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Hi, I'm Anne Strange Champs, and today, on to the best of our knowledge, I want to talk to you about being white.

That sounds strange, doesn't it, to talk about whiteness?

Because most of the time, when we talk about race in America, and we talk about it a lot,

we talk about the experience of people of color.

But maybe that's a problem.

Maybe we're missing something.

I grew up in this almost exclusively white suburb, and it never occurred to me how strange

it was that I was living in an all-white space.

Debbie Irving grew up like a lot of white people, almost unaware that she was white.

I didn't understand what racial privilege

was at all. And that's racial privilege in a nutshell. It's when whiteness gets coded as normal

or the default. Exactly. Race was something that belonged to black and brown people. And that can

sound so naive. So I would make a distinction between, I absolutely

knew I was white and I could check that off on a census form. But if you had said to me, Debbie,

describe how being white has shaped your worldview, I would have had nothing to say. I couldn't

have answered that. I would have thought that was a stupid question.

So today, Debbie Irving is a racial justice educator. She travels the country teaching people how to have uncomfortably honest conversations about race and privilege. And she talks about her own

experience of, in her words, waking up white, which, she says, happened embarrassingly late in life.

It was a graduate school course. I was 48 years old. It was only seven years ago. And I had gone

back to get my master's in special education. I was a classroom teacher. And yes, there was a moment.

...