Write Privilege
21st March 2015
White privilege — the concept that whites benefit from structural racism in ways that similarly situated nonwhites don’t — has been hotly debated among academics for decades. But recent events — from the riots and protests in Ferguson, Mo., to the closure of a University of Oklahoma fraternity over its racist chants, to this week’s beating of a black University of Virginia student by campus police — have reinvigorated that debate, along with calls for teachers to talk directly with their students about white privilege.
For professors inclined to answer those calls, just how should they do it, particularly in a writing class? That was the topic of a popular session Thursday at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. The session was led by Ersula Ore, an assistant professor of writing at Arizona State University who found herself at the center of a debate about police racism on that campus last year, when she was body-slammed by campus police after they stopped her for jaywalking and she refused to show her ID. (Ore is African-American.)
The new clerisy is on the march through the institutions, leaving no mind unmowed.