Food for thought... please read

[M Dogg™]

WHITE PRIVILEGE SHAPES THE U.S.
by Robert Jensen

Here's what white privilege sounds like:

I am sitting in my University of Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white student about affirmative action in college admissions, which he opposes and I support.

The student says he wants a level playing field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he thinks that in the United States being white has advantages. Have either of us, I ask, ever benefited from being white in a world run mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is something real and tangible we could call white privilege.

So, if we live in a world of white privilege--unearned white privilege--how does that affect your notion of a level playing field? I ask.

He paused for a moment and said, "That really doesn't matter."

That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate white privilege: the privilege to acknowledge you have unearned privilege but ignore what it means.

That exchange led me to rethink the way I talk about race and racism with students. It drove home to me the importance of confronting the dirty secret that we white people carry around with us everyday: In a world of white privilege, some of what we have is unearned. I think much of both the fear and anger that comes up around discussions of affirmative action has its roots in that secret. So these days, my goal is to talk openly and honestly about white supremacy and white privilege.

White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is complex. In a white supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not they are overtly racist themselves. There are general patterns, but such privilege plays out differently depending on context and other aspects of one's identity (in my case, being male gives me other kinds of privilege). Rather than try to tell others how white privilege has played out in their lives, I talk about how it has affected me.

I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of northern European heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the country. I grew up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by racism, both personal and institutional. Because I didn't live near a reservation, I didn't even have exposure to the state's only numerically significant non-white population, American Indians.

I have struggled to resist that racist training and the ongoing racism of my culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I "fix" myself, one thing never changes--I walk through the world with white privilege.

What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission to a university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don't look threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me for those things look like me--they are white. They see in me a reflection of themselves, and in a racist world that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of them. I am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am cut some slack. After all, I'm white.

My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am white. Some complain that affirmative action has meant the university is saddled with mediocre minority professors. I have no doubt there are minority faculty who are mediocre, though I don't know very many. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action policies were in place for the next hundred years, it's possible that at the end of that time the university could have as many mediocre minority professors as it has mediocre white professors. That isn't meant as an insult to anyone, but is a simple observation that white privilege has meant that scores of second-rate white professors have slid through the system because their flaws were overlooked out of solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and ideology.

Some people resist the assertions that the United States is still a bitterly racist society and that the racism has real effects on real people. But white folks have long cut other white folks a break. I know, because I am one of them.

I am not a genius--as I like to say, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I have been teaching full-time for six years, and I've published a reasonable amount of scholarship. Some of it is the unexceptional stuff one churns out to get tenure, and some of it, I would argue, actually is worth reading. I work hard, and I like to think that I'm a fairly decent teacher. Every once in awhile, I leave my office at the end of the day feeling like I really accomplished something. When I cash my paycheck, I don't feel guilty.

But, all that said, I know I did not get where I am by merit alone. I benefited from, among other things, white privilege. That doesn't mean that I don't deserve my job, or that if I weren't white I would never have gotten the job. It means simply that all through my life, I have soaked up benefits for being white. I grew up in fertile farm country taken by force from non-white indigenous people. I was educated in a well-funded, virtually all-white public school system in which I learned that white people like me made this country great. There I also was taught a variety of skills, including how to take standardized tests written by and for white people.

All my life I have been hired for jobs by white people. I was accepted for graduate school by white people. And I was hired for a teaching position at the predominantly white University of Texas, which had a white president, in a college headed by a white dean and in a department with a white chairman that at the time had one non-white tenured professor.

There certainly is individual variation in experience. Some white people have had it easier than me, probably because they came from wealthy families that gave them even more privilege. Some white people have had it tougher than me because they came from poorer families. White women face discrimination I will never know. But, in the end, white people all have drawn on white privilege somewhere in their lives.

Like anyone, I have overcome certain hardships in my life. I have worked hard to get where I am, and I work hard to stay there. But to feel good about myself and my work, I do not have to believe that "merit," as defined by white people in a white country, alone got me here. I can acknowledge that in addition to all that hard work, I got a significant boost from white privilege, which continues to protect me every day of my life from certain hardships.

At one time in my life, I would not have been able to say that, because I needed to believe that my success in life was due solely to my individual talent and effort. I saw myself as the heroic American, the rugged individualist. I was so deeply seduced by the culture's mythology that I couldn't see the fear that was binding me to those myths. Like all white Americans, I was living with the fear that maybe I didn't really deserve my success, that maybe luck and privilege had more to do with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid I wasn't heroic or rugged, that I wasn't special.

