Written Assignment #1

I'll be honest. Before I watched Tim Wise's video, I never even thought of the idea of privilege. I never thought of myself as racially privileged. Rather, I just saw the way my life was lived as the standard, the norm. It may sound selfish, but I'm just being honest.

But as Tim Wise explained, members of my race, of the whites, are the bearers of more privileges than we know exist. Like he said, we can have our voice heard in a group and even sometimes be considered the authority in such a gathering. We can have the confidence of walking into a store and buying anything we want without a second glance. We can drive fancy cars and just have cops peg us as "spoiled little rich kids" as opposed to drug dealers.

The media tends to use this concept to their advantage in an unusually obvious manner. I have seen it in the past. If the story being covered has a setting where the people in the shots are predominantly of the African-American race, who do they send to cover it? Someone who is like them, an African-American correspondent. I can't blame them. After all, as journalists, it's our job to establish a level of comfort with our interviewees in order to get them to open up to us and make the information we receive all that more valuable. The media utilizes privilege in order to get the best story no matter where they are sending their reporters.

I managed to record some privileges that I noticed I have had in the last couple of days:

1) I can walk up to the cashier and pay them with the only cash I had (a fifty dollar bill) and not receive a single question of its authenticity.

2) I can walk up with my camera and microphone to the OU Men's basketball team's practice and be seen as a legitimate journalist and allowed access.

3) I can come to work at OU Nightly knowing that I will be, for the most part, surrounded by members of my same race and held in respectful regard for it.

4) I can sit in any place on campus and eat.

5) I can explain to my boss why I couldn't get away from class to cover storm-stricken areas of Oklahoma without being accused of laziness or complacency.

6) I can loiter about the South Oval in a black leather jacket and sunglasses on without anyone becoming suspicious of what my motives are.

7) I can wear my clothes in any way I choose and not be judged or stereotyped for it.

8) I am admitted into many extracurricular and social groups here on campus with no questions asked.

Just to name a few.

I honestly do not believe society still believes in the one-drop rule. Perhaps they have in the past, and I know this example is probably going to be beaten to death, but with the election of President Obama, all of that changed. When the country first started comprehending the fact that we would have our first African-American president, people began to argue that he wasn't black. Even though Obama did have the blood in him, he also had a white mother. For that, he wasn't seen by many as truly black, but mixed. Nowadays, you can have African-American blood in you, but you won't be seen as black in this country if you have another parent of a different race.

As I have mentioned before, Wise's and Tatum's words served as sort of an awakening for me. I started analyzing myself and the reasons behind my previous ignorance of such a race issue. I began to even wonder if I was just gripped with denial and that I was, in fact, racist because I did not acknowledge it. Everything they told us had been new information to me, information that delivered a swift kick in the butt and told me I need to start thinking bigger and not just within the confines of the OU borders. This information and the proceeding realization led to my sudden awareness that, hey, there really is a problem of race in this country.

But as Wise said, now is not the time for guilt. True, we didn't start this, but that doesn't mean we don't have any responsibility to change it. Tatum and Wise call upon us to use this new-found awareness in order to change our behavior and essentially begin to fix the problem. We have to make the conscious effort to alter the situation towards the better end, and only we can make that decision ourselves.

Speaking as a member of the race that is known best to many for their past oppressive behavior to his felllow man, I do sincerely hope that I am givien the chance to do so someday.