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Having written this essay in December 2019, I am providing a reflection on the content. While racial injustice has clearly always been a part of our countrys history, events from Summer 2020 have me once again wrestling with and updating my understanding of the privilege I have as a White educator and person. I originally wrote the column to share my experience, broaching issues related to social injustice in my predominantly White classroom. Recent events and my subsequent reflections remind me that I am not an expert in these matters, and the work of becoming an antiracist educator for me is never over. I offer the ideas as a teacher who has grappled with what it means to teach about privilege in my specific school context.
As a White American high school English language arts (ELA) teacher in suburban Massachusetts, I frequently wrestle with how to best navigate discussions of privilege in my classroom. How do I authentically engage with such topics in a school with a predominantly White American student population? How do I manage student resistance to these topics? What materials most effectively engage students with these issues? How do I sustain engagement beyond a superficial level that simply pays lip service to these issues? In this column, I document my use of one of Roxane Gays essays from Bad Feminist and two other texts to address these questions and engage in the work of challenging the status quo.
Working with texts that bring issues of racism and other societal inequalities to the visible forefront of a classroom gets at the crux of why we read and write: to be able to discern where and how oppression exists in society, to articulate the oppression we witness or experience and argue for justice, and to strive for a more equitable world. Modeling this work for students supports them on their own journeys of challenging the status quo.
DEFINING PRIVILEGE
We start by zeroing in on the types of privilege that Gay lists: racial privilege, gender (and identity) privilege, heterosexual privilege, economic privilege, able-bodied privilege, educational privilege, religious privilege (16).
Privilege becomes an advantage that accompanies certain characteristics that society values more than others. In my experience discussing this list with my students, the existence...