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Increasingly, I find myself taken aside by graduate students of color telling me how disappointed they are to find their comments about race being dismissed as "tangential" in discussions of literature and theory. ...professors have a tendency to get defensive. "They didn't mean that back then" or "Let's focus on the main argument first" or "Huh, anyone else have a thought?"
Contrary to popular stereotype, racists are not necessarily ogres. The ones to which I refer today are not gun-wielding, cross-burning hate-filled Klansmen. In the course of everyday conversation, they are indistinguishable from anybody else. I bet some don't even consider themselves to be particularly prejudiced.
Yes, because I AM white -- in theory -- I've been given some advantages that I wouldn't have had if I wasn't white. In theory. But you won't know whether or not I've really been given these advantages -- or whether I have other disadvantages that outweigh them -- without getting to know me personally.