Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
White Privilege in the Classroom

White Privilege in the Classroom

Last updated on: March 26, 2026 at 9:19 am by Vance Morgan

0 Comments

White Privilege in the Classroom 2026-03-26T09:19:23-04:00 Vance Morgan

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Today I am starting a unit on race issues in my ethics class. For the past several years, I have assigned a blog post from the height of the pandemic as the starting point for that unit, a post titled “I’m White, I’m Privileged, and I’m a Christian. Now what?” Here it is.

During the past month, in the context of protests for racial justice and police reform in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, I have come across an interesting meme several times on social media:

White supremacists use the Bible to justify their racism. Problem is, there are no white people in the Bible.

True, but I did not know that until I was at least in high school. The Jesus I grew up with was white, his Dad was an old white guy with a beard, and the Holy Spirit was a white bird. Jesus’ disciples were white, and every character in the “Children’s Bible” of my childhood was white.

This seemed perfectly normal, because virtually everyone in my life, from my extended family to my small northern New England town, was white. According to Ancestry.com, my heritage on both sides of my family is blindingly white. Scandinavian (mostly Swedish) on my mother’s side, and largely English and Welsh on my father’s side, with a bit of Scottish, Irish, and Belgian thrown in. I was hoping at least for a few outlier percentages of heritage at least from southern Europe, but no such luck. You don’t get any whiter than I am.

The only non-white person I knew until I went to college was an African-American guy who was one year ahead of me in high school, the best player on our pitiful football team, and I only knew him slightly. My first non-white friend was two doors down the dormitory hall during my freshman year at college. I was taught from my earliest memories to respect everyone, to treat everybody as equally important because they were equally important to God. My only knowledge of the history and continuing presence of racism in this country was intellectual and indirect, through books, movies, and current events.

I grew up during the sixties, learned to admire Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement, worked hard to keep racist language out of my vocabulary, intolerance from my actions, and truly believed, especially given my white roots, that I not only talked the talk but walked the walk successfully when it came to matters of inclusion. Said the right things, didn’t say the wrong things. But even as I earned a PhD and started teaching philosophy, I found myself in largely white classrooms at predominately white colleges and universities. It wasn’t until a few years ago, after an experience at Walmart, of all places, that I began to realize just how much I did not know and how much work I had to do.

If I truly lived according to my occasionally expressed principles, I would never shop at Walmart. For reasons too numerous to list, Walmart represents many of the worst features of American capitalism. But there are many items that Jeanne and I regularly purchase at Walmart, items that we could get at any number of other retail establishments. So why do we go to Walmart? Because it’s convenient and its cheaper. Principles be damned, apparently—I guess there’s an American capitalist in me after all.

On this particular day, after I purchased my items there was an employee checking the bags of those leaving the store for the parking lot—something that Jeanne and I both find annoying and yet another reason to hate Walmart. There was a Hispanic family in front of me and an African-American guy behind me. After checking the receipt of the family in front of me to make sure everything was accounted for, the Walmart employee at the door (an older white guy) said “You’re good” and waved me through. I said “No, either you check everybody or you check nobody.” Checking my receipt, he admitted, “you’re right.” In the parking lot afterward, the guy who had been in line behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said “Thanks, man–that was nice.”

This was not a typical thing for me to do; I often float through my days less aware than I should be. At Walmart, my awareness usually is only high enough to show the employee my receipt if she or he insists and get the hell out of there. But this time I noticed something and, contrary to my nature, said something about it. “Good for me,” I congratulated myself as I drove home. But over time, I couldn’t get the experience out of my head. For one of the first times in my life, even as a progressive liberal with all of the right attitudes and things to say about racial injustice and inequality, I had become aware of white privilege.

Over the past several semesters, I have started the ‘Race” unit in my ethics course with this simple story. Although the student body and faculty at my college has become far more diverse over the twenty-five years I have taught there (currently the student body is about 18% non-white), the majority of my students still come from upper-middle-class to wealthy white backgrounds, with twelve years of Catholic parochial school education behind them. White privilege is an appropriate place to begin.

