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Argumentative Essay : Growing Up White

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Growing Up White Often when individuals are presented with the concept of privilege, especially those who have a lot of it, they find the idea affronting. It’s hard to hear that the country we are taught to love isn’t as perfect and fair as it seems. Privilege is the unearned benefits or advantages given to a specific group. The key to this definition, and the one most people don’t recognize is the unearned benefits or advantages. For example, not having to think about how you will enter a building if they do not have handicapped access, or not having to consider how others will react to learning your sexuality. The idea that some of the population has an advantage over others is often met with automatic defensiveness. People in power feel like they have worked hard enough to earn what they have; however, privilege is understanding that not all of us begin at the same starting point. Some people need more help than others. As a temporarily able bodied white man in America, I receive a lot of privilege. This essay is going to focus specifically on the privilege I receive from my own whiteness and the prevalence of normalized whiteness in American culture. Growing up in a small town with a majority white population, I didn’t truly begin to think about how race affected my experiences until I started my Junior year of college and moved to Norman. Before I came here I thought that institutional racism died with the civil rights movement, and that individuals who were racist
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