Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible

Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible is a brilliant documentary and a must-see for all people who are interested in justice, spiritual growth and community making. It features the experiences of white women and men who have worked to gain insight into what it means to challenge notions of racism and white supremacy in the United States.

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If you are white, I highly suggest you take an hour to watch this documentary. It’s an oldie, but a goodie, and it touches on racism 101, the pathology of white privilege and the ideology of white supremacy (from a white perspective), including bits of intersectionality. Here’s a preview:

“We were talking about friendships, and those of us who are white are frequently interested in friendships… and this Latina said to me, “When you want to be my friend, you get up, you walk across the room, shake hands, [introduce yourself], and begin a relationship. When People of Color decide that they will again try to be friends with a white person, we are crawling…”—this is what this woman said, and I’ll never forget it—“we are crawling on our knees over the broken shards of relationships where we thought we could trust someone.”

“Being raised in a nice white liberal home… you come to understand racism like a lot of white folks—as this very obvious, overt manifestation of bigotry, and you don’t see yourself perpetuating that, therefore, you separate yourself from the problem even when you’re manifesting the problem.”

“What is the legitimate role of white folks in social justice and race in related to race issues and racism? How do we find a line… I mean in a legitimate, authentic work? My initial motivation when I got this job teaching was that I wanted to teach these white kids that they were racist. That’s another stage in white identity development—you want to blame your own group. In other words, it was a way I connected with some sense of purity in myself is by rejecting my own community, which is the white community, and we see white people caught in that. I had established my “goodness” by being imbedded in a Black community, Hispanic community, Asian, Native community, and I also demonstrate my distance from whiteness by rejecting my own group.”

“I think the main place that I was stuck was that I immediately expected People of Color to accept me once I had decided I was going to do this work, so as soon as I might go to a workshop and I might be one of only a handful of white folks, and I thought, “Well, doesn’t my presence here… you know, I’m a committed white person!” and I could feel the distress from folks of Color, and I was like “Uhh, I’m here. Think of all the other [white] people who aren’t here!”

etc.