When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories

Choosing to Be Black—The Ultimate White Privilege?

© Michael T. Klare 215 Choosing to Be Black— The Ultimate White Privilege? Beverly Daniel Tatum I recently had the opportunity to speak to a group of first-year students at a small selective liberal arts college in New England known for its liberal campus environment. It was the beginning of the new semester , and I was the opening speaker for their orientation program. The auditorium was packed full of the eager and wide-eyed faces so characteristic of the first day of school. It was a diverse group, young men and women, white and of color, sporting a range of hair and clothing styles. While waiting to be introduced, I noticed shaved heads, dreadlocks , hair dyed bright blue and red, bodies pierced in various places, and a slight buzz of excitement that suggested to me that this would be a lively discussion. And in fact it was. My book, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria ?” and Other Conversations About Race, had been assigned as required summer reading for all first-year students, and I could tell 216 B e v e r ly D a n i e l T at u m they were already talking to each other about it. I was eager for them to talk to me about it too, and after a few introductory remarks, I invited them to ask me questions about what I had written. The first was about affirmative action. A young white woman said that she had read my chapter but was still confused by the concept. Wasn’t it really just “reverse racism?” I responded at some length by talking about the many ways that racism still systematically provides white people with greater access to education, employment, housing, quality health care, and media representation, just to name a few examples. On the blackboard I drew a diagram of a seesaw, one end tilted down, representing the accumulated effect of racial discrimination on people of color, and one end tilted up, representing the elevating effect of white privilege. We need action—affirmative action, I explained, in order for us to reach the ideal of the “level playing field”; in order for us to counter the insidious ways that American cultural messages and institutional policies and practices still benefit white people in educational and employment settings. I also talked about why at a college, for example, diversity in the student body as well as in the faculty and staff was important, and how students of color need to see themselves represented in their environment just as white students almost always do. It was clear by the heads nodding in the audience that many students agreed with me, but it was certainly not unanimous. In fact, a young white man standing in the back of the room spoke repeatedly about his belief that the emphasis on race in affirmative action was misplaced. “The issue,” he said, “is class, not race.” This blond-haired, blue-eyed freshman did not see himself seated on the elevated end of my seesaw. “I grew up in the inner city,” he said. “I went to the same crummy schools that the black kids did. Most of my friends were black. What systematic advantage did I have?” It was a question that I have heard before, and I invited some of his classmates to respond to his comment. They did. Without minimizing the economic struggle that this young man had experienced, classmates, both white and of color, pointed out the benefits that come simply by virtue of skin color—when dealing with the police, when shopping at C h o o s i n g t o B e B l a c k — T h e U lt i m at e . . . 217 the mall, when sitting in a class with white professors. One young woman, a Latina, who had attended the same high school as this young man, pointed out the benefit of the tracking system that had disproportionately advantaged the white minority in the school, and the ways whiteness conveys the benefit of the doubt in many situations. But the young man remained unconvinced. At the conclusion of the evening’s presentation, a number of students lingered to ask individual questions, and this young man was among them. When everyone else was gone, he told me more about his experience growing up in a poor family, one of few...