They're Privileged

       The summer before my senior year, I was accepted into a pre-college program at Davidson College in North Carolina, July Experience. My motivations to attend a pre-college program were that I would be going for free, I would spend a month of my summer in a different state, and I would be able to experience what college is like. Prior to going, I had no idea what the program would be like, what kinds of people would be attending, and how much I would change because of going. Davidson College is a liberal arts college in Davidson, North Carolina with 1,850 students, 20.5% of which are students of color. In the profile of the class of 2018, of the 5560 applicants, 1200 were accepted and of the accepted students, 67.9% were Caucasian, 8.9% were Asian American, 7.8% were international, 7.4% were African American/Black, 6.5% were Hispanic/Latino, and 1.4% were other or unreported. These were things I should have looked up and considered but even though I had no previous knowledge of what the East Coast, or specifically North Carolina, was like, my experience there was one to be thankful for.

       When I first arrived at Davidson College, the first few people I met were friendly and made me really excited to have the opportunity to be there. Within the first week, my level of excitement decreased as I saw the kinds of people I would be spending my summer with. My roommate was white and there was one white person in each room on my hall. It was unlikely for two students of color to be rooming together. It’s not that because they were white that caused my excitement to decreased, but because of how they acted and how they were unaware of their privilege. The majority of the students there were white and they carried themselves with ignorance, pride, and class. No one was racist towards me but I felt racism in the air everyday and everywhere I went.

       I took two classes everyday; “Frontiers of Neuroscience” in the morning and “Social Movements and Youth” in the afternoon. The professor who taught “Social Movements and Youth” and the class itself were the reasons I realized that there was a difference between myself and the majority of the students there. What I experienced and realized at July Experience was white privilege. The majority of students there were there because they came from privileged families; their parents had the ability to pay for their kids to attend this program. Looking at other sources as to why white families are able to pay for their children to attend such programs, the book, Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach provides a chart showing that Whites experience the least amount of unemployment with less than 10% unemployment rates whereas the highest unemployment rates are Blacks with at least 15% (Golash-Boza, 246). Because they hardly experience unemployment, they are most likely working stables jobs where they know they are financially stable and don't have financial problems to worry about. White privilege was very apparent to me because the way the other students dressed, spoke, acted, and carried themselves was so different from what I was used to seeing. I went to a high school where the majority of students were students of color and they never carried themselves in such a way that came off as people of higher status or someone who was better than you because of the things they had. Even though it was just three weeks, the change of people around me was kind of surprising because I hadn’t expected such a culture shock.
       The idea of racism persists because everything has been normalized in our society. We see these things going on around us but we accept them because we assume that that's how things are supposed to be. Even though the laws no longer for racism to continue, it's all on a very personal level in which we show racism. Because race is just a social construct, we can change our ways of thinking. To me, racism and racial discrimination still exists because is it taught. We learn racism from family members, friends, teachers, and many others but we can rid racism if we change what we are taught about people and how we think about the things we are taught. Laws no longer permitting racism aren't always followed because they simply are just rules that guide our actions. To have our actions guided doesn't necessarily mean that racism is no longer existing. To cease racism and to change racial issues, we need to begin with changing our own actions and thoughts.