‘Examine your privilege’

Morgan Appley is a junior and co-president of USD’s Sustainability Club.  

Last month I had the privilege of attending the White Privilege Conference in Madison, Wis. I was offered the last minute opportunity to attend this conference when another attendee backed out.

I had no idea what to expect but I knew that this would be an important conference which would quite possibly change my perspective on life and the future.

The WPC was an amazing experience, giving participants a chance to examine white privilege through a new lens while learning how to have difficult conversations about race, power, sex and intersecting identities.

In society, we’re often taught to be “color blind,” ignoring other people’s races and cultural identities. Unfortunately, while this may lead to a more diverse friend base and workplace, it ignores extremely important aspects of people’s unique identities and experiences.

Also, color blindness is perhaps a privilege solely available to white people, as we have not had to experience much of the discrimination and potential exclusion felt by people of other races. Further, many of the white friends I have believe that as long as they are not actively racist, they are not contributing to the problems created by racism.

This conference helped me to see that if we are not actively engaged in the fight against racism, we are either directly or indirectly contributing to it.

Another important take home from the conference was an opportunity to update my version of “sustainability.” Most of the people in the USD Sustainability program are interested in environmental sustainability.

An aspect often neglected is that of social justice, or social sustainability. There is a very interesting correlation between social justice and environmentalism, known as “environmental racism.”

Often people are either more specifically concerned with environmental issues or social justice issues without realizing that the two are heavily related.

To see the correlation, we need only look to recent history, to New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina or to multiple dam sites where American Indians were removed from their homes for little or no compensation in order to flood the land and build the dams. Environmental racism is happening all around us, all of the time, we are often just blind to it or don’t realize that it’s happening.

These are reminders to us that we cannot just look at one aspect of a problem, especially a problem as complex as sustainability. We need to work on every level so that we can work toward a world of equality, environmental respect and a general respect and compassion for human kind.

Take a minute to examine your place of privilege and determine whether there may be something you can do to contribute toward that equality or respect. I’m pretty sure there are things we all can do, and we’ve got to work together.