My First Post!!

Talking Points:

Beginning: “I wanted to say, ‘Can we talk about us?’ But I didn’t, because it felt risky…” I want to talk more about this quote because sometimes I do feel uncomfortable addressing white privilege, because I feel like I am pouring salt in the wounds by talking about all of the ways someone else suffers at the expense of my privilege. How do we make it a productive conversation?

Middle: “The existence of privilege doesn’t mean I didn’t do a good job, of course, or that I don’t deserve credit for it. What it does mean is that I’m also getting something that other people are denied, people, people who are like me in every respect except for the gender, race, and sexual orientation categories they belong to.” I wanted to mention this quote because I feel like it assuages/rationalizes some of the white guilt that I try my best not to feel, but sometimes still do feel as a knee jerk reaction.

End: “What matters is who other people think we ara, which is to say, the social categories they put us in.” I feel like I need to discuss this with other teachers because a lot of times I tell my students that they need to speak a certain way in school, or to code switch. I want them to have access to as many opportunities in life as possible, and speaking formally (or like a white person) is much more accepted in an academic or career setting. It just feels so problematic that I want them to change how they speak so they will essentially convince people that they are more like a white person. I try to do it so that they don’t feel judged, and I make sure to tell them the way they speak at home is not wrong. However, it is still a situation that I struggle with because it feels wrong as a white teacher to tell a minority student how to speak, when the way I want them to speak is essentially more white, even if it is to afford them more access in their future.



Argument:

This author, Johnson, argues that even though discrimination against people according to their gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and social class is entrenched in our society, we can work together to fix the problems but we first need to “use the words” such as privilege, racism, sexism, etc. and the privileged groups need to “make the problem of privilege their problem and do something about it”.