First, we must understand the background of the author. I am a thirty-something white married male with two children. I was born in Florida, raised around the rural outskirts of the St. Louis area, moved to the “Big City” (inner-city) when newly married, and then fled to farm country when the inner-city crime became too much to bare to raise a family. When in the educational system, I wasn’t completely isolated from racial concerns. There was a black family with kids in grade school and a couple of black kids in high school. We thought we were high society, progressive “color-blind” people, though I can’t remember ever going to their houses, or seeing them outside of school, or even hanging out with them in school. My parents were not always the first to step up and claim “ain’t racist” but they would when pressed. They enjoyed a good joke or two or twenty and stereotypes a-plenty. It was when I went to college straight out of high school, and let a racist slang term slip amongst a group of my multicultural friends that I realized how much my parents tainted my worldview. That was my first realization and my first step towards being anti-racist. The purpose of this reflective paper is to examine what confrontations are experienced in recognizing institutionalized racism and white privilege.
In order to understand today’s institutional racism, we must define. That is a difficult task and we were unable to fully define it amongst a group of my peers and that I turn to an authority such as Enid Lee. According to Enid Lee in the article titled Anti-Racist Education: Pulling Together to Close the Gaps, racism is defined as “the use of institutional power to deny or grant people and groups of people rights, respect, representation, and resources based on their skin color” (Enid, Deborah, and Margo, p27). Let’s take a moment to dissect this powerful definition.
“The use