What I learned from August 11th and 12th and My First Year at the University of Virginia
By Anonymous
The morning of August 11th 2017, my boyfriend, his family, and I were all on our way to the beach. I was so excited to get to spend my last week of freedom with the people I love at the place that I love, before entering the real world. The real world, which was full of taking care of myself for the first time, making grown up decisions, and living on my own. The world of college was fast approaching.
The sound of laughter echoed in the air as my boyfriend and I sang karaoke along with whatever song was playing on the radio. It was our road trip tradition trying to see who could badly out-sing the other. We spent what felt like forever making our way to the beach, and finally we were there.
We pulled into our gorgeous two story lemon-yellow beach-house, jumped out of the car, and ran to the beach as fast as we could. The warm salt air filled my lungs and I could feel the breeze tickle my skin. The soft sand was squishing between my toes, and I felt the hand of the person I love gripping mine. We stood there at the shore just listening to the waves crash together, it was a perfect way to end the summer before heading off to my new home at the University of Virginia.
My boyfriend and I walked hand in hand back to the beach house. When we walked in everyone was gathered around the TV and they all turned and immediately looked at me. There was a breaking news story on about UVa. My future home is all over the news, how cool is thisI thought, but then I read the headlines. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists had invaded the place that I would be living in less than a week from now. Footage of the alt-right supremacist group carrying tiki-torches and chanting terrible things plastered the television screen. I felt a sense of panic and confusion. What would all of this mean for my first year of college? Would the first week of class be cancelled? The events only worsened from there.
Here I was doing the most basic white family vacation thing as possible while there were people invading my home. I was staying in this beautiful beach house without a care in the world, and suddenly it felt like I was bombarded with this massive guilt. This guilt that I did not know where its origin was at the time, but would later realize that it had something to do with a thing called white privilege. There was more going on than I realized. They were invading my perfect world and destroying its image. The blindfold had been taken off, and the world wasn’t as perfect as a I once thought it was.
The events of August 11th and 12th took place just days before I was to move into my new home. A home that I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a part of anymore. I was already indecisive about going to college at UVa in the first place. This could be a sign I thought, a sign to stay closer to home, go to school with Gavin, my boyfriend, and live happily ever after. I was scared and confused, still only eighteen at the time, exactly a month away from my birthday. What is an eighteen-year-old, who hasn’t seen or experienced such things supposed to make of this? It was a something of a culture shock.
I am the oldest daughter of a middle-class family. Or maybe I should say middle-class white family. I have a younger sister and younger brother. I am the one who sets the example for them, and I feel that in some ways I have failed. I am the oldest, supposed to be the wisest. I am the intellectually charged big sister. I am the reason why my sister and brother work so hard in school. I have set the bar high. I was top of my class in high school and joined all the clubs, but I have failed at showing them the bigger picture of the world. But how could I when I myself could not even see the beyond that county line? I want to be proud of where I am from. Doesn’t everybody? But after the events of August 11th and 12th, I have realized a lot about where I come from. I have always been an example for my brother and sister to follow. But the guidance I have always given them was not equipped to understand or deal with this kind of situation. I am only three and seven years older than them, and if I cannot understand it, then, how can they?
I was raised in a small town with small town values, but my parents always pushed me to see and experience more of the world. They wanted the best for their kids, and they prided themselves on being able to say my sister, my brother, and I were all well-rounded individuals. We were always taught to be open and accepting. My mother is a woman who is everyone’s saving grace; she works with and counsels under-privileged youth at our local elementary school. My father, a man, whose will and determination to support and provide for his family shows in everything that he does. These are the kind of people I come from. They are great people. Great people, who like everyone in our small town never gave a thought to white privilege and what that means. We are all completely unaware, because to us it’s not personal. Coming from a small town in Southwest Virginia, I never gave much thought to racial issues. This I am ashamed to say. The events that occurred on August 11th and 12thin the city of Charlottesville forced me to see the world for what it really is: an ugly horrible place filled with oppression and racism. My eyes have been opened to the world outside of my bubble that was my small town. We have never witnessed or explicitly faced acts of racism or discrimination. This is simply due to the fact that I do not come from a very racially diverse community.
