I felt anger and empathy, and truth be told, I felt uncomfortable and self-conscious. Simply by being a middle-class white woman, I have been immune to the everyday racism afflicted upon my sisters, and the sense of power and entitlement afforded me by such privilege has enabled me to shun the sexism so many have experienced. In class yesterday, I felt my white privilege as a gut punch, not as the intellectual abstraction it so often is; now I need to return to class to figure out how to transform the viscera of

privilege into action. I know that I must speak up (class ended before I could offer my own testimony—I will today—) and speak out (to call out and demand an end to police targeting of people of color), but I need to learn how better to work towards systemic inclusion and equity in my own union and in our world and to know—first hand-- that when I do so, I speak from a position of privilege.

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