About 30 students met in the Butt C lounge on Saturday for six and a half hours to discuss their own experiences with race and prejudice. The workshop was sponsored by the United Student Labor Coalition (USLAC) which brought in Ewuare Osayande, a member of the activist group POWER, to lecture and lead exercises designed to explore the students’ conceptions of race relations and their experiences with the idea of white privilege.
“We want to have students be confronted with the reality of racism as a systemic reality,” Osayande said. “We helped students who are white to be aware of white privilege.”
The workshop began with a talk by Osayande, which focused on the historical evolution of the concept of race. He spoke about what he said was the original development of an idea of race within white European society as a tool of disenfranchisement.
“All the ideas of race came about in the Enlightenment,” said Alex Early ’07. “So he called it the ‘Enwhitenment.’”
Osayande claimed that racism, and race itself, was developed specifically to benefit white people, pointing to what he argued were ingrained racist attitudes that pervade American society to this day.
“[Osayande discussed] how specific laws, and provisions of social services, like Social Security, have made it so white people have been able to build up this base of wealth, and how minorities haven’t,” Early said. “He was debunking the myth that America was founded through the initiative and skills of white men, that each white individual got where they are because of their initiative and skills.”
Osayande went on to put forth advantages he argued only white people enjoy today in daily life, including freedom from harassment and an unfair leg up in the job market.
“[The talk] was about recognizing racism and white privilege and providing a framework to break it down,” said Meggie Harvey ’07. “Towards the end, there was more discussion. There was a lot of tension, it was a very intense experience. Confronting one’s own tension is a difficult thing to do.”
Osayande asked white students present, who made up the majority of the participants, to list aloud in front of the group some of the privileges they enjoyed as white people. Students referred to the existence of pro-white bias in job interviews and discrimination against blacks in the health care system.
“They seemed to really appreciate it and been challenged,” Osayande said. “They named their white privileges.”
“It makes you realize how much being white or not being white shapes your everyday experiences, in little things you take for granted: places you can go, how you feel in social situations, what jobs you can get,” Early said.
The discussion between the students, which lasted several hours, was personal and at times highly emotional. Citing the sensitive nature of the subject matter, participants agreed to ask the Argus reporter to leave the workshop. The participants engaged in heated debates about the extent of their privilege and their own individual experiences.
“It was really hard and emotional,” Early said. “It makes you feel guilty, but he gave us a path to follow in being anti-racist.”
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