This week’s show brings back our guests and the next phase of our discussion on White Privilege (see Part One). The dynamic of hatred of a people we once enslaved is not as unusual at it may seem. This is the American Indian experience and the African-American experience. The psychology and pathology of refusing to accept what it means to be white pervades the culture still. In the wake of the recent annual conference on white privilege* in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, TTT delves deeper into the issue of unconscious entitlement that is so much a part of the American psyche, and the most difficult to extricate from our national inclination toward the colonial European view of race as well as understand the oppositional subculture we’ve created from the dregs of slavery over 200, 300, 400 years of American history. (Audio file below)
Confronting our privilege as whites is being seen as an essential step in understanding what it means to be NON-white, something that’s always been true. This is the antithesis of the sense of white superiority or white supremacy that has pervaded much of our laws and commerce and governance since well before our founding – a pervasive, shameful, and dehumanizing perception that gave us slavery, Jim Crow, school segregation, and the ghettoizing of our cities, suburbs and metropolitan areas – and continues to plague the underlying poverty, class distinction, and subtle exclusion that marks what was originally designed to be a totally inclusionary alternative to the monarchist cultures where our forebears were born and raised.
TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and LYNNELL MICKELSEN talk with researchers, teachers and advocates who work to get all of us to come to grips with what it means to be white in our society.
GUESTS:
• PEGGY MCINTOSH, PhD – Sr. Research Scientist and Associate Director, Wellesley Centers for Women; Author, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
• NANCY RODENBORG, PhD – Associate Professor of Social Work (Diversity), Augsburg College; Augsburg College Diversity Committee and the Diversity and Global Learning Collaborative
• ROWZAT SHIPCHANDLER – Director, Facing Race Initiative, Saint Paul Foundation
• LISA ALBRECHT – Associate Professor, School of Social Work, University of Minnesota College of Continuing Education
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