ABSTRACT
“But how can white people not know that they have white privilege? I mean, come on!” The end of a workshop about race and racism in the classroom with a group of 11 New York City high school teachers is thick with tension. The teachers in the room have already self-identified their racial categories (white, Black, Latinx, and Asian) and have been in the throes of using some of the new tools I have shared to willingly grapple with the impact of white privilege on their classrooms for the duration of the workshop series. The not-so-rhetorical question was thrown out by a Black woman who could not understand the possibility of white people being genuinely ignorant about the toxicity of whiteness. Nervously, a white woman, face flushed, chimed in: “Well, sometimes it’s unintentional. Like, I have friends of color so I’m aware of the things that are problematic to say or do, but one time I brought a friend of color to my mom’s house, and my mom made such a racist comment. She had no idea, she is a loving, good woman, but I know my friend and I knew immediately that he was uncomfortable.” I sat back and let the conversation take its natural course. In my approach to facilitation in such spaces, it is more important to create space for people to wrestle with difficult racial questions that we rarely have the opportunity to discuss openly than for me to pretend that I have come with some fixed singular answer to the question of white privilege. Eventually, I did enter the conversation: “What a privilege it must be to not know that white privilege is a problem after hundreds and hundreds of years of people of color protesting racism with their bodies, voices, pens, ballots, across digital landscapes, and more. If centuries of cries against white privilege have truly fallen on deaf white ears, then we are in far more trouble than I ever imagined.” My words are direct and inevitably create discomfort in the room. But by now we have intentionally created space for discomfort as a necessary precursor of authentic dialogue. We have cultivated a space that is sacred and brave with the knowledge that this work cannot happen unless we are willing to abide in the tensions we are afraid of. We are clear that discomfort means something different for people with racial privilege and people without it. We do not shy away from these truths. Most importantly, by now I have already made it clear to all the participants that my goal is not to reify white privilege by coddling the comfort levels of the white folks in the room. For now, we will sit in the crosshairs. Black Appetite. White Food.