I let go of some of that fear when I realized that, indeed, I wasn't special, but that I was still me. What I do well, I still can take pride in, even when I know that the rules under which I work in are stacked in my benefit. I believe that until we let go of the fiction that people have complete control over their fate--that we can will ourselves to be anything we choose--then we will live with that fear. Yes, we should all dream big and pursue our dreams and not let anyone or anything stop us. But we all are the product both of what we will ourselves to be and what the society in which we live lets us be.

White privilege is not something I get to decide whether or not I want to keep. Every time I walk into a store at the same time as a black man and the security guard follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am benefiting from white privilege. There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out in our daily lives, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased from this society.

Frankly, I don't think I will live to see that day; I am realistic about the scope of the task. However, I continue to have hope, to believe in the creative power of human beings to engage the world honestly and act morally. A first step for white people, I think, is to not be afraid to admit that we have benefited from white privilege. It doesn't mean we are frauds who have no claim to our success. It means we face a choice about what we do with our success.

Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism in the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

[M Dogg™]

 Service-Related Racism  
 
________ while black.  

We once took a family trip to Disney and I was disheartened by the service I received at one of their shops. My sweet-loving husband got a hankering for a hunk of peanut butter fudge, so I decided to indulge him by making a stop at a sweet shop in the park. I stood in line for several minutes while the couple two places in front of me made what was apparently the life-altering decision between chocolate and vanilla. Next up was a pretty blond girl with her husband. She quickly gave her order for two pieces of chocolate-peanut butter to the fudge handler and moved on to the register. At the register, the cashier greeted her with, "What are you having?" since the fudge was already packaged up in a white paper bag. The girl replied, "Two pieces of fudge," and was promptly rung up and on her way. I'm next. I move up to the register with my own identical white bag containing two pieces of fudge. The cashier looks at me and gives me the same line, "What are you having?" to which I reply, "Two pieces of fudge." The cashier pauses a moment and looks at me. "I'm assuming that's all," she questions. Dumbfounded, I watch her begin to open my bag and riffle through the waxed paper, investigating the contents. Satisfied that I wasn't trying to pull a fast one, I presume, she rings my candy and hands me my change. I turned away red-faced and hurt and practically ran to meet my waiting husband to share this humiliating story.

So what's the deal?

Can we ever know the reason the cashier suspected me of wrong-doing and not the blond girl in front of me? No, we can't. But I can tell you that while the incident I experienced may not have been discrimination by many people's assessments, it sure felt like it to me. And this type of service-related discrimination is happening across the country every day.

Recently, a couple was dining out at a posh Thai restaurant in Miami Beach. Upon receiving their bill, they found that a 15% gratuity had been added to their charges. This is normal practice in many restaurants for large parties and this particular restaurant's policy was to add the gratuity for parties of five or more. But this was a party of two. Confused by the charge, the couple called for an explanation and were reportedly told by the manager, "You people don't tip well." The couple was black.

This story made the headlines and the restaurant has already suffered some serious repercussions as a result of their actions, including being thrown out of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitor Bureau. But, don't be fooled into thinking that incidents like this don't happen every day just because you aren't hearing about them.

"______ While Black"

You've heard of "DWB - driving while black." May I suggest, in the case of the Miami couple, "dining while black?" How about "hailing a taxi while black," or "shopping while black?" Clarence Page suggested these two phrases in his column for the Chicago Tribune back in October 1997, written in the aftermath of another service-related discrimination incident. In that case, a black youth was forced to remove the shirt from his back after he was suspected of shoplifting it from the store he was shopping in. The boy returned to the store the following day with his receipt; he had purchased the shirt the day prior to the incident. Need more? Actor Danny Glover recently filed a formal complaint with New York City's Taxi & Limousine Commission for drivers who consistently fail to pick up and transport black passengers, despite their being on-duty and unoccupied.

Pervasive Racism

Besides blatant discrimination, many blacks feel the brunt of more subtle discrimination on a daily basis. I have felt the eyes of sales clerks upon me as I shopped in expensive stores. Even when I'm not being actively watched, I find myself being very aware of my actions. My thoughts too often run along these lines: "Don't open your purse and reach in for a Tic-Tac or your keys until you leave the store. Make a grand gesture of replacing that item you have picked up to examine more closely. Don't stand looking at the same item for too long, don't want to be accused of anything." I've even found myself leery at restaurants, hoping that the chef hasn't seen me and my interracial family before he prepared our meal. (Hey, I've seen those undercover video shows!) Lightheartedness aside, I realize that I am a product of our society. I have been trained to know that I was, as comedian Chris Rock has put it, "born a suspect," and to behave accordingly.

