White Silence, White Solidarity Essay, Research Paper

In the article of White Silence, White Solidarity, the author is an Euro-American and an educator of multicultural education. What she thinks of multicultural education is a fiend that criticized as skirting around white racism, and celebrating the European ethnic immigrant experience. She thinks that white people of their common whiteness or the privileges is gained from white racism and they are fear of losing material and psychological advantages when they screen out the color of people. She also states that white people learn to talk about race-related issues by several communication strategies.

First, they equal racism with individual prejudice and personal ignorance, which allow them to assume every group is racist, and to avoid acknowledging the differences in power and privileges between whites and groups of color. Second, many whites define culture in a way that draws impermeable boundaries around groups, and that views culture as consisting of flat and unchanging holdovers from the past. Moreover, equating ethnicity with race is a related strategy for evading racism, which actually highlights cultural heritage and denies whiteness as a phenomenon worth scrutiny. Furthermore, they evade white racism by constructing sentence that allows them to talk while removing themselves about racism. The final strategy is to avoid use of a subject together by employing passive sentence construction. However, the more subtle one is the process called “white racial bonding”, which the author explains as the interactions that have the purpose of affirming a common stance on race-related issues, legitimating particular interpretations of oppressed groups, and drawing we-they boundaries, for example, using strategic eye-contact, jokes and/or codewords.

Actually, many whites do not support racist beliefs, actions, or policies; however, they do not want to risk breaking bonds with other whites, so they simply remain silent. As suggested by the author, breaking whiteness is needed to learn sharing, listening with other people who are not of European descent, and have the aim of constructing ways of life that are healthy and sustainable for everyone. From this article, the socio-economic status of whites are higher than other groups in the society, they have more privileges as most of political elite are whites, and generally they serve to their self-interests.