Skookumchick over at Rants of a Feminist Engineer is keeping a racial diary as part of a project:
A friend of mine asked me to be on a panel she was organizing at an interesting sounding conference, to be held in September. She and a postdoc wrote an abstract which proposed that 4 people - including two white people, one of whom is me - would keep a "racial diary" for a month and then use it to talk about unearned privilege and prejudice, particularly all the little things that we White people tend to overlook.
What a nifty idea for a conference panel! What a nifty idea in general. If you are a white person who would like to start keeping your own racial diary as a means of becoming a more sensitive person and better colleague, but you aren't quite sure how to begin, you could start by reading Peggy McIntosh's classic White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack and then just writing down your thoughts and reactions to the article.
In the article, McIntosh offers a list of unearned white privileges. It's a pretty dandy list. Here are just a few:
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I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
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I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
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I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
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I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
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I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing, or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race.
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If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.
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If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.
That last one is a real zinger, isn't it? Think of the luxury of all that time and energy I don't have to spend worrying whether people are reacting to me in a certain way based upon my race. Whiteness is like having an Airport EZ Pass for everything in life.
2:59:15 PM 
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