[ACC25087]

I’m with you on this one. When I teach freshmen college students about racism in American history, everything from lynchings to the slave trade to massacres of Natives to theft of land from both Natives and Mexicans to internment of Japanese Americans, I almost always immediately hear the ridiculous assertion, ‘Why don’t you tell us about all the bad things people of color have done to whites?’ And the ‘worst’ they can come up with is Affirmative Action.

Never mind that Affirmative Action is mostly about gender, not race, and that it’s helped white women more than any other group. Never mind that whites are protected under it, too. Never mind that there are white scholarships and quotas for them to go to historically black or Latino schools. Never mind that ‘reverse racism’ or ‘losing jobs to less-qualified minorities’ exists far more in their imagination than in reality. It is amazing to me how people from privileged backgrounds can do backflips and twists to invent how they supposedly have it ‘just as bad as people of color used to’ nowadays. I think this is all about ‘respectable negrophobia’ and fear of other non-whites as well, as Jody Armour says. It is all about finding a more subtle way of holding onto white privilege. The positive side of this is that I rarely hear that from older students of any ethnic background. It’s mostly the most sheltered, still-living-at-home with the parents, never been out in the real world kids who make that kind of statement. Nontraditional (over 25) students rarely make that statement, I think, because they’ve seen how the real world works.

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Name : ACC25087, Gender : M, Race : Mexican and American Indian, City : Phoenix, State : AZ, Country : United States, Occupation : Teacher, Education level : Over 4 Years of College, 

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