Blog #5

White people have a responsibility to acknowledge their privilege. Johnson's chapter properly titled "Getting Off the Hook: Denial and Resistance" discusses the vacuum of denial in the white American culture that is damaging to other races and white people as well. It is no surprise that white people are in denial of their obvious privileges that they have because they deny the experiences of others and their views of alternative realities.
Denial takes many forms and examples of which follow: the privileged group sees subordinate groups such as blacks or Hispanics actually being better off than privileged groups, or the privileged group blames the other groups for their own behavior and not due to the institutional privileges, or the oppression that subordinate groups have is their problem and not the privileged groups problem. These few were the way I thought for years growing up in a lower-middle class family. I never considered myself or my family racist, but I do know that I was raised to understand classism which I have dealt with my entire life. I denied oppression being my problem throughout my youth because I never said derogatory words. I always thought that in this country their was a problem with our class structure and at best I accepted that racism was still a problem in our country, but that it would nothing to do with my life. I could not even comprehend how badly women were oppressed even today because I thought that if I had female friends who were not lovers who I treated as equals then I was doing my part for equality.
The truth seems to be improbable for white American males can comprehend to a point where they can positively impact and degrade the disparity between the privileged and the oppressed. We seem to support and perpetuate the status quo by making it appear normal and legitimate that whites should be the privileged. My race could not be more wrong. White people are the ones who created these divisions among the races and I do not understand how whites believe that their is not a black and brown truth that we will never understand. The truth is that we need to try to understand the reality of each race in this country and try not to place blame as we like to do in this country, but rather we need to understand each others realities to have the advantage of overcoming racial profiling. How do we start to learn alternative racial realities? A starting point I believe in is integrates neighborhoods that we do not normally have in this country.