In my home county there are approximately 30,000 people. That sounds like a lot for such a close-knit community, but out of all those people, there were only few people of a different race other than white. Seeing someone of a different race other than white was almost unheard of where I am from. Always thinking of myself as this worldly person, it was shocking to me once I took a look at my town. Being from a prominently white town, doesn’t make me worldly at all. I could be as well-rounded as I wanted to be, but something I would still never have been to understand if I hadn’t stepped foot into my sociology class.
Now, it was August 19th 2017. The first week of classes had started for my first year of college. All the neo-Nazis protesters and counter protesters are gone, but their presence can still be felt as students walked around Grounds to go to class. This first week of class was when I finally began to grasp just exactly what happened just one week earlier.
My first class was Intro to Sociology. I wasn’t too excited about it, but I needed it to fill some general education requirement, so there wasn’t much that I could do. I walked into a huge lecture hall in Gilmer 130, where I and 249 other students were patiently waiting for our professor to come in. Finally, at 11 A.M., Professor Jeffery Olick took his place front and center of that giant classroom.
“Good morning class, it's lovely to see you all today for our first meeting. Usually, this first day would just be talking about the syllabus and other blah, blah things that no one really cares about, but I would like to start our first class a little differently,” Professor Olick said.
That had gotten everyone’s attention. We all sat up a little straighter in our tiny desks and gave him our full attention.
He then said, “I am sure that you all are aware of the events that took place here at UVa, just a week before your arrival. This being an introductory sociology course, we will be discussing many things that occur in our society and how people react and deal with them, but in light of recent events, I would like our first topic to be about race.”
He then went onto talk about readings that we would be doing on this topic for the rest of the week to prepare for our discussion sections on Friday. These readings were W.E.B Dubois’ The Veil, Joe Feagin’s Racism, Michelle Alexander’s the New Jim Crow, and Peggy McIntosh’s "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." Each reading had a different approach, but the topics were all the same, racial issues in our society. The one that stood out to me the most was McIntosh’s piece, where she talked about whites having advantages over non-whites, and how most of the time, white people do not even realize it. She had made this long list of things that white people do every day and take advantage of, when other people of different races do not get the same opportunities. This was how I learned about white privilege. This was when I made the decision to acknowledge my white privilege and take a stand to do something about it. I would no longer be someone blind and idly waiting on the side while these terrible things where occurring all around me. I remembered that feeling of being unworldly that I had back before coming to UVa. It was a time where I didn’t know the words to use for what was happening in the world; now I understood the words to use. The feelings that I had that summer prior became clear from a sociology class I had never even wanted to take. Needless to say, Sociology class because my favorite course of my first semester of college.
It is now my second semester at the University of Virginia. I have made it through my first semester, but I am still perplexed about what to make of everything around me. Here I sit, writing this essay for my first year writing requirement, writing about what I have taken from my first year and the events of August 11th and 12th. The more I write, the more questions I ask about why these events had to happen.
I do not have answers to all of questions, but I have discovered that I have learned something about myself and something about the world while writing this essay. I have learned that it is okay to be confused, so confused as to what to make of it all. I was confused in my sociology class, in my first semester of college, and still am now in my second semester ENWR class. I am nervous to say the wrong things. I constantly find myself consciously making sure to have a friendly face to all the people, but especially people of a different race or ethnicity than me. I am aware of my white privilege and I acknowledge it. I want people to know that I am on their side. I want them to know that I want to reject white privilege and see everyone equal in my eyes. To say that I reject the notion of white privilege and see everyone equal raises the question of the idea of being racially colorblind. This is not something that I will claim to be because like I said, I am, and try to be consciously aware of who is around me. I am in a new element here outside of my small town now being at a large university. There is so much diversity and I have such a big wish to show that I am welcoming to every single bit of it. This is simply me making a conscientious attempt to see and treat everyone the same by believing that everyone should be the same. This is me trying to make sense of something that I have never encountered before, which is a world that is not so welcoming. That people of all races deserve freedom and equality without having their heritage and culture becoming separate from themselves. I find it extremely important to honor and respect each person’s different background and do not allow that to be a factor when acknowledging who they are as a person. Through this journey of learning about the world outside of where I come from,I have learned how important it is for seeing the person for who they are and not what color they are, and I do not allow it to affect my judgement of them in a world that is full of judgmental implicit and explicit bias.
