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You're listening to the Partially Examined Life episode 161 Part 2 on White Privilege.

We've talked about Peggy McIntosh's unpacking the invisible backpack, Tim Weiss'

White-like me documentary, a little bit about Charles Mills' white ignorance and Lewis Gordon's critical

reflections on three popular tropes of the study whiteness and Lawrence Blum's White Privilege of

Mile Critique. We have yet to ring in Charles Yancees, Dear White America or John McWorders,

the privilege of checking White Privilege. I'm sure we'll have all of that and more back here with

Lawrence Ware. So I want to say something about the notion that there's sort of a personal

project and a policy project involved in looking at one's participation in privilege, however

it breaks down. So we can talk about distinctions between passive and active or benefit versus

avoidance. But what I've been getting from what Wes had been saying is that there's a psychological

aspect to coming to terms or coming to some kind of recognition of your participation

and benefit from white privilege. And then there's the, how does this motivate individual

action for the sake of public policy? And there's also the third component of recognizing, I think,

in one of the essays I don't remember which one mentions the idea that thinking of racism

as an individual's act against another individual, like violence or hate of one individual of

another versus recognizes systemic institutional racism. And I want to just sort of speak out from

what I'll call the naive individual and say, it strikes me as insofar as we undertake the

philosophical enterprise of trying to root out and uncover assumptions and biases, faulty thinking

for the sake of getting a truth. I don't see that there's anything fundamentally different

...