Blog Post #6 Response to McIntosh Article

I found the article by McIntosh to be very intriguing and eye-opening. It brought up issues that had never occurred to me before and made me think about and analyze my own life. One of the points that really stood out when reading this was the one that said "I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group". This is something that I have noticed happens quite often in the classroom. I have been witness to many of my teachers asking any of the minorities in my class to speak of their experiences. I never really thought about it until now that I never really feel obligated to speak for a large group of white people. While there are teachers who ask students to represent all the people of their racial group, I have met many people who voluntarily do this on their own. The fact that a person might feel in a place where they need to represent an entire group of people that may only have the common bond of skin color with them is upsetting to me. This makes me realize that I have more White privilege than I ever realized. I never even thought about the fact that there are so many people that cannot actually match their skin color to what we refer to as "flesh" tone. I have now started to think about more instances when I have been at a racial advantage. As a kid I never had trouble finding a Barbie doll with the same skin color as me, television shows commonly featured kids who looked like me, and I never felt like a minority in my classroom. While I always befriended any of the minority children in my classrooms, I never really put myself in their shoes let alone examined how much easier my schooling might have been. I think this issue is something that could be contemplated for a very long time and I almost feel ashamed that I never thought about it much until now. White privilege is something that may be very hard to get rid of but I think it is possible for us to work towards leveling the playing field for all races. We need to act more aware of not only refraining from racial discrimination, but of not taking advantage of the privileges that are linked to our races.