White Privelege and Recasting Moving Selves

I find it interesting to read Rubin’s article “Is This a White Country, or What?” I feel like this is one of the first articles that begin to really diminish the idea of white privilege based on the developments America has had with immigration. The article touched on white people feeling nervous with the rise in minorities for several different reasons, but not all, shockingly for me, had to do with economics, but rather with feeling left out. I found it as an interesting view point to look from, that white Americans “not only see their jobs and their way of life threatened, they feel bruised and assaulted by an environment that seems suddenly to have turned color and in which they feel like strangers in their own land” (Rubin, 229). For the most part, white Americans have lived a life of luxury under the umbrella of white privilege. They are advantageous within the society economically and socially, but as their numbers become less, their power also has the possibility of diminishing.

What I found to be really interesting was the fact that a point in which immigration bothers Americans is all as a result of feeling left out. Other groups are becoming more visible within society with their languages, their cultures, their traditions. If this is happening, there no longer is a white culture; instead, Rubin suggests it has whites searching to find the roots of their own historical ethnicities.

Evelyn Alsultany’s essay was also very interesting in response to the habit of assuming we know people and the culture in which they celebrate based on their physical appearances. A student of mine who was adopted by a local white family and is of Chinese descent told me a story not too long ago about her freshman year here at school which I thought connected well to this article. She claimed that as a 9th grader, she was confronted by a teacher at school and asked what country she came from and who her host family was. A young American girl of Chinese descent assumed to be an exchange student by someone of her own nationality because of the way in which she looks; all I could think was yikes, that teacher should be humiliated.

Jess Bird