White Privilege

After our discussion this past week on Peggy McIntosh’s article White Privilege, I discussed the topic with my professor Olon Dotson, who teaches the class Cultural and Social Issues in Architecture. After talking about this, he emailed me this youtube video, while an extensive video (about an hour) it is a very good argument about white privilege and social inequality. Tim Wise starts out his lecture by stating that he is on that stage because he is a white man and that if a person of color tried to present something like this on that stage they would probably have been denied that right.
So is there a solution to this? I believe that as long as ‘white’ people remain a majority in the United States, this problem is not going to go away. A good portion of Americans are too stubborn to learn about these issues, or else remain ignorant of the fact that they exist. So these ignorant or stubborn people will not try to do anything about an issue like this until they learn what it feels like to be a minority, to be stereotyped and oppressed.

Catalyst

While perusing the internet, this YouTube video came on my news feed. Watching this showed me that one incident can change a person’s life. All he needed was a catalyst to get his life on track. A catalyst being an event that affects one’s life and leads to other events. Mr. Ramsey’s character goes through a catalyst as well in “To the Lighthouse”, the death of his wife, instead of finding a way to get through the event and change his life for the better, it adversely affected him causing him to avoid the house near the lighthouse for ten years.

Everyday we experience different catalysts and it is our decision on how they affect us. This video teaches us that we must appreciate the opportunities that are given to us.