Page 152 - Microaggressions in Everyday Live Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation

126 microaggressive perpetrators and oppression

employment and education. The following quote illustrates this realization
and meaning:
I know I did not get where I am by merit alone. I benefited from, among other

things, white privilege. That doesn ’ t mean that I don ’ t deserve my job, or that
if I weren ’ t white I would never have gotten the job. It means simply that all
through my life, I have soaked up benefits for being white. I grew up in fertile

farm country taken by force from non - white indigenous people. I was educated
in a well - funded, virtually all - white public school system in which I learned that
white people like me made this country great. There I also was taught a variety of
skills, including how to take standardized tests written by and for white people.
There certainly is individual variation in experience. Some white people have
had it easier than me, probably because they came from wealthy families that
gave them even more privilege. Some white people have had it tougher than
me because they came from poorer families. White women face discrimination I
will never know. But, in the end, white people all have drawn on white privilege
somewhere in their lives. (Jensen, 2002, 104–105)

Layer Four — Fear of Taking Personal Responsibility to End Racism
Once Whites achieve level - three awareness, they are confronted with another
dilemma in level four: How do they deal with their own racism and the ben-
efits and advantages that they have enjoyed individually and collectively?

Does the realization of inequities built upon racism and how they personally
profit from it motivate change and action? Or do Whites deny responsibil-

ity for it? The ultimate White privilege may be the ability to acknowledge
one ’ s privileged position in life, but do nothing about it! One would hope that
awareness of racial injustice at this level would be powerful motivation to
take action against these unfair personal and structural advantages for Whites
and disadvantages for people of color.
It is therefore disheartening to realize that despite awareness of inequities and
injustice (cognitive insight), many White Americans may not follow through
affectively and behaviorally in taking responsibility to intervene when racial
injustice occurs and/or proactively combat discrimination. In a study aimed
at predicting affective and behavioral responses to racism, for example, inves-
tigators found that Whites mispredict their affective and behavioral responses
to racism (Kawakami, Dunn, Karmali, & Dovidio, 2009). While they (1) clearly
recognized racist actions, verbalizations, and events, and (2) indicated that

they would find such situations distressing, and (3) predicted they would
take responsible action against the person (rejecting the racist person), White

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