The original post did not really provide enough information on this exercise, and I am surprised by the length of this thread, which seems to lack focus. I am really not clear enough on how this exercise was conducted or how “privilege” was defined.
Is a wealthy white male privileged if his mother drinks all day and father hits him? Or an uncle is sexually abusing him? Is a white student privileged if her or she has a long history of serious medical issues? What about low income students whose parents made education a priority in the home? Things are complex, not simple, and many whose lives are assumed to be “charmed” are actually dealing with bad stuff in private.
The description of the exercise in the first post was inadequate to really understanding what the exercise entailed. It is easy to assume it was some sort of sledgehammer approach without subtlety. I don’t really know.
I do think exercises like this are better if groups are assigned randomly, without real life characteristics as identifiers. Privacy is important and there are ways to enhance sensitivity and empathy without shaming. If that is what happened.
Looking at the privilege walk questions, it is clear that race is not the only component. Yes, wealthy white males would likely end up at the front of the line, but isn’t that reality? As compomom says, it really depends on how this was handled. It is not a bad thing for kids, especially 18 year olds, to understand that others have walked a different path. Perhaps the balance of questions could be altered, but a kid that only has to take steps forward certainly was lucky in terms of his family and life. Feeling a bit uncomfortable about that is not a bad thing.
For those that say this sows more discord, what is the basis for that statement? These workshops will not reach all the kids, but at least it may make some kids more aware. Of course it is not enough, but maybe it will make a kid stop and think before making the assumption that everybody had the same access to money and things growing up that they did.
It all depends on the approach. If the starting point is “you and people like you are the cause of all the problems in the world” it’s probably not going to reach anyone. But if it is presented, like the seminar in my office, as helping to uplift everyone, it really could.
It’s not about “shaming” – or it’s not supposed to be. But talking about race does make white people in particular uncomfortable. White people need to become comfortable with discussing race, which is really hard to do in a large group setting like freshman orientation. Indeed, all this focusing on how the white males felt being pushed to the front of the line is masking how potentially damaging it could have been to the confidence of the poor black kid at the back – she could have ended up at the end of this exercise feeling like, “why bother when the cards are so stacked against me?”
Doing a discussion or presentation about privilege badly isn’t always better than doing nothing at all.
Discussing race and wealth in the same breath muddies the waters when trying to explain racial privilege. Think about Trevor Noah’s monologue after the Philando Castille case – he’s a wealthy celebrity driving a Tesla, but he has a bunch of stories about being pulled over for “driving while black.” Race is something he cannot buy away with celebrity. It’s always there.
Many of the privilege walk exercises have questions like “did your parents graduate from college” “have you ever been made fun of because of appearance” “Do you have a disability” “Did you ever worry about your next meal” “Do you live in a single parent house hold”. A chosen set of questions doesn’t define the group any more than their ACT score or their grade point average and I haven’t seen it presented like that. It can open awareness about perception and biases.
We still don’t know what the OP’s daughter’s experience looked like and I would love to know what exactly about the OP’s daughter’s exercise exactly caused demonizing.
“NOT seeing” race or class or sexuality is not the same as accepting that society still DOES treat people different based on those characteristics."
And the ability to not see is, for me, a privilege I enjoy. Many people are constantly aware of their race, their class, and/or their sexuality because it colors at least some of their interactions every day. Honestly, it took me a while to get that being color-blind is at the heart of white privilege.
“Why don’t you name the college”… Because that is not the point of my post. My D loves the school she chose and that chose her. Her school is not the only one having these sorts of discussions/outcomes.
The discussions are good… it is always a good thing to be educated, informed etc. on the life experiences of other people… that is one of the awesome things about college… it takes people from all walks, families, backgrounds and brings them together. Again, I say singling out one group of people and making them “feel badly or guilty” about being raised in a more privileged family/community/ etc. is NOT the way to foster understanding and community. As many have pointed out no one hour workshop will make my D understand someone else’s life experience.
My opinion if we as a nation do not find a way to bridge the differences constructively than all we are really doing is stirring the pot. The Colleges and Universities have a captive audience of 18yr olds… maybe they could find a way to help people move past all the divisiveness. ok I am done.
OP- your initial post was very harsh and this last one much modified in its language. Makes me think that secondhand diversity experience was good for you as well as for the students. Got you upset, thinking and hearing different points of view. Bravo to your D’s school for challenging her and others. Awareness is a necessary first step. Feelings and not just words help a message stick.
Back on pg 7 in post #91, @roethlisburger said:
"To take a concrete example, women are underrepresented in big law as equity partners. Is the reason for this:
A) Male Privilege i.e. big law firms are engaged in systemic, illegal promotion and hiring practices
B) there is or was a pipeline problem
C) women are less likely to develop the book of business needed to make equity partner
D) women are more likely to want to pay off their student loans and then head into a smaller firm, in house counsel, government, non-profit legal services, or out of law entirely
E) all of the above
A role playing exercising which assumes the answer is A, and repeats the answer is A ad nauseam, is simplistic and moral proselytizing. An in depth look at the research, as well as interviews of current and former big law attorneys might be interesting."
I have a female relative who has first hand experience in that situation. She is an attorney. Her first job out of law school was at a big law firm and yes, she earned a really big salary there. She worked there for about 3 years, I think, before moving on to another job elsewhere.
Why did she leave? A couple of reasons - none of which had anything to do with option A (Male Privilege):
She wanted to have a life.
It was expected to work 6 days a week. Many times, none of the lawyers went home until midnight. She was rarely at her apartment. She basically lived at the office. Often would just go home for 6 hours of sleep and then crawl back to work again to do it all over again. Over time, she found this to be really depressing. She grew to hate her job. The income was really nice and she had a lot of vacation time racked up, but she knew that it was getting pretty bad when the only thing keeping her going was stuff like "Only a few more weeks until my vacation to ___" (insert your favorite tropical locale).