I know that many will suggest that I'm simply paranoid and that things really aren't that bad, but I challenge that this pervasive racism has become so much a part of our culture that we have actually come to expect and accept it. It's normal to be cautious when approached by a group of black men or even a single black man. It's reasonable to assume that a black person driving an expensive automobile has either stolen it or is a drug dealer or a professional athlete. So normal and reasonable in fact that it's easy to justify these thoughts. We don't like to talk about it, but these types of broad assumptions penetrate our mind in ways that we are sometimes unable to recognize as racist. And the fault doesn't lie entirely in the hands of the offender. We are all responsible for ensuring that our actions do not further contribute to these problems.

It's Everyone's Problem

I'd like to give the cashier at Disney the benefit of the doubt. After all, she's probably gone through a zillion videotapes on fair business practices in her training at the Disney Institute. She's probably a good and loving woman who, in her mind, hasn't a racist thought in her head. And I'm willing to bet that whatever instinct made her distrust me simply because of the color of my skin, has crept into all of our subconscious minds at one time or another. We've been poisoned by our past and we've been misled by the media. The damage has been done and the residuals, like service-related discrimination, are being swept under the rug because we're afraid to look them in the eye. We all want to believe that things are fine and that we have gotten past the hateful history we were handed, but it's time to be honest with ourselves and each other. Racism and discrimination do exist. And they affect us all.

[M Dogg™]

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group

Peggy McIntosh

Through work to bring materials from women's studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women's status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there are most likely a phenomenon of while privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see on of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in Women's Studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, "Having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"

After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow "them" to be more like "us".

I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions which I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographical location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can see, my African American coworkers, friends and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place, and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions.

I usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work to systematically overempower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one's race or sex.

I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.
I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can cut my hair.
Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals,the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.
I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.
I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in charge," I will be facing a person of my race.
If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race.
I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my race.
I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, out numbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.
I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.
I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.
I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.
I can choose blemish cover or bandages in flesh color and have them more or less match my skin.
I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one's life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.

In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of daily experience which I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these prequisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant.

I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a pattern of assumptions which were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways, and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.

In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit in turn upon people of color. For this reason, the word "privilege" now seems to me misleading. We want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred systematically. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.

We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantages which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power which I originally saw as attendant on being a human being in the U.S. consisted in unearned advantage and conferred dominance.

I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance and if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the U.S. think that racism doesn't affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see "whiteness" as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.

Difficulties and dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantaging associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage which rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex and ethnic identity than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the Combahee River Collective State-ment of 1977 continues to remind us eloquently. One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms which we can see and embedded forms which as a member of the dominant group one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.

Disapproving of the systems won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. But a white skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end, these problems.

To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to be now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power, and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.

Though systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.

[UnstoppableForce]

Good post.

BTW, I was thinking about applying to the Univ. of Texas at Austin, but when I read that part about it being predominantly white, I have come to the conclusion that I won't attend a school full of racist crackers.

[Don Breezio]

Good post.

BTW, I was thinking about applying to the Univ. of Texas at Austin, but when I read that part about it being predominantly white, I have come to the conclusion that I won't attend a school full of racist crackers.

rofl

[M Dogg™]

Good post.

BTW, I was thinking about applying to the Univ. of Texas at Austin, but when I read that part about it being predominantly white, I have come to the conclusion that I won't attend a school full of racist crackers.

Another thing about white privilege is that no matter what, it is hard for a minority to attend college without having white people around, but there are many, and I mean MANY college without minorities in general. In my school, many white people have never saw a minority on campus, and that is said for almost every college in the state of Minnesota, except for the University of Minnesota. That can be said for almost every state also, except the Cal State system in Cali, and a few other states. But even in those universities, minorities are highly underrepresented. So unless you are going to a historically black university, I doubt you'll find a college that wouldn't have racist crackers. And I say that after traveling and going to see different colleges, and talking to transfer students from all states. Oh, and I mean racist crackers as in racist white people that are intent in keeping minorities down, because they are crackers, they crack a whip on uppity minorities. I use the word in it's correct content.

[UnstoppableForce]

^^^ That's why I think I'm just gonna apply within the UC system and a couple of large BETTER universities where there are fewer white people in comparison to other schools. UCLA is only about 30-40% white; that's not bad.

