“Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the US 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 Statement 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 me 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.”