Discussion Panel at SHU Takes on White Privilege

White Americans must come to terms with their privilege in order to fight anti-Black racism.

The second installment of Sacred Heart University’s Heart Challenges Hate special segment, “Wrestling with the Legacy of America’s ‘Original Sin’—White Privilege is the Problem,” set its sights on the root of anti-Black racism in the U.S.

The University has been gathering faculty and staff for panel discussions on aspects of the anti-Black racism that has been prevalent in America for 400 years, going back to the introduction of slavery. These discussions are on the University’s YouTube channel.

“We want to focus on white privilege as both the legacy and the cause of racism in our society,” said moderator Michelle Loris, professor and associate dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, in her introduction. “We will point to the historical, social and psychological structures that support white privilege and therefore perpetuate racial injustice and racism.

“White privilege assumes that white lives matter more than Black lives,” Loris continued. She acknowledged that the evening’s conversation could make white people feel uncomfortable and suggested that this discomfort is necessary to “wrestle” with the legacy of white privilege so societal growth can take place.

Sacred Heart history professor Jennifer McLaughlin gave the historical context of white privilege, beginning with slavery. “White privilege is enshrined in the laws and it has persisted in a myriad of ways. But we should also keep in mind that, since the beginning, white privilege has been met with Black resistance, and we are witnessing that legacy today,” McLaughlin said.

Historical context

In the beginning, the few Black slaves in America worked alongside white servants and owners on plantations. They were treated the same as the servants. “So, we have to ask ourselves, what changed in colonial society to racialize slavery?” McLaughlin said.

In the second half of the 17th century, laws known as the Black Codes classified the difference between slaves and servants, primarily based on skin color. “These laws restrict the ways enslaved Africans can behave, where they can travel, who they can be with,” McLaughlin said. The Black Codes also ensured the perpetuation of slavery by including a law stating, “any child born to a slave mother is born into slavery,” she said.

The differentiation was important not only for wealthy white people and slave owners. Poor white people could take solace in the fact that, “At least I am not Black, and I will never be a slave.”

“The idea of white privilege perpetuates from that moment when the laws start to change,” McLaughlin said. The Black Code determined who could own land, who could marry, who could leave their land to children, who could write laws, who can go to school, who can vote, who can learn to read. Granted, these privileges were not applied equally to white Americans, nor are they equal today. However, these codes defined the power structure so that race was a bigger factor than class—a power structure that is still evident today.

The Declaration of Independence itself sets up a system of white privilege. When Thomas Jefferson said that all men were created equal, he meant all white men who owned land, not poor white men, women or African Americans—in effect, defining an American as a wealthy Caucasian male.

The racialization of slavery sets America apart from other countries. While prolific in other parts of the world, only America used a person’s skin tone to determine status as a slave.

Building a structure of white supremacy

Jill Plummer, professor of Catholic studies, shared the scholarly work of Nell Irvin Painter, Ira Katznelson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Richard Rothstein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Manfred Berg, and others in order to highlight how “government laws, private institutions and white citizens have all been responsible for the construction of white supremacy and white privilege.”

Plummer pointed out that the U.S. Supreme Court collaborated in  “restructuring a culture of white supremacy” through their rulings in cases, such as Plessy vs. Ferguson—a case that upheld racial segregation as long as the facilities and amenities for both white and Black people were of equal quality, leading to the “separate but equal” precept. This decision instituted discrimination and endorsed Jim Crow segregation in the former Confederacy states affecting such places, but not limited to, public facilities, drinking fountains, and other kinds of spaces as well as possessions, including bibles.

During the Jim Crow period, southern states worked to disenfranchise Black voters through means such as the poll tax. The success of measures like the poll tax meant that until the mid-twentieth century less than 5% of eligible Black citizens were registered to vote in 11 formerly Confederate states, Plummer said.

Another means of white supremacy was the unethical practice of leasing convicts’ labor, which meant Black prisoners were forced to work without pay.

