“White Privilidge” by Paula S. Rothenberg

Harlon Dalton Suggests that most white people tend not to think as themselves in racial terms. What does he mean when he says this? Do you agree with him?

When Harlon Dalton suggests that most white people do not give racial recognition to their backgrounds he means that most white people do not see themselves as raced. They associate raced people with anybody who is not white and usually not put in the media as problematic. Most raced people are usually known as a certain race because of there language or ability to stand out for one reason or another. Most white people never associate whiteness as race because they were taught to label others and not themselves cause if they label others as raced they themselves cannot be apart of that group. Being white is a biological attribute given by both parents not something the person asks for. Whites failing to see themselves as raced put them and the rest of the world at a disadvantage. Not seeing themselves as raced closes the door of understanding how other races feel and why they act the way they act. By not seeing race when they look at themselves leaves whites with the inability to see that race is part of their lives as much as it is for any other race.

As a member of the raced community the fact that most whites do not see themselves as raced is not common knowledge but at the same time troubling because the truth is that they are raced just fail to see it. They fail to see the privilege they are born with the advantages they receive for having white skin as an attribute. Society as a whole already puts so many restrictions on people and when it comes to race many say that line has been abolished but the truth is it has not it just has been swept under the carpet. If whiteness did not exist blackness would not exist and vice versa. People would just be people but terms of race were brought to be too separate the worth of a person not by their intelligence or ability to do work but by their background, their mother language, and physical attributes. Unfortunately for the raced community the one race that receives all the breaks does not even see itself as a part of the raced community.