Exploring White Privilege (New Critical Viewpoints on Society)

Exploring white privilege is an enterprise few of us who identify as white have attempted. White privilege is a foreign territory to us, although an unpleasantly familiar territory to people of color. At first the exploration can seem threatening, frightening and uncomfortable because, like any exploration, it can shatter the way we look at the world and how we understand ourselves. This book is, in part, a personal exploration of the author’s white privilege and how he sought to transcend it. It is also a sociological analysis of white privilege, drawing upon key social science literature. The book is an invaluable tool for personal and group explorations of racial privilege as well as other forms of privilege, including gender.

Exploring White Privilege offers an analysis of white privilege as well as numerous examples of systemic white privilege in the U.S. Amico explains the cognitive and emotive factors that play a role in making it difficult for most white Americans to understand, learn and accept the sociological facts about systemic racism. While white privilege is generally understood as a system that benefits white people, Amico investigates the psychological, social and spiritual costs of white privilege to white people. And with a deeper understanding of how white privilege affects us all, questions of moral responsibility and accountability are investigated through personal anecdotes. The author offers a moral argument that is a call to action within our individual spheres of influence. The benefits of such a commitment to action are then explored and compared to the costs of inaction. Exploring white privilege can lead to social change. Amico offers a variety of tools for the reader interested in such explorations of their white privilege.

Robert P. Amico is Professor of Philosophy at St. Bonaventure University. He serves as chair of the university’s Diversity Action Committee and the Council on Discrimination and Harassment. He serves as an editor for Understanding and Dismantling Privilege, the official journal of the White Privilege Conference. Since 2000, Amico has facilitated numerous antiracist workshops and seminars for student teachers, faculty and staff in the five-college area as well as at the White Privilege Conference and other universities. Amico is the author of Anti-racist Teaching and The Problem of the Criterion―a Choice Award winner in 1995.