Racial Discrimination

In her essay “White Privilege,” Peggy McIntosh, writes “I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” McIntosh, in my opinion, must have been personally frustrated with race relations or guilty that her merits were unearned and she was the recipient of white privileges. White men set up a system of oppression centuries ago to be dominated by whites. Though most white Americans didn’t rely on these privileges; nevertheless, they have been taking advantage of them for centuries. In this essay I intend to show that white privilege wasn’t by accident but by design.

This system of oppression was established back in the 1700’s when slavery was the preferred labor system of most southern colonies. They established laws that saw slaves as property, not only the living but their unborn offspring as well. When the Constitution was written in 1776, it made no inclusion for the rights of African Americans (slaves). In fact, it stated that all men have the rights to “Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness.” That sounded good, but it still saw slaves as property and not as equals. This system continued to use slaves as seen fit by their owners. This ideology would be used as the spring board that fuels the system of white privilege.

In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, essentially ending slavery in every state of the Union, but Southerners felt they had the right to still dominate, continued the acts of discrimination. In 1866 a group of Confederate veterans decided to start the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee. In the beginning the group wasn’t intended to be malicious but it quickly became a terror...

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...ed to write about white privilege, I was reluctant, because it made me focus on a system of unfair practices, the systematic destruction of the dignity of a people, and the reality of no matter what changes America has made, it will still be the same in the future. For America to level the playing field, we would have to travel back in time and re-write its Constitution, to change the institution of slavery, and treat the Native Americans with some measure of respect. Since going back in time is not an option, I guess we are stuck with fixing it ourselves. Though changes have been made for the better, some whites still hold true to ideas of racial superiority. These are the very ideas that continue to fuel racial discrimination into the next generation of American society; hopefully it won’t take two- hundred years to totally achieve racial equality.