"White Privilege in Library Land" by John Berry

This article was so short I am not really sure what to say about it other than comment on the idea of white privilege. In my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I took a grouping of classes that looked at race in America. One of the classes was lead by a prominent member of the music faculty and he also happened to be a black man. I will never forget the story he told us about walking down a hallway of the music wing of Humanities and having more than one person mistake him for another black man involved in the basketball program. He was so hurt, because even though there was no malice in any of these comments, it was automatically assumed that a black man in academia was really not a member of the club, he must be one of those who is here because of sports. I will also never fogrgt the time he made us line up against a wall, close our eyes, and take a step forward every time we could answer affirmatively to the questions that Peggy McIntosh wrote and was reproduced in this article. At the end, he made us open our eyes, and to my astonishment, me and the four other white kids were all on the entirely other side of the room from our black friends. I had never seen white privilege so physically manifested in the classroom. We were literally steps ahead of other people just because of our race. That class was definitely difficult and uncomfortable most of the time, just because I was not raised to talk about race at home or with friends who were mostly white. In general, I think that my black cohorts in that class were much better talking about race issues because as the minority, race is something that they had to pay attention to. The biggest privilege I have ever had by being born white was that I was never forced to think about race, I could simply choose to pretend racism did not exist. It did not negatively affect me. And based on the tables in this article about the racial makeup of library school graduates, this is probably the case for the vast majority of librarians at least on a professional level. Not only is our library history class entirely white, it is also mostly female, and as I walk the halls of the school that ratio does not seem to change no matter where I look. And I wonder why.