There has been a group of videos circulating around Facebook under the page titled: Whiteness Project. According to the website, “The Whiteness Project is an interactive investigation into how Americans who identify as white, or partially white, understand and experience their race.” In addition, this is actually the second installment. The Whiteness Project’s first installment, "Inside the White/Caucasian Box," is a collection of 21 interviews filmed in Buffalo, N.Y. in July 2014 and released in October 2014. The latest installment, Intersection of I, is a collection of 23 interviews filmed in Dallas, Texas in July 2015 and released in April 2016. Currently, they have 10,159 likes on Facebook including myself and 292 followers on Twitter. It is funded by organizations like the Tribeca Film Institute, Justfilms Ford Foundation, POV, The Fledgling Fund, and MacArthur Foundation.
For anyone who is wondering if they were joking...this is very real and you can tell that these people are being real and being open about how being white affects them in some way or another. What I find interesting is that when the topic of racism comes up, we hear the perspective from minorities, mostly black people, but here we hear it from the people who are usually assumed as the perpetrators of racism.
I only saw the second installment which interviewed people from Dallas, Texas from the ages of 15 to 27. For anyone willing to sit through the compilation of brief videos, I recommend that you have someone else with you, as it creates interesting points for discussion.
My overall experience with the Whiteness Project was actually mixed with feelings of anger and happiness, but all led to a state of understanding and being aware that not everyone thinks like me. There were some points where people showed their racial prejudice after they claimed they were not prejudiced, others with people who were of mixed race and expressed finding it hard to fit into all parts of who they are, and people who admitted to their white privilege. The one that stood out to me the most was Connor’s story which I felt reflected white privilege at its highest. He claims that he has been arrested over 20 times, yet the only thing on his record to prove his civil misbehavior is public intoxication.
It really made me think about a story of someone I know who got arrested for graffiti and was placed on probation for five years. After getting into a few trivial situations with the law while on probation, one for jumping a turnstile when they did not have money and another for defending themselves in a fight, they officially placed themselves at risk of getting deported to Rikers Island. This person is a minority.
What I found interesting was that depending on how young the person was, the more immature they sounded, like 18-year-old Sarah who was unaware of the difference between her and her black friend, and 17-year-old Nathan’s opinion of the disruptive black students in his class. The idealists actually aggravated me more than the people who were openly prejudiced. They were avoiding the problem and it was just frustrating to watch it. At the end of all the videos, I realized that we are not a land of equal people and to be honest I think it is going to take us hundreds of years to finally reach the state of mind that many civil rights activists talked about.
For anyone who has not seen all the videos, I recommend you go through all of them. Each are about two minutes or less, and feel free to comment your thoughts and opinions about them. But if your first thought is that we are equal, you are dead wrong!
