A Discussion of White Privilege

A few months ago, one of my friends asked me whether or not I believed that white privilege was still a thing in the U.S. I told him that I did, and he asked me for an example. After thinking about it for a little bit, I decided to address the inequality in schools, as it encompassed so much more and was an excellent example of subtle white privilege. I began with a statistic that I had read about for my psychology class last semester. It was a statistic that had been drawn from a study that had inspected differences in black and white student’s standardized testing achievements. It began by inspecting the two groups’ scores in Kindergarten, which found the achievements to be comparable to one another. Then, the study inspected these same children’s scores when they were in 3^rd grade. Three years of elementary school later, the white students had scored appreciably higher than the black students. This study showed two important things: (1) that black and white students intellectually began at about the same level, and (2) that by 3^rd grade, white students had made significant gains over black students.

After setting this as the basis for my discussion, I inspected why this difference occurred. As it turns out, the white students came from a wealthier area than the black students. And since property taxes pay for schools, this meant that the white school had significantly more funding than the black school. This higher funding meant more teachers, newer textbooks and more technology. This also meant that parents of the white students were more likely to have more time to spend with their children as they would not have to work longer hours and deal with as much stress with regard to finances. I’m not trying to claim that all predominantly black schools are poor, but rather that a disproportionate number of black schools are less wealthy than their white counterparts. For example, in Memphis alone the graduation rates in the poorer neighborhoods are significantly lower than they are in the more wealthy ones. These poorer neighborhoods also happen to be predominantly black while the wealthier ones are not. Across the country, white graduation rates are decently higher than black graduation rates. This was enough to convince my friend that white privilege was in fact still prevalent in the U.S.

After establishing this, we began to discuss affirmative action in colleges and universities. After seeing this unfair racial education gap, it becomes clear why we have affirmative action, if we did not, minority higher education rates would be even more abysmal than they are now. We began to discuss the goals of affirmative action next. I referenced a few studies that showed the impact that parental education played on the education level of their offspring. The main result being that children who had parents who attended and finished college were much more likely to do the same than children whose parents did not do these things. I was glad to have this discussion with my friend, and I’m glad that my classes have helped me to better understand the contemporary moment.

Sources: http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2015/08/state-high-school-graduation-rates-by.html

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/schools/shelby-county-schools-graduation-rate-ticks-up-22b43616-e567-2e7f-e053-0100007fa06b-335876541.html

http://everydaylife.globalpost.com/education-level-parent-affect-childs-achievement-school-6869