by Ben Harris
Two weeks after the Power and Privilege Symposium, Michael Anderson is still talking about race. A first-year upper-middle-class white student from Portland, Michael is thrilled to have had the two-day lecture series confronting the issues of power and privilege. “I wasn’t sure at first if I’d have enough time to even attend a workshop, but then I realized I could probably watch the finale of ‘Girls’ on HBO Go anytime,” he said.
“I think the greater point of the symposium was evident: Talking about race only makes the problem more visible.” Michael mentioned a few instances in which he either left conversations about race or tried to change the subject. His primary struggle regarding the topic of race: white guilt.
“A lot of people don’t really get how hard it is to be white.” Since his race became salient to him—at about age 10—Michael has struggled daily with what it means to be white. “I get so sad realizing many of the things I take for granted as rights are actually privileges. Because not everybody who should have those rights actually has them … I try not to think about it that much.”
At this point in the interview, Michael began to weep white tears. “I struggle every day with the fact that I, as a white person, benefit from that discrimination; I, for no reason other than the color of my skin, have a lifelong advantage at the expense of others.” When asked what helps to ease the pain of white guilt, Michael said, “I try not to think about it. The more I can ignore the problem, the more I feel like it will go away.”
The Whitman community has really helped Michael to ignore the difficult aspects of racial diversity. “It’s just so white here,” he said. “Everyone goes skiing and rock climbing, people are either vegetarian or vegan and everyone listens to artists like Mumford & Sons and Bon Iver. All my friends are from Boulder, Palo Alto or Bellevue. Whitman is even on the white side of town. I don’t feel like I have to hide who I am here—I can just be myself.” He added that the main factor in choosing Whitman over BYU was the added middle-class whiteness of a liberal arts philosophy and general antagonism towards organized religion.
But despite all this, sometimes racial salience is still an issue for Michael. “In my psychology class, I always feel like the one Asian girl from Seattle is looking at me since almost all psychology studies have been done on young white people. I just wish she’d realize that it’s not me they’re talking about. I don’t like feeling like I represent my race. It’s not a comfortable feeling.”
After checking his iPhone 5, Michael suddenly left, saying he had to go play beer pong instead of going to do his gender studies homework. “I’m only taking it because I had a terrible registration time and my adviser said I needed distribution credit,” he clarified. “Trust me, I’m doing my best to ignore diversity, power and privilege so that problems like white guilt go away.”