Question E

Reading chapter 8, Getting Off the Hook: Denial and Resistance, honestly got my blood flowing and watching the powerful lecture The Pathology of Privilege by Tim Wise made me even angrier. Honestly am baffled by I feel like the amount of truth that I was just slapped in the face with it. The blame game, I'm one of the good ones, mislabeling, denial, assumptions, and plain ignorance (the sick and tired section), all strategies that the dominant groups for generations have been using to minimize the oppressed and further the cycle of oppression in our country. The sick and tired section really pissed me off because what kind of nerve do these dominant groups have to say their sick and tired of hearing about race? Tim Wise stated correctly that we the privileged created "race" almost four hundred years ago. When Johnson persisted these people more you come to find out that in reality them hearing about it all the time comes down to "enough to make me look at what I don't want to look at, enough to make me feel uncomfortable." Unbelievable really.

Whether it involve race, the disabled, or gender the dominant group seems to love the strategy of putting the blame right back on the oppressed.  Simply minimizing the blame on themselves and directing the guilt right back onto the victims while the privileged remain invisible. Saying that they are one of the good ones, a strategy admittedly I feel I have used before, is simply saying that if I do nothing and am nice to everyone I'm not at fault. As Johnson said, at every moment, social life involves all of us. Our blindness to situations does not excuse us from our obliviousness to the realities of life. Wise and Johnson both put it nicely that the dominant group has these unburdened feeling of race that the oppressed suffer from.

I loved what Wise said in his lecture about if there is unprivileged then by simple grammar there has to be an over privileged. Yet that's not a word that you hear a lot because it really doesn't exist. It's just the dominant group and then the underprivileged. Unprivileged is a created word by the dominant groups to label everyone under them. As Johnson wrote for example, when people of color call attention to the divisions caused by white privilege, they're often accused of creating those divisions, as if racism isn't a problem unless you talk about it. Simply ignoring and then blaming the problem back on the victims seems to be our go to plan as a dominant group. And yes I am including myself in the dominant group because I am a white male from a working class, which as Wise stated in his lecture is still better off financially in the long run then a middle class person of race who has four times the income of me, scary thought.

The dominant group, and human beings in general nature can be quick to jump to their own defense when their morals are being questioned. However, when it comes to these types of issues of oppression the dominant groups have to stop the ignoring and rise up to the responsibility and opportunity. In Wise's lecture he said for hundreds of years, every generation members of the dominant group have said there is no problem and in every generation without fail we have been wrong. White denial has to stop for us to make any progress.