BARRIERS TO CLARITY: What Keeps White People from Being Able to See Our Whiteness and, Therefore, Our Privilege?

At a workshop I was conducting, a white man said he was glad he was white and male and that he wouldn’t choose to be anything else. In the next moment, he asked why we were even talking about race; it was not important-he was simply a human being. He grasped what it meant to be white and privileged, and that insight was stored in one file. In a completely different file was the insistence that race isn’t important to anyone and that there is no reason to discuss it.