I wasn’t always sure about UVA, but now I have learned so much. In August, seven months ago, I didn’t think about race, and didn’t know that school could be so relevant in learning about these larger world problems. In my home town, school was just something you did, and being smart and well-rounded, is what you did to get out and see more of the world. Not everyone in this world has come to these conclusions like I have, but I would like to think that maybe one day they will.
White Privilege and Perspective
By Anonymous
Peggy McIntosh and Ta-Nehisi Coates are two influential writers who share their views of racism and how they believe it affects today’s society. Each writer, coming from different backgrounds, with different racial identities, have their own view on the subject, but the end goal is the same. That goal is to express their views of white privilege, racial issues, and what the outcome is, or should be, in order to fix these problems. While taking into account these authors, it is important to analyze their different conceptions of white privilege. McIntosh comes to terms with the idea of white privilege, explains what to do, and she wants to take the next step to acknowledge her white privilege. Coates sees things differently, he does not acknowledge what is happening as white privilege, but rather as the destruction of black bodies, and believes there is no hope in fixing it. When reading each writer’s piece, it is a jarring experience for readers in coming to terms with what they feel white privilege is and what should be done about it.
Peggy McIntosh is an associate director of the Wesley Collage Center for Research on Women, an academic writer, and a white woman, who focuses on women’s studies. In her piece “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,”McIntosh has, through her research, approached the idea of white privilege. Working predominantly in women’s studies, she could not help but to take notice in “…men’s unwillingness to grant that they are over privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged” (np). This is how she came across the idea of white privilege. McIntosh states, “[t]hinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege that was similarly denied and protected” (np). Throughout history, a hierarchy has been established. Whites are, and always have been privileged, and their privilege is not earned. McIntosh explains what she has come to realize about white privilege when stating, “[a]As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage” (np). She sees that these things exist, that white privilege exists, and recognizes it. Her reconciliation has taken her so long because, “[she] think[s] whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege…” (np). This rightfully raises questions for her since she has now uncovered something very deeply embedded into her life that she had never realized was there. Furthering her research, she has “begun in an untutored way to ask what it was like to have white privilege” (np). McIntosh is doing this on her own and is proud of what conclusion she has come to. It is very sobering for her, as a well-educated woman, to realize this idea of white privilege that had been missing her whole life.
McIntosh has made this life changing realization;,she wants to investigate the ways that she herself has been given this “unearned skin privilege.” She defines:
white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that [she] can count on cashing in each day, but about which [she] was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks (np).
Now that McIntosh has described what white privilege is, she is newly accountable. She is now responsible for deciding if she will ignore it and go about her life as she has always known it, or will she rise to the occasion. By rising to the occasion it is important to understand that ,“…one who writes about having white privilege must ask, having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?”’ (np). It is the time to acknowledge this thing called white privilege and do something about it. McIntosh does just that, she takes acknowledgement and goes a step further to inform her readers. She starts by “[counting] the ways in which [she] enjoy[s] unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence” (np). The large body of her piece is a list of ways that she identifies “some of the daily effects of white privilege in [her] life” (np) allowing her readers to see those instances when she did not feel that her racial identity as a white woman was not attached to her in society.
