I completely forgot to post the info on the suggested reading I told you about a in Session 4 (it's posted in the Ppt slides I put on angel.) This article was one of the first of the required readings I did for the "Doing Our Own Work" Seminar (two four day retreats) on racism and white privilege, back when the Children's Lit Team was preparing for and developing this course.
The article is "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" by Peggy McIntosh. The article introduces the idea of "white privilege": the idea that white people may or may not have had a chance to recognize the significance of race in day to day life. Although McIntosh thinks in terms of race, the idea of privilege can be helpful in thinking in more general ways about how those with majority identities sometimes haven't had a chance to explore common experiences of people with socially marginalized identities. A colleague (Valerie) also suggeted article which uses the concept of privilege to think about heterosexual privilege called "The Daily Effects of Straight Privilege". What do people think? Did anything in McIntosh's article "ring true"? Was there anything that you questioned? What does "privilege" have to do with our identities as readers?
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I read this article for a couple classes within the past few years. Honestly, the first time I read the article I skimmed through it and didn't put much thought into the issues that it brought to the surface. However, as I read the article a second and third time it made more sense to me. I think that as readers, those with privilege can look at text with a very different lens than those readers who do not benefit from such privileges. A point was brought up in our insider/outsider debate that outsider writers have the privilege of stepping outside of the culture they are writing about and are not always subject to the inequalities and ridicule that insiders to that culture may face. The same is true for privileged readers - you can read a text and gain some insight into the lives of those being portrayed, but you will never experience the exact same thing yourself. Because of this, most readers have the privilege of reading about an issue and then sweeping it under the rug since it does not affect them on a personal level. This is what happened the first time I read this article, I was the person of privilege that the article described so I initially discarded it. However, I now see the importance of such an article - to open the eyes of both those with privilege and those without.
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