She couldn't have a social life outside of work.
There was a lot of drug and alcohol abuse floating around amongst all the employees at the law firm. Work social events involved spending a few hours in a bar. Lots of pressure amongst work peers to drink. One person she encountered had the knickname "Snowy." You can guess the reason why. She didn't use drugs, but it was rampant enough that it really bothered her.
The "part time" staff worked 40 hours a week.
The job helped her pay off a good portion of her law school student loans.
“My opinion if we as a nation do not find a way to bridge the differences constructively than all we are really doing is stirring the pot.”
Sometimes stirring the pot is needed, IMO. If we don’t acknowledge the differences, what has gone on and continues to go on, the systemic bias, how will it ever be truly fixed?
From what I’ve seen while working a stint as an IT person in a NYC biglaw firm, 60+ hours per week is on the extreme low side.
The minimum expected IME was more like 70 - 80+. If one only worked 60-70, that’d be considered a sign the partner track attorney isn’t intending on staying in biglaw beyond a few years or doesn’t have a clue on actual firm expectations despite this being made clear during law school and not-so-subtle hints being dropped from partners, of counsel, and senior associates.
This reflects the experience of an older Black college classmate who was constantly racially profiled because the LEOs despite coming from a comfortably well-to-do background(One parent was a successful MD, another parent a senior exec at a fortune 500).
On the SES front, he was far more privileged than I and other FA/scholarship students or even many upper-middle class students at my LAC.
However, those from both groups who weren’t URMs including yours truly are more privileged in that LEOs aren’t likely to racially profile and pull us over for traffic stops or on some Ivy/elite campuses, stop us for ID checks*.
Same older classmate was stopped multiple times by Harvard's LEOs for ID checks while giving me a tour of his section of the Harvard campus while a Chem PhD student. This was in the same period as an incident where police were called on a group of Black Harvard undergrads merely because they "didn't seem to belong there" despite the fact those undergrads were gather on their own quad for a picnic which prompted much outrage on the campus at the time and even prompted the head of Harvard's LEO's to admit their shortcomings and that they needed to do better.
None of the White or Asian/Asian-American alums I’ve known even had an inkling that there were ID checks. I myself was never stopped for ID on that very campus and I was a frequent visitor on campus due to grad/undergrad friends while living in the Boston area and an occasional student(summer).
Absolutely it is about shaming. It’s about taking people down a notch instead of boosting people up or looking for commonalities. It is the antithesis of and by-product of a society where it has been more common to “put down” people by saying things “check your privileges” or name calling (sexist, homophob, mysogynist) , ironically the very similar things those same segments in society get all up in arms about (we’ve talked about jip and jew or other racial slurs) - when it is just as easy to say to students “gain some empathy or demonstrate emphathy”…and if someone tells me they are the same thing - I will truly barf.
In theory I don’t have a problem with workshops like this. IMO every kid should have an experience of having their various privileges pointed out to them. The issue for me is that kids are repeatedly whacked over the head with this stuff. My kids have done the step forward/step back exercise repeatedly. They’ve had the “You think you’re middle class but you’re not” discussion repeatedly. They’ve read Peggy McIntosh multiple years. They’ve sat in a circle and discussed micro aggressions ad nauseam. They’ve been doing these things since elementary school.
One of my kids once skipped their high school MLK Day with my blessing. She said they spent every MLK Day doing the same type of activities and in her words, “I’m privileged. I get it.”
In my experience, and I’d be willing to bet in my kids’, the most meaningful discussions around race, privilege, income inequality, social class, gender norms and other tough issues has always happened in the context of a group of friends who trust each other to be able to say how they really think and feel. I don’t think these workshops are able to produce such an environment no matter how hard their leaders try to create it.
First off, thanks for popping back in to give some clarification.
I would hope, though, that you reconsider not that you’re not naming the school (I don’t know that doing so would help the discussion at all, really), but that you would reconsider not giving enough details about the exercise to be able to really discuss whether it was well conducted and likely to accomplish its objectives. As it stands, a lot of the posts on this thread are thrashing about because posters are left to their own ideas and assumptions on what these exercises include (in some cases based on personal experience and research, but in many based on secondhand or even more distant rumor).
Of course, your report would still be secondhand (well, unless you got a report from your child which you quoted), but more specifics would help everyone here focus
RE #135: How is it shaming to point out areas in which one is privileged? If done properly, it is about awareness and maybe a bit of discomfort, but not shame. The questions are not all about race, but also about physical appearance, disability (physical and mental) as well questions that lean toward sexual orientation and gender. A rich kid of color is not going to be at the back of the line and a white kid that grew up in a very poor circumstances will not be at the front.
I agree, however, that the assumption that simply because a kid is a white male they are necessary unaware of their luck and privilege or have a lot beyond their inherent skin color and gender is unfair. It can be counter-productive to continually harp on these issues, without moving forward.
Sue22: I have a friend that teaches in an urban district, and her students of color also get tired of some of the MLK day events - the speech they have studied every year for example. Seems the schools need to do a better job of changing up the celebrations and lessons.
@momofthreeboys You are selectively quoting me to serve your own agenda.
I also disagree with your notion that what we need is more “uplifting” discussions. Dealing with different perspectives on race is difficult work when it is done honestly. (Notice that difficult is NOT the same as shaming.) If the goal is everyone leaves the room feeling “uplifted” then those who have been the victims of hate cannot be honest about their life experiences in the discussion. The nature of the task at hand is hard, not easy.
