Reflective Essay: White Privilege In My Life

Looking back at the last five years, I am a completely different person than I used to be. I grew up sheltered in a white bubble where I could just choose to ignore that racial injustice exists. As McIntosh said in her list of privileges that she has experienced as a white person, “I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and minority activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative consequences of any of these choices” (McIntosh). For the majority of my life, I had lived in ignorant bliss; I did not even notice that I was ignoring the struggles of minorities because I was not experiencing any real consequences from my ignorance. Throughout

I remember being appalled that these white people were dehumanizing him so that they did not have to care as much about his death. Regardless of criminal history, race, or appearance, nobody deserves to be spontaneously and publicly executed. I remember looking back at incidences like the Aurora shooting in 2012 where a white mass murderer was taken into custody alive and went to court. When talking to my peers I would often compare incidences of violent and belligerent white criminals being taken into custody alive with incidences of black people being killed by cops for things like mild traffic offenses or holding a water gun. In nearly all of the latter cases, the cops were not even put on trial for killing innocent black people. It was common for white people in my community to defend and humanize white criminals by saying they were a depressed “lone wolf” or they were mentally unstable. These same white people were the first dehumanize the black victims of police brutality by calling them thugs and criminals. When groups like Black Lives Matter made an effort to point out these injustices, many white people simply chose to