ABSTRACT
What I convey in this article is through the eyes of a Black woman and is influenced by my observations of the reactions of Whites to issues of race and diversity in racial awareness training, in clinical situations, and in my personal lived experience. As a Black person writing about Whiteness I approached this task with a sense of moral and social responsibility. Morally I felt the responsibility to speak with both candor and humaneness. In regard to the latter I paid special attention in writing this article to literature describing the subjective emotional experiences and opinions of White individuals about the issues I discuss. In regard to my sense of social responsibility, socially I always feel the responsibility to take any opportunity I am offered to speak about matters that will help illuminate, or at the least encourage dialogue about, the crisis that is race relations within the United States. Most often race dialogue is focused on the “other,” or minority group members and their disadvantages. However, given that inequality in race relations is inherently
provided another perspective on racism. McIntosh (1998) pointed out in describing White privilege that most White individuals are “taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness …, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance… from birth” (p. 152). For some White students the exercise of thinking in terms of their advantages made racism more visible and its existence more legitimate in their minds.
