I am ____
I have been tasked with making a list of “I am ___” before, and it was hard for me. I am a dancer, I am a woman, I am an artist, I am a New Yorker. I think at the time I was subconsciously aware of the role that my privilege played during this activity of listing my identities, but now I have a much more active awareness of how major privilege is when talking about who we are. Tatum’s words “in the areas where a person is a member of the dominant or advantaged social group, the category is usually not mentioned,” made this very clear to me (11). I do not talk about how I’m white or how I’m straight very often, all because these parts of me fit into the dominant group. Tatum elaborates on this by saying “it is the targeted identities that hold our attention and the dominant identities that often go unexamined,” which makes sense because society wouldn’t have any interest in pointing out my dominant characteristics (11). This makes it easier for privilege to fly under the radar or become almost unrecognizable in many everyday situations.
This privileged group, the dominant group, is who holds the power. They set the social norms, and “assign roles to the subordinate that reflect the latter’s devalued status, reserving the most highly valued roles in society for themselves” (Tatum 12). The subordinate group becomes labeled by the dominants as “defective or substandard” which has implications in systemic oppression that go deeper than the surface. This power dynamic can become internalized by the subordinate group, and many individuals can not see beyond the image that dominants have painted of them.
Powell visits privilege in a similar way, but introduces the idea of a deficit, or the relationship between privilege and non privilege. Dominance becomes so invisible to those experiencing it because privilege normalizes the situation of the privileged. This acceptance of privilege, or “innocence” as Powell calls it, can be dangerous to even the privilege holder. While I in no way support or engage in the racist rhetoric that Powell describes, the fact that my skin is white means that I exist in a certain place in our society’s racialized system. This does mean that as I learn to accept and become fully aware of my privilege, I must also learn to understand that many of the things that I have achieved have been given to me largely as a privilege holder, regardless of the work that I have done. I have never experienced most levels of oppression and it would be wrong to act as if I have.
Powell says “a white person need not be a bigot to benefit from racial privilege” (78). This statement makes me somewhat uncomfortable with myself, somewhat guilty. However it is refreshing that Powell also voices that “the necessary first step is acknowledging that there is indeed white privilege” (75). Acknowledging is just a mere first step and actually accomplishes next to nothing, these small steps can “help uncover deeper aspects of the problem and suggest further appropriate responses” (Powell 84).
As of writing this, I have not yet had an experience at my community partner site, Canal Alliance. However, I can still imagine some of the functions of privilege that may come into play based off of information addressed at the orientation meeting. Most individuals in these adult ESL classes at Canal Alliance do not have more than an elementary school education, and haven’t been in a classroom environment in years. On top of that they are in a new country, a country with a currently rampant anti-immigration rhetoric in play. I would not be surprised if these students, people who are working hard and putting themselves in a vulnerable learning position, have a deeply internalized substandard image of themselves that has been subconsciously forced into their mind by the dominant group.
Erik Erikson wrote “the individual judges himself in the light of what he perceives to be the way in which others judge him in comparison to themselves and to a typology significant to them” (10). If these students are being shamed, oppressed, taken advantage of, and racially targeted in parts of their life outside the classroom, it is likely that they would still carry that lack of self worth and lack of self confidence into the classroom.
