Ames Progressive

“Liberation, Liberation, Liberation!” shouted the audience and welcoming speaker. More than a thousand people from across the United States came together for the 9th annual White Privilege Conference in Springfield, Massachusetts from April 2 – 5. It was a four-day conference filled with workshops dedicated to understanding white privilege.

“More and more the White Privilege Conference is less and less against something as it is for something,” said Barbara Love, Associate Professor in Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. For the past nine years, Eddie Moore, Jr., the conference organizer, has pulled together many leaders of the anti-racist movement for this annual conference. I have been to two of them, and you should go too (next spring it is in Memphis).

At the conference, I attended a two-part presentation about internalized racial oppression and racial superiority. While I cannot reiterate the entire three-hour workshop, I must say what I discovered about myself. A few weeks before the conference, an African American friend and I were in a computer lab together discussing jobs. For most students, finding a job after graduation is an intimidating and scary thing.

I said to my friend, “Whatever job I do get won’t be too bad because I’m a white male.”

Immediately, I had the feeling that I had said something wrong, but I did not know why. As a person conscious of their whiteness, I thought I was recognizing the unfair advantage I have, but all I felt was a sense of shame.

My friend, did this kind of “yeah, whatever” and we continued our conversation and life went on.

That conversation resurfaced when I was at the conference listening to the speakers discuss internalized racial superiority. I recognized what had happened that day in the computer lab.

When I told my friend that I would have an easier time getting a job, it was an enactment of white supremacy. I acted as if I was better than he was because I am afraid of my unknown future.

This may seem insignificant and not even racist, but I am a white person where white people are the majority of people. White people hold most positions of power in this country. Imagine how this incident supports a system of white supremacy.

If we are to end white supremacy, then white people themselves must begin by witnessing how they reinforce that system.