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I was going to develop the piece below as a column, but since it’s gotten somewhat stale, I’ll post it here instead. Hey, that’s what blogs are for!
Is sending students to a “white privilege” conference with government funds intended to be used to close the academic achievement gap an appropriate use of those funds?
That’s what Seattle Public Schools (SPS) will soon find out. The U.S. Department of Education is investigating the race-obsessed school system to determine whether its use of a Smaller Learning Communities Program grant to send students to the annual White Privilege Conference was improper under the terms of the grant. (Source)
The grants are to be used “to support the development of small, safe, and successful learning environments in large high schools as a component of comprehensive high school improvement plans.” How a white privilege conference fulfills this purpose is a mystery.
According to the conference web site, its mission is to offer “a means to develop and sustain ongoing work to dismantle this system of white privilege, white supremacy, and oppression.” Although the conference is “not about beating up on white folks,” why else would people gather to discuss such ideas as “white man’s pornography,” “transforming whiteness in the classroom,” “multiple systems of oppression,” homosexual “oppression,” and to denigrate that whitest of white traits, individualism?
“White privilege” is the idea that whites enjoy certain benefits that stem from decades of discriminating against blacks. Whites who may not consider themselves racists still benefit from a racist system.
Feminist Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women, describes white privilege as “an invisible package of unearned assets” that is “like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, code books, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.” (Source – PDF)
According to the “White Privilege Checklist,” you may be benefiting from white privilege if you answer yes to the following:
1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
The rest of the list includes statements about traffic stops, IRS audits, and…flesh-colored bandages.
SPS has had its share of race-obsessed faux pas. Last year Caprice Hollins, director of the system’s Office of Equity and Race Relations, declared on the web site that long-term planning, goal-setting, and speaking proper English were white values and implied that holding black students to these standards was “cultural racism.” Last month, school board member Darlene Flynn suggested that superintendent candidates have a “clear understanding of institutionalized oppression.” (See Seattle’s Guilt-Tripping Battles)
After much ridicule, Hollins deleted the offensive web page, and Flynn’s suggestion was downgraded to “institutional factors contributing to the achievement gap.” But the message was loud and clear.
Parents ought to be ashamed for allowing bureaucrats to politicize black underachievement and blame whites instead of erecting a mirror in front of so-called underprivileged minorities. In an op-ed in The Seattle Times, Seattle writer and blogger Matt Rosenberg noted that the white privilege conference has little, if anything, to do with helping black students improve academically. They’ll be well-equipped, however, in useless, politically correct finger-pointing. “What we have here,’ writes Rosenberg, “is an institutional evasion of personal responsibility.” (Source)
Perhaps we should cut SPS some slack. After all, it’s easier to send kids to white privilege conferences, babble about so-called institutionized oppression (though Caprice Hollins herself could find not one example of it in the system), and tell black students it’s OK to speak ebonics in the classroom than it is to demand that more black parents get involved with their kids’ educations and to hold black kids themselves responsible for achievement. The latter is unprofitable and probably not much fun.
Pointing out the obvious is too controversial. Seventy percent of black babies are born into unstable homes. In 2005, only 35 percent of black children were living with two parents. But we’re to believe that white privilege – and not family structure – is a greater cause of concern?
A focus on trendy, mind-numbing ideas as institutionalized oppression takes the responsibility for excelling out of the hands of black students and their families and throws it into the ubiquitous white bogeyman’s lap. It’s unfair to whites and to blacks, not to mention unproductive.
The Department of Education should find that SPS improperly used taxpayer funds by sending students to a white guilt conference.
I’m curious to know your opinion of “white privilege.” Are you a beneficiary or a victim? Share your experiences. 
Addendum: Is “white privilege” a myth?
Update (5/19): A commenter mentioned a study about “black-sounding” names on resumes, where there was a disparity between interview callbacks for people with such names and people with non-black names. In a study called The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names (PDF), researcher Roland Fryer quoted another study, which found that “resumes with traditional names are substantially more likely to lead to job interviews than are identical resumes with distinctively minority-sounding names.”
Fryer writes: “The results suggest that giving one’s child a minority name may impose important economic costs on the child. In our data, however, we find no compelling evidence of a negative relationship between Black names and a wide range of life outcomes after controlling for background characteristics.”
Fryer said there were three ways to interpret the call-back interview disparity:
(1) Black names are used as signals of race by discriminatory employers at the resume stage, but are unimportant once an interview reveals the candidate’s race, or (2) Black names provide a useful signal to employers about labor market productivity after controlling for information on the resume, or (3) names themselves have a modest causal impact on job callbacks and unemployment duration that we are unable to detect.
Fryer found that black names are a strong predictor of socioeconomic status. People who give their babies black-sounding names tend to be unmarried, uneducated, and poor. Additionally, the woman with a black name was likely to repeat the pattern. What’s happening is that black-sounding names are correlated with disparities, but those disparities aren’t necessarily caused by racism, as so many people love to think. Fryer concludes (emphasis in original):
More generally, this paper takes first steps toward an attempt to understand what role Black culture might play in explaining continued poverty and racial isolation. With respect to this particular aspect of distinctive Black culture, we conclude that carrying a black name is primarily a consequence rather than a cause of poverty and segregation.
As Fryer would agree, having a black-sounding name doesn’t seal your fate. Your life is what you make it.
There is no data to support the assertion that white people in hiring positions turn away people with black-sounding names because they don’t want to hire black people. Many factors go into hiring decisions, but it’s much easier and less painful to think you didn’t get an interview because of your skin color rather than lower-quality credentials relative to other candidates.
Personal note: As you’ve noticed, I have a black-sounding name. My mother named me after another La Shawn, a black little girl she thought was very pretty. (My mother was married to my father, and he’d just started his business. They didn’t have much money, but weren’t “poor” as the word is defined these days.) Growing up, I didn’t think about whether my name was black. It was simply my name. I’ve never been ashamed of having a black-sounding name, and I always introduce myself as “La Shawn,” not “Shawn,” and insist that people spell it correctly. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to correct people. No, it’s not “Le Shawna” or “LaShawn” or “LaShaun” or “LeChan” or ‘Lashawn.”
Is it possible that I didn’t get called for interviews because of my black-sounding name? Sure. It’s also possible that I didn’t get the calls because I was competing against better qualified candidates. I think that explanation is more likely.
It definitely doesn’t matter now. The people who threw my resume in the slush pile did me a favor. I’ve always wanted to work for myself, and working in jobs I didn’t really like or that didn’t suit me frustrated me enough to take a risk and start my own business. 
