In the interest of fostering understanding, homosexuality is not a choice. I hope this is not what you have taught your children.
It’s also amusingly ironic considering most of the bona-fide Marxist-Leninist-Maoist college classmates from my undergrad years at Oberlin(mid-late '90s) actually decry such discussions of privilege as “too focused on bourgeois establishment values.”
They’ve actually cited this as one example of how Oberlin’s student culture has moved too far rightwards towards the mainstream.
"In life everyone will have bad experiences that is a given. "
Sorry, but it is relative. Until you walk a mile in another’s shoes and all, I think you don’t have an idea of what it’s like to be under constant scrutiny and prejudice.
The 60s were a long time ago. Not only were entering, traditional college students not born in the 60s, for the most part their parents weren’t born yet either.
@doschicos I totally agree and to assume that race/socio-economics are the sum total of a person is sad to say the least. No one knows the path that any person has taken.
In the context of Colonial America/US history and the centuries of slavery, de jure discrimination, lynchings, riots instigated by racist Whites against Blacks and other minorities they felt were “too uppity”(i.e. 1921 Tulsa riot), anti-immigration agitation(i.e. Know-Nothing Movement in the 1850’s against Irish Catholics who weren’t considered “White” by the prevailing WASP elite majority back then), discriminatory laws against non-White immigration(i.e. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882), Jim Crow and segregation laws, laws against interracial marriage(Virginia didn’t repeal such laws until the late '60s), etc…what happened in the '60s, just 5-6 decades ago is very recent in that context.
The rate of girls’ teen suicide has hit a 40 year high. The rate of self harm, eating disorders, and other dysfunction in middle class youth has skyrocketed. Perhaps they aren’t all so privileged after all, or at least we shouldn’t make assumptions.
@cobrat Therein lies the problem. Until we can move on from the past ( none of my kids where involved in any of the historical examples you laid out… they were not even born yet), appreciate each other and try to start walking together instead of hoping for bad things to happen to particular groups of people, out of spite, or some distorted idea of pay back none of the diversity workshops will really have meaning. Instead of bringing the freshman together and appreciating their differences, many left feeling insulted and stigmatized. I feel like instead of getting better things have continued to deteriorate over the last decade or so.
If college students feel comfortable throughout their time at university, then the institution has failed as a place of higher education.
I don’t know if this particular workshop was done well or not—the OP didn’t give enough information to tell. I do know, however, that the simple fact that students experienced discomfort of some sort is not of itself evidence that things were done badly.
Privilege in this context doesn’t mean you are bad.
Recognizing that growing up in a household with two college educated parents, access to books, opportunity for music lessons and participation on sports teams is not a universal experience is sometimes useful to middle class students. Recognizing their advantages, and understanding not everyone has had those advantages seems a useful exercise to me.
In this exercise, the Privilege Walk, obstacles middle class white students may face are factored in.
https://peacelearner.org/2016/03/14/privilege-walk-lesson-plan/
Does anyone object to this particular exercise? ^^
Lots of students go on church building trips to other countries. Isn’t one of the points of these missions to understand privilege? Do any parents whose kids participated in such trips object to these exercises? I’m just curious.
In my mind Privilege equals Luck. It is just something you are born with. It is okay with me to acknowledge the luck of my life circumstances. I want my kids to understand the luck of their lives.
The idea of privilege doesn’t mean that people who have that privilege don’t have problems, difficulties or challenges. Of course white people can have terribly difficult lives. But, all other things being equal, it’s easier to be white (or male or cisgendered, etc). My husband and I are white. Neither of us has ever been followed around a store because our skin color makes some store employee suspect we’re going to steal. Neither of us has ever been stopped by the police while driving for what appears to be a made up reason. We’ve never had to have the talk with our son about making sure he survives any encounter with a police officer. Either pretty much every black person ever is lying (which I highly doubt) or these are common experiences for black people. White privilege is me not having to worry about these things in my life. I ought to know that and so should white college students. If a college workshop made white students feel uncomfortable or judged or stereotyped because of their skin color for a few moments, perhaps they should consider it a learning experience.
While true, that does not prevent people from making stereotypical assumptions about others based on race, social class, etc., resulting in different frequency of encountering anti-privilege. Some people who grew up in situations with little anti-privilege may not realize that some others may have encountered considerably more.
“At the end of the exercise the kids were sorted into the haves/have nots”
How did this work? I can’t imagine that they said “OK, all white rich kids go to the right, all poor brown kids go to the left”. I bet the process was something like MusakParent linked^. Much more complex than just sorting by color or SES.
I also agree that this type of exercise probably makes most of the participants uncomfortable. If a white person feels “singled out” how would one expect a poor person of color to feel? I’m sure they didn’t leave feeling on top of the world either.
One of the lingering problems in our society is that many of us fail to understand that one can only genuinely even START to move on from one’s past if one actually has a genuine meaningful and no-holds-barred discussion of one’s past, acknowledged it without defensiveness or attempts to hurry the process along by saying “get over it” to those who were marginalized, AND sufficient time has passed.
One issue we in the US have had is that whenever there’s any attempt at a genuine discussions, conservative parents and politicians historically have attempted to complain, publicly disparage, suppress, or even block such discussions in popular discourse and in many K-12 school districts. It’s what some would call the stereotypical ostrich sticking his/her head in the ground approach.
Worse, some of these discussions are only starting to get off the ground within the last 10-20 years because of the levels of conservative resistance and some of the struggles for greater social equality of other marginalized groups are still ongoing as shown by recent disputations over GBLTQ rights. Especially considering there’s still efforts to deny or roll back the few gains they’ve made in the last decade and half even in the current time.
Considering all that, we’ve actually haven’t really even started taking the first meaningful steps necessary to actually “move on from the past”.
How are they supposed to learn with just a little discomfort? I think the target group of kids should have been separated out and then caned.
droppedit: what specifically do you object to in the privilege walk exercise? What steps bother you?
Evidently, you’ve never heard of Justine Damond.
@LeastComplicated I will not go into the exact methodology but at the end of the exercise “everyone” knew which students were most privileged.
There is something to be said for wanting to go to college, meet all new people, and have them make judgements about you based on something other than race/money/ etc. Unfortunately, not even in higher education can one truly get a clean slate. FWIW-- she picked this school because of the great diversity and community…
Many women are sexually assaulted. Should we assault men so they better understand their relative safety or instead work towards a world where no one is assaulted?
Just to be clear, you aren’t comparing this exercise to sexual assault are you?
I think the point is to help cis straight men understand that they are not at risk of sexual assault in the same way women usually are. I don’t see that as a problem. I’m thinking most male college students just nod and say, “of course” to that part of the exercise.