“White citizens in the south and the north supported the political disenfranchisement and segregation of Black people using extra-legal means, including, most violently, in southern lynching campaigns,” Plummer said. “Lynching was justified in the southern and the northern United States by the white supremacist myth that Black men were predators and rapists threatening the purity of white women.”

White police in the north overlooked the destruction carried out by racist mobs as they tore through Black neighborhoods and threatened the lives and livelihoods of Black families. While establishing the welfare system and the New Deal to boost the economy, President Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress unevenly distributed aid to white citizens, increasing the wealth gap. “Important New Deal legislation bolstered white privilege by excluding agricultural and domestic service jobs, where the majority of Black people worked,” she said.

In the 1930s, the government also initiated a state-sponsored housing loan program that “set out to further segregate white and Black neighborhoods,” said Plummer. This introduced the practice of redlining: labeling Black neighborhoods as unsafe to insure for housing loans, even if the residents were middle class.

These are just a few examples of white privilege being built into the country’s political system.

Racism as a social sin

Theologically, racism would be considered a “social sin,” according to June-Ann Greeley, associate professor of Catholic studies and language and literature. She said white privilege is very much a sin in the Catholic sense.

“When we think of sinning, we think of behaviors,” she said. “But sinning itself, particularly in the Catholic tradition, is a disorder of the soul. It is a corruption to the inherent natural workings of the soul.” That natural working of the soul is considered a moral or natural law.

Catholics believe everyone is born with a natural understanding of right and wrong. “What is the good, but God? And what is God, but love?” she said. So, at the core of sin, that love has been corrupted. In Catholic tradition, sin is also defined as intentional and freely willed.

“I think we need to ask people to do a really tight inventory,” Greeley said. “The really tough internal questioning has to come from all those ‘good people,’ who would not identify themselves as racists.”

What is systemic white privilege? What is it not?

“Talking about white privilege is not to say that white people do not have struggles,” said Amanda Moras, associate professor and associate dean for student success in the College of Arts & Sciences. “It is not the assumption that everything a white person has accomplished is unearned.”

Moras cites an essay by activist Peggy McIntosh titled, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” in which McIntosh describes an invisible, weightless knapsack “full of special provisions, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.” In this essay, McIntosh lists 50 day-to-day transactions that white people move through within their personal and professional worlds with relative ease, Moras said. People with power make conscious choices that perpetuate this cycle.

She pointed out that McIntosh’s knapsack could be used as a tool or a weapon, depending on who holds it. “The many examples of white people calling the police on Black people for mundane things is an example of this weaponization,” Moras said, using the recent incident in New York’s Central Park, when a white woman called the police on a Black man who asked her to leash her dog, falsely claiming that he had threatened her.

“The power of normal is the ability to walk through the world knowing that your needs will be readily met, and if they are not, it is not because of your race,” Moras stated. Referencing flesh-colored adhesive bandages, which match white people’s skin color, she said, “The Band-Aid example emphasizes the counterpoint as well: if privilege means walking through the world knowing your needs will be readily met, then being marginalized or minoritized means knowing your needs exist on the margin.”

Whiteness often means being given the benefit of the doubt, Moras said. She brought up a study out of Australia in which people of different races tried to board a bus and tell the driver they didn’t have the bus fare. They found that 72% of white riders were allowed to stay on the bus compared to 36 percent of Black riders.

Vast racial disparities in the accumulation of wealth, school funding, health care, interactions with the police and the larger criminal justice system, as well as the number of polling places in voting districts, are just a few of the results of systemic or institutional racism. “We need to not just unlearn our biases, but dismantle that power and redistribute those resources,” she said.

“In a recent conversation, Democratic Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio Cortez was asked about activists’ calls to defund the police and what that looks like. She pointed out that it doesn’t take a lot of imagination; one only needs to look to affluent white suburbs,” she said.

