My name is Jessica and I’m a recent viewer of your site. I tried to send this message to you via email, but it wasn’t working, so I thought I would leave this on your post…

I wanted to email you to let you know that I really appreciate the way your site has pushed me to think about issues that I have sometimes neglected to think about. As a white female who grew up in a conservative home and in a town and school system made up of predominantly white Protestants and Catholics, the notions of white privilege and the social construction of race never really entered my mind as a critical matter. As a child and into my teenage years, race seemed like a private, intimate topic—no one talked about it and if questions were ever asked, many did not know the answers.

Now a first-year graduate student with a research interest in race and writing, I have learned a lot about my own assumptions, both as a child/teen and even now. Your required readings, specifically on white privilege and colorblindness, have invoked many questions, ones that I hope to continue to think about both in my day-to-day experiences, as well as my studies. If you have any suggestions or readings for me to think about in relation to teaching about race (especially as a white woman), I would greatly appreciate it. I am still struggling with my position as a white female and how to situate myself in conversations about race.

I do want to mention that your site reminds me of a passage I recently read in Patricia Williams’s Open House. In the first chapter she describes a scene in which her and a white male (J.B.) engage in an argument over their experiences and beliefs. J.B. makes it clear that “Affirmative Action [is] corrupt” and “anti-hate speakers [are] the real haters” (Williams 5). Upon hearing such claims, Williams acknowledges her anger towards J.B. and urges him to try and see where she is coming from. Yet, he desires the same thing, for her to understand him and his racist implications. As she reflects on this experience, she brings up a concept that she uses throughout the entire piece—“double being” or rather, double consciousness. She comments on how all throughout her life she has experienced this notion of double being—seeing the oppressed and the oppressor in the same body. She notes that she desires J.B. to experience a “double being” and how in many ways it his social responsibility to do so, especially since Whites have never really had to experience a double consciousness.

To me, this idea of double being requires me to see myself in terms of a history based in oppressive agency, as someone who is privileged and regarded as “normative.” I also must see myself through the eyes of people of color and thus as unequally privileged, ostensibly “normative”, a representation of the “system,” and in many ways an unsettling connection to a dominant group of people who aimed to dehumanize others. Powerful and in many ways life-altering, this is what your site invokes—the call for us, and I’m referring to Whites in this case—to see ourselves as a double being. Then, I think, we will be able to understand more about lived experiences and the discrepancies in the social system.

Thank you for pushing me to think about these issues.

Best,
Jessica

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