Everyday Bias by Howard J. Ross

Author:Howard J. Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

This message is strong. Yet, within some of the classic ways that power and privilege have been studied in the diversity field, there is a trap. This is because the study of power and privilege has focused on the particular people (e.g., “white male privilege”) rather than the dynamics of power and privilege. The cost of that is that we often create hierarchies of pain, in which one person or group’s suffering is not seen to be as important as another’s. If we are not careful, this tendency can have people so focused on the aspects of their identities where they do not have power and privilege that they can remain blind to the places where they do. As McIntosh also wrote in her paper:

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 just 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 . . . 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 that will allow “them” to be more like “us.”

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