In McIntosh’s list of daily effects of white privilege, her forty-sixth effect, “I can choose blemish cover or bandages in ‘flesh’ color and have them more or less match my skin” (np), is drastically different in stance compared to her fifteenth effect. Her fifteenth effect, “I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection” (np), is one that stands out. Her list alone is very important but think about how she explicitly sees that because she is white, she does not have to protect herself or her children from physical bodily harm. The need to protect her and her children’s bodies, along with the rest of her list, is something that she says “[a]As far as [she] can tell, [her] African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with whom [she] come[s] into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place and time of work cannot count on most of these conditions” (np). Something so meaningless as a bandage matching her skin tone does not compare to not feeling like she does not have to live in fear for her children’s safety. These effects vary in degree of what could be considered actual unearned skin privilege, but in the end, they are all things that she has been able to have because she is white.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, an African American male, is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He uses creative non-fiction to voice his views on how he feels about society doing something about racism in his piece, “Letter to My Son.” Coates makes it very clear that he believes that nothing is being done and nothing can be done to fix these problems of racism in our society. Coates sees something very different from McIntosh’s discussion of white privilege. He never explicitly states that what is happening in our society is a result of white privilege, but he goes a step further in interpretation. Coates is in fear for the bodies of himself, his son, and his race as a whole. Coates states,
There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth” (np).
He sees these words that people use to try and describe what is happening, but where the fear he experiences comes from is from a much darker place. These words blur out the truth of what is really going on, and that is the violent destruction of black bodies. Coates had to formulate a plan for survival that he now passes onto his son. When discussing his time as being a young man of his son’s age he states, “[n]No one survives unscathed. When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with whom I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, whom or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body” (np). Coates says that his and his race’s fear originated, and was caused by the only history that was taking seriously, the “[s]Serious history was the West, and the West was white” (np). The only black history that was taught were the “sentimental firsts” (np), and none of the rest mattered because it wasn’t white and that American history founded on the destruction of black bodies. Coates states,
...everything else that was white “mattered.” And this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West (np).
These black bodies are made to feel subordinate and their lower status is much more than just an idea like something of white privilege. The inferiority that the African American race feels goes much further. It is very traumatic and very real.
McIntosh, after making an elaborate list of forty-seven effects that she feels have given her the privileges that she has had over the course of her life because she is white, tells her readers what they can do to fix these problems. She says that “one question for [her] and others like [her] is whether [they] will be like them or whether [they] will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantages and conferred dominance” (np), them being those who refuse to acknowledge their unearned privileges. Acknowledgement is her first step in telling her readers that a change can be made. She wants them to ask themselves the question of will they stand idly by or will they become outraged at what they have discovered white privilege to be? Then she says, if they choose to become activists for speaking out against their white privilege then how will they lessen the “unearned race advantage[s] and conferred dominance?” (np). It is time to see “whiteness as a racial identity” (np); a racial identity that gives people advantages over others. It is time to acknowledge what is clearly right there in front of her readers. She pushes her readers to see these “interlocking oppressions” (np) that form a social system that has become invisible to whites. McIntosh says that, “[she] did not see [herself] as a racist because [she] was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of [her] group, never invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on [her] group from birth” (np). She lays out her plan of fixing and coming to terms with white privilege when stating:
Disapproving of the system won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. But “white” skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems. In order to “redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. 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. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist (np).
Do not be oblivious to what has been happening for far too long. Acknowledgement of these systems of racial oppression is the first step in the right direction to fix the issue of white privilege. White people should choose to use these unearned advantages that white privilege gives and use that power to try and “reconstruct power systems on a broader base” (np). McIntosh says, “Although systemic change takes many decades… if we raise our daily consciousness on the prerequisite of being light skinned” (np) then something can be done. Once your eyes have been opened to what white privilege has given you, it is time to make a change, a change that has been long overdue.
Coates feels quite differently from McIntosh. He does not believe that there is anything that can be done and is tired of people acting like there is. When he was on popular news show, he was asked about “hope” (np). Coates states, “at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of a 12-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about ‘“hope.’”And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness welling up in me” (np). He knows that despite anything that he says about the breaking of black bodies and what whites have come to see as white privilege, the question of hope always arises. That there is hope for a better tomorrow when everyone will live in peace and harmony, but Coates is not afraid to call bull shit. The world is, and always will be filled with this hate and negativity, and despite whether being white or not, all people are raised to believe that if you are going to be worth anything then you have to be “white.” Coates states,
I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you (np).
