Hi everyone,
I have been thinking a lot about the discussion my group was having yesterday about how race has affected my own experience in education, and during class when I looked back I shared that race was not usually on my mind, and, perhaps due to my own ignorance, really hadn't had a very profound impact on my life. But now that I've thought about it more, I am realizing that this is in itself a form of my racial privilege. I can't speak for anyone other than myself, but as a caucasian I never identified specifically with my race, being 'white' doesn't mean anything to me, and it doesn't affect who I am or who I want to be. But I cannot deny that it has allowed me the privilege of being able to ignore how my race shapes my experiences. And, because I had not experienced firsthand racial discrimination, I was in a position to brush off the notion of race as a factor in my educational experience, and to assume that because it wasn't blatantly there before my eyes, it wasn't there at all. Even though I had good friends of many different racial and ethnic backgrounds, we weren't sitting around seriously discussing race, it just didn't come up that often. And so I hadn't had a serious discussion of race with a diverse group of people and I am actually very thankful to have heard so many diverse views in our class. I'm curious to know what else people think because I'm sure most of the discussions in class were truncated for time reasons.
Thanks everyone and have a good Halloween weekend!
-not written by but uploadede by JWP
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