Tim Wise’s latest blog post titled “Imagine: Protest, Insurgency and the Workings of White Privilege” asks readers to play a game in which they imagine the public reaction to current events if the main actors were not white but black folks or other people of color.  At first glance, the set up felt a little hokey to me.  It reminded me a bit of Matthew McConaughey’s character’s strategy in the movie “A Time to Kill”–to get the white jury to imagine the young black girl’s suffering…and then to imagine she was white.  However, I have to admit that the game–like the jury argument–was pretty powerful.

For example, Wise invites us to (and I quote):

• “Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters–the black protesters–spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government. Would these protesters–these black protesters with guns–be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.
• Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry, screaming, black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.
• Imagine that a popular black liberal website posted comments about the daughter of a white president, calling her “typical redneck trash,” or a “whore” whose mother entertains her by “making monkey sounds.” After all that’s comparable to what conservatives posted about Malia Obama on freerepublic.com last year, when they referred to her as “ghetto trash.”

Wise concludes that “Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it.”  He goes on to say that is what white privilege is all about:  “The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.”

Wise ends his post with “Game over.”  Yet, the game was on for one commenter who chose to challenge Wise point-by-point.  In the commenter’s mind:

• The group of gun-toting protesters was representative of the country’s demographics (predominantly white), the protest was not “restrictively” white, and there must have been some black participants, thus…not white privilege.
• The video Tim posted did not show anyone spitting on members of Congress (no “hard” evidence) and the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a Tea Partier, thus…not white privilege.
• People criticized George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Sarah Palin’s daughter, thus…not white privilege.

This, I suggest, is also what white privilege is all about.  It’s the ability to deny the significance of race, to narrowly define racism so as to exclude all but the most extreme (think KKK), to point to black participation as legitimizing/de-racializing, and to disregard this nation’s racist past as irrelevant to its present.

Perhaps we should play Wise’s game for real (but in our own context on issues that we care about) and see how the public responds.  I’d be willing to bet the prototypical (white) American won’t be thinking about black folks’ constitutional rights…and no one will be calling us patriotic.  Rather than game over, I say game on.  Imagine that!

You can find Wise’s post at www.timwise.org, but you will have to click on Blog (At Red Room) to find it.

At West Wind, we believe the system was perfectly designed to get the results it is getting. Thus, we seek to problematize the racial achievement gap by reframing the problem from one of failing students to one of a failing system. While this most certainly includes inequitable resources and inequitable distribution of highly qualified teachers and principals, we believe these are just symptoms of the larger systemic problem—an enduring belief in the inferiority of students of color, their families, and their communities. A new study by Marvin Lynn et al (2010) illustrates this point.

Lynn et al. examined how teachers’ and administrators’ understood the problem of African American male underachievement in an all-black, low-performing high school, and how those understandings impacted their ability to work successfully with such students. They found that school personnel overwhelmingly blamed students of color, their families, and their communities. Further, Marvin et al. tell us that “the school was pervaded by a culture of defeat and hopelessness” and that “ongoing conversations with a smaller group of teachers committed to the success of African American male students revealed that the school was not a safe space for caring teachers who wanted to make a difference in the lives of their students.”

The full article is available through the Teacher College Record here.

I just reconnected with an amazing woman from my grad school days at the University of Maryland.  Avis Jones-Deweever is director of the Research, Public Policy, and Information Center at the National Council of Nego Women.  Please read her recent blog post on “Precious” and “The Blind Side” on the Race-Talk blog site!  Media portrayals of black women, men, children, families, and communities deeply impact choices we ultimately make about public policy, education, care, and trust.  Avis’ blog helps put current movie releases into relief.

At West Wind, we have been exploring the impact of othering on education…how our expectations and beliefs about children of color, their families, and their communities have been shaped by centuries of images of people of color designed to justify oppression and lack of care.  The conversations we had with folks at the Summit for Courageous Conversation and the Harvard Alumni of Color Conference have helped us to understand much of what we have seen in our work with schools, communities, researchers, and policy leaders.  If we don’t believe children can learn, we don’t teach them effectively.  If we believe they are dangerous, we discipline them at higher rates and we do what we can to protect others from them.  This is precisely what we are doing as a society.

Overcoming dominant narratives about children of color may be our greatest challenge as a nation and an education system.