post week 4

In the cartoon “White Lies a ‘Top Ten’ List,” characters are depicted as white people justifying their reason for racism.  This animation lists 10 things white people say in order to avoid being seen as a racist.  Some of these listing go as such; “whites are the only group left that it’s still ok to criticize,” “we’re liberals, so we can’t be racist,” and my favorite “to be fair, we should be talking about racism against whites, too.”  This makes it clear to the reader that the white population is trying to justify their reason to be a racist.  Going back to the census and having some people identify as white to avoid such harsh discrimination, we can come to the conclusion that white is a standard and that people of color are subject to discrimination/racism.  The connection to white privilege is that people of color are automatically considered less than whites, therefore making it more difficult to achieve privileges that white people have easy accessibility to. 

                I fully agree with the McIntosh quote.  We do try to mask this realization of racism in order to keep things the way they are, by having whites and males on top of the privileged latter.  I can make another reference to our past to present presidents of the United States. Before we had Barak Obama as our president and role model, we had white male presidents setting a standard that, to be white and a man means you will have all the power.  To this day we are trying to preserve this idea, by limiting the power and privileges that people of color have.  By having Obama as a president we are finally taking a peek under the mask in order to diminish discrimination/racism against people of color.   

                In John Scalzi’s post, the video game analogy, a way to explain how privileges work to white males without upsetting them, makes it useful for us to understand structural privilege.  He goes into how if we where to put ourselves into a video game, some of us would be able to start on the easy difficulty and others with less privileges can only start at a medium or hard difficulty.  In this case the white males are the ones who have the option of starting on an easy difficulty, whereas to people of color have only medium or hard as an option for difficulty.  Word count:402