White’s live in this dream, the “American Dream” if you will. The dream that is built on the backs of black bodies. And Coates is terrified for what all of these things mean for his son. He knows that there is no hope, but like any parent, he wants to protect his child. Coates’ son is young and naive and protecting his body means so much more than being able to go into a store and find a bandage that matches white skin tone like McIntosh. This may very well be the same bandage that will have to hold together the pieces of the broken black bodies. Coates goes into a scene where he actually has to protect his son’s body. He tells a story of when his son was only five years old and they went to Hal’s Moving Castle (np). Coates states, “... you were moving at the dawdling speed of a small child. A white woman pushed you and said, ‘Come on!’ Many things now happened at once. There was the reaction of any parent when a stranger puts a hand on the body of their child. And there was my own insecurity in my ability to protect your black body” (np). It is only natural that Coates wanted to protect his son from a stranger, but the fact that they are African American adds a whole new obstacle to this confrontation. He sees that this woman “was pulling rank” (np). A rank that had been given to her as one of the privileges of being white. The same rank that McIntosh has when she says that she does not have to worry about protecting the bodies of her own children as a direct result of their skin color being white.
The same week that Coates was asked about hope, was the same week that “[his son] learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free” (np). A black man’s body had been destroyed and left dead on the street. Coates’ son was devastated by the news, but Coates knew that he could not comfort his son because there was no point. When telling the story of hearing his son cry in his bedroom after hearing the news he states, “I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it” (np). Coates believes that it is just how the world is. He was taught that he had to live in it the way it was, and he's raising his son to do the same thing. Coates explains there is nothing to do about the way his race is pushed down and that they must live with it and fight against until their last breath, but by Coates saying that there is nothing that can be done, he is doing something. He is inviting his readers into his life and does not embellish or lessen anything that has happened to him. Coates is simply a father talking to his son. Coates uses his son as a proxy. What Coates is saying to his son, is what he is saying to all of America. He is throwing up his hands and making it a point to his readers that it is not his job to fix these problems and it is not his race that needs to fix these problems. Coates’ implicit argument is to read writers of color. He wants his readers to understand the situation and that people should do something about it, specifically white people. Coates is telling whites his story, but now where does that leave us? He may not have a list or a plan, but he is saying something.
In conclusion, it is important to learn about the idea of white privilege from different perspectives. McIntosh and Coates will never be able to fully understand the others’ situations, but by reading their works, it gives a very good idea of how each of them sees white privilege and what should be done about it. Whether someone perceives white privilege as an invisible knapsack or as the breaking of black bodies, these influential writers did their job wonderfully in informing their readers on a very important issue. It is now time to speak up and speak back to the problem of white privilege. Coming to terms with these two pieces of work might be the first step in doing just that.
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Author’s Note
The purpose of my essay is to come to terms with two amazing writers and their works on white privilege from their own experience. To come to terms with McIntosh, and how she acknowledges her white privilege and has a plan to do something about it. Also, how Coates does not see it as white privilege, but instead the destruction of back bodies. He does not see that there is any hope or anything that can be done about this, but maybe by saying this he is saying something. He speaks to his son, but is also speaking to the world, and telling them to do something about it. My context is that it is time to speak up and speak back to the world about something that I have had to come to terms with myself. By taking the ideas of what McIntosh and Coates are saying I am using their ideas to try and contribute to the conversation of white privilege. My audience is an academic audience. I could see this being published on a word press. I would also like if I could somehow send it to McIntosh and Coates and have them read it. I am very proud of this piece because it goes along with two other amazing pieces of works. I am proud and honored to have the opportunity to reflect on these pieces and think about what the authors are really trying to say. I am also proud to be able to speak back and say something about white privilege. I believe that my piece needs work in narrowing in on more specific ideas. There was so much that I wanted to use from each piece that I am scared that my voice was lost at some points in the paper. My process for this paper was a little difficult. I had a lot of trouble starting this paper and I am not really sure why. Maybe it was because I had a lot going on in my other classes, but it might also have been that I was nervous as to how I was going to mesh together such different writer’s works. I had two conferences, many conversations with my classmate Madison, made my boyfriend read it, and a few mental breakdowns (moment of uncertainty) when I just had to step back and take a break. I really had trouble with starting the Coates’ portion of my paper, because I was afraid that I could not do it justice. But I just sat down and started writing, and I am proud of how my paper has turned out.
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