White privilege—I confess that although I read about it frequently and have intellectually affirmed that it exists for a long time, in practical terms I have been virtually blind to it for most of my life. My Walmart experience was an epiphany—and it often serves the same purpose for my white students, as they begin to think about their own experiences. One student remembers that time when a security guard followed his non-white friend throughout a store, while he was left alone. Another student remembers the time when, strolling through a familiar neighborhood with a person of color, she heard car doors locking for the first time in her life as she and her friend walked by. The time when the one non-white student in a class was asked to give the “Black” perspective on the issue being discussed. All of a sudden, what has been “normal” begins to look slightly different.

My Walmart experience has, not surprisingly, also caused me to reconsider my commitment to following Jesus. Despite the intellectual and religious knots certain white Christians twist themselves into attempting to keep a semblance of their faith in tact while embracing their privilege and specialness, there is nothing in the gospels that specifies such surface level characteristics as even worthy of our notice as we seek to bring the love and inclusiveness of Jesus into the world. Recognizing that the world I’m trying to do this in is often fractured by and infected with discrimination and intolerance should be a reminder of just how important, difficult, and radical the message of the gospels actually is.

Human beings are naturally wired biologically to be tribal, to define ourselves in terms of who is most like us, and particularly in terms of those who are least like us—even if the differences in play are superficial and random. By random luck of the draw, I happen to be white in a culture and country that has systematically favored people who look like me for centuries, in ways that have become structurally embedded in how our society operates at its core. Dismantling these structures requires far more than simply “not being racist.” It requires recognizing, first, that I am the recipient of favor and privilege every day I walk out the door, just because of the color of my skin.

Next, it requires a new dedication to listening rather than pontificating, to standing with rather than platitudes, and to participating in the creation of a world in which I am no longer privileged because of the color of my skin. I cannot fully enter into the rage, anger, and thirst for justice that has been so palpable as a driving force in the demonstrations, protests, and riots of the past few weeks, because I will never know what it is like to live in fear in situations in which I have never had to fear, to struggle to open doors that have never been closed to me, or to swim against a tide that I have floated on top of my whole life simply because I am white.

I saw a young white woman, roughly the age of my students, holding a sign at one of the protests recently. She was wearing a mask and seeking (sort of) to socially distance from the three or four other young white women standing around her. Her sign expressed something that many of my white students have expressed during discussions of white privilege in my ethics classes.

I understand that I will never understand. But I stand with you.

Amen.

Previous Post

March 22, 2026

Can These Bones Live?

Next Post

March 29, 2026 A Palm Sunday Reflection: Blessed is He Who Comes

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"Mary did have a choice. And she was able to make it before the Holy ..."

madalyn baumstark

Mary Got To Choose

"i cannot read beyond your recommendations for the books since i like to have a ..."

madalyn baumstark

A Doubting Faith

"AI will never be able to utter with honesty, feeling, or humility, the greeting: "Namaste".It ..."

madalyn baumstark

AI and Human Dignity

"They do. I'm sure you could find discussions of the same topic from any of ..."

Vance Morgan

AI and the Life of Faith

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abortion Advent AI Angels Artificial intelligence atheism attention baptism Baptists beauty belief Benedictines Bible bicycling Big Bird books Bovina Camaldoli hermitage Canada Catholicism cats certainty change Christianity Christmas Collegeville Covid-19 creativity Development of Western Civilization dogs doubt Easter Enneagram Epiphany Episcopal ethics Eucharist evil extroverts Facebook faith family fear flowers forgiveness freedom friends God goodness grace happiness heaven hell history Holy Spirit Holy Week hope human nature humility humor idolatry incarnation introverts irreverence Islam Jeanne Jesus Joe Biden joy Judaism justice Kamala Harris knowledge Lent listen literature liturgy love Marsue Memorial Day miracles movies music mystery mythology NPR Old Testament optimism paradox peace Penguins philosophy piano podcast politics power prayer Protestantism Providence College Religion Rhode Island sabbatical sacrament science seeing silence Simone Weil Socrates soul sports St. John's