[AWS SS 88]

Good post.

BTW, I was thinking about applying to the Univ. of Texas at Austin, but when I read that part about it being predominantly white, I have come to the conclusion that I won't attend a school full of racist crackers.

Another thing about white privilege is that no matter what, it is hard for a minority to attend college without having white people around, but there are many, and I mean MANY college without minorities in general.

boo fucking hoo,maybe they should make the grades to get in before whining that there are more whites in universities. remember sikotic that used to post here?(dont know if he does now) bu thes a pretty smart MINORITY,and from what i understand he takes school pretty seriously. i can gurantee you that he will get into a college,so maybe if minorities want to diversify the college crowd,maybe they should take school seriously,and apply what intelligence they may have to their school work. with affirmative action now in place a minority with good grades is guranteed to get  into a college

[Real American]

Does M Dogg ever stop whining about white people? Seriously man, get a life.

I love how all these Mexicans move to America and whine about how oppressed they are. I think I am going to move to Mexico and complain about "Mexican privilege" because there aren't any white people around. Racist ass spics.

[AWS SS 88]

^^you are my new all time favorite poster on wcc lol

[M Dogg™]

Does M Dogg ever stop whining about white people? Seriously man, get a life.

I love how all these Mexicans move to America and whine about how oppressed they are. I think I am going to move to Mexico and complain about "Mexican privilege" because there aren't any white people around. Racist ass spics.

LOL... does CWalker ever get dumber. Have I not said before, my family never immigrated here, WE WERE HERE. We are from California, which was Mexico. We lived in California for 1000s of years before white people were ever here. Then one day, there was a war, the after affects of the war was for us to become U.S. citizens.

[Real American]

I want to have a keystyle battle against M Dogg.

I have always considered myself to be the white Chuck D.

[M Dogg™]

I want to have a keystyle battle against M Dogg.

I have always considered myself to be the white Chuck D.

That can be arranged... I'll set up a thread right now in the battle board. I wish you good luck in your keystyle WCC debut.

[M Dogg™]

Good post.

BTW, I was thinking about applying to the Univ. of Texas at Austin, but when I read that part about it being predominantly white, I have come to the conclusion that I won't attend a school full of racist crackers.

Another thing about white privilege is that no matter what, it is hard for a minority to attend college without having white people around, but there are many, and I mean MANY college without minorities in general.

boo fucking hoo,maybe they should make the grades to get in before whining that there are more whites in universities. remember sikotic that used to post here?(dont know if he does now) bu thes a pretty smart MINORITY,and from what i understand he takes school pretty seriously. i can gurantee you that he will get into a college,so maybe if minorities want to diversify the college crowd,maybe they should take school seriously,and apply what intelligence they may have to their school work. with affirmative action now in place a minority with good grades is guranteed to get  into a college

OK... why are you here to begin with, I mean WCC. This is a hip-hop board, and your reppin' the Beatles. Also, the troubles with Minorities are that we are not allowed to have an even start. Read the articles, they are from college educated WHITE people. Maybe that will make it more believable for you. Read about white privilege, it's taught in college, which I am in. I'm a senior Social Studies Education major at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, which is one of the top 50 schools in the United States according to all college rankings. I grew up in broke ass Rialto, California, poor, and I read books on different topics that interested me, mainly history. I took studies seriously, and I knew others that did too. But, colleges mainly take students that go to prep schools, that are in white neighborhoods, and attended by white people. The SAT and ACT were made to be culturally bias, and this is the truth because they were made so Jewish people would not pass the test, and enter college and make natural born Americans look bad. I did lots of research on these topics, I have sources, and educated opinions on these. I know what I'm talking about. But if you don't believe me, then I can quote the white people on this. After all, in White Privilege:

If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.

See, it's out there, and as long as people like me are getting educated, and sick and tired of our communities being expose to this quit form of racism, then you will see that more and more of us will speak out against it, we will begin find knowledge, and use it to help advance ourselves, and our communities to be on an even field with white people.

[AWS SS 88]

really man,if you dont like how things are just leave,im so tired of hearing minorities bitch about every god damn thing its not even funny. go live in canada,maybe things up there will suit you better,because i along with many othe rpeople dont want some whining minorities in this country anymore.


and about the beatles comment,does it look like i post in the music sections of this board? obviously ive been at this board before,for a very long time,which is why i post here. is there a rule that says everything in our signature and avatar has to be centered around rap?