Privilege

Privilege

            Let’s all take a minute to acknowledge our privilege as Rhodes College students. Privilege is something a lot of people at this school were born with and don’t even know or want to think about they have. Some people don’t like to acknowledge their privileges because then it shows them they were born with an advantage that lots of people were not born with. 

            I would like to take a moment to focus on white privilege alone because this is not something earned or worked for, it is simply given to you based on the color of your skin alone. This goes back to the roots of the American culture and how Americans came with a way to judge a person from somewhere they have never gone and has been this way even before slavery. The significance of simply being born white gives white people a big leg up over African American people. A study was done to see if employers, who were looking for candidates for specific jobs, decisions were affected by skin color. It showed that if a white man with a felony that has the same credentials as a black man who has not been to prison, the white man with a felony was more likely to get the job. Later they asked the employers where they knew of this discrimination. They said no they just thought that the white people would be more suitable for the job at hand. White privilege is embedded deep in the way we function as a society. Slavery did help to enhance these thoughts and feelings of white dominance over black people as white people were able to do pretty much anything they wanted to black people because they were looked at as property and as people.  

            This unknown or not talked about but yet very prevalent privilege that white people have continues to have and to pass down for generations while black people have to work to have privileges for their future kids which is hard to do because of social mobility which is the ability to move up in social classes, and since black people were lower on the social class scale then white people due to slavery and laws that kept black people suppressed for years.

            But now, all of us as Rhodes College students have some privilege that people at some state schools will never have due to the connections this college has and the prestigious name that it carries on our degree when we all graduate.