Experiencing white privilege

Julie Lawrence, SHU’s executive director for diversity and inclusion, grew up in Fairfield. She had many white friends, went to a good school and was not privy to the reality of white privilege as a child or adolescent. “I was shielded from a lot of racism that people who I know deal with on a daily basis,” she said.

White privilege has been normalized in America, Lawrence said.

Public goods and services cater to the needs of one race, while segregating everyone else’s needs into “other” categories. For example, hair-care products for white people may be found in one aisle, and ethnic hair care products may be in a separate section. “Up until recently, at Walmart, that hair-care section was locked,” she said as a simple example of this normalization.

“It’s an emotional and psychological burden for people of color to have to navigate this space,” said Crystal Hayes, clinical assistant professor of social work. She discussed having a difficult conversation about race with her young daughter, who was being targeted by a teacher. Her daughter’s white female peers would be rewarded for challenging status quo, while she would be punished for doing the same.

“When I started working here, I was hesitant to talk about white privilege,” said Lawrence. She didn’t want to be known as the “diversity police” on campus. She had to remind herself that her own discomfort with talking about it actually fed in to the problem.

When confronted with the reality of white privilege, many white people get defensive and begin giving “what about” examples in an effort to dismiss the notion that such privilege exists, she said.

“I’d like to say that white privilege doesn’t mean that, as a white person, your life hasn’t been hard. But it does mean that the color of your skin didn’t contribute to your struggles,” Lawrence said.

Dismantling white privilege

Hayes co-teaches a class at Sacred Heart about white privilege with Jill Manit, clinical assistant professor of social work.

“This is an intentional partnership between a white woman and a Black woman in the classroom,” said Hayes, noting they are both very purposeful about how they present themselves in class. “This partnership would not be possible if we hadn’t developed a deep mutual respect for one another and trust our commitment to be anti-racist.”

Manit spoke of a 1962 voter registration campaign, when preacher Charles Sherrod worked to create a biracial community organizing team to “strike at the very root of segregation.” Manit pointed out that the “root” is the idea that white is superior. “He said ‘We have to break this image. And we can only do that if we see white and Black working together, side by side.’”

The foundation of Hayes and Manit’s partnership is to work side by side in class to present themselves as equals. Manit said she also has to consciously consider her own white privilege and intentionally give up any subconscious idea of superiority.

Becoming an ally

White people can begin by asking themselves some core questions, Lawrence said:

• How do I work with my own thoughts and fears as a white person?
• How do I work with those thoughts, fears and beliefs in a way that nurtures the dignity of all races?
• How do I comfort my raging heart in a sea of racial ignorance and violence?
• How can my actions reflect the work that I want for myself and for future generations?
• How do I advocate for racial justice without harm or hate internally or externally?

Lawrence pointed out that people must give each other the space to make mistakes, talk it through and come to an understanding. “That’s the only way we will be courageous enough to have these conversations. People need to know that they won’t be ‘canceled’ for saying the wrong thing,” she said.

“As a history teacher with Black students in the classroom, it is uncomfortable for me to talk about slavery,” said McLaughlin. But working through that discomfort leads to conversations and a mutual appreciation. Students are not being taught African-American history in high school, and McLaughlin said they are grateful for the knowledge and dialogue she encourages in class.

Greeley pointed out that white people are in for some hard work. “It’s easy to intellectually say ‘I get it.’ But we need to take a truly honest appraisal of ourselves,” she said. She also stressed the importance of listening.

Manit used the analogy of a nurse putting on her uniform and showing up for work. Someone who is new to nursing has wonderful intentions but may not be as skilled as a nurse with 30 years of experience. “Think about this new knowledge as putting on your uniform,” she said. “That uniform consists of honoring our history of slavery and accepting that is our legacy and taking on an identity as someone committed to dismantling white supremacy.

“We have to recognize that just showing up for this job isn’t enough,” she said. Now in uniform, white people have to “push forward and push through” to get the experience and become more skilled at dismantling white supremacy.

The system of white privilege and white supremacy will only be successfully dismantled from within. It is up to white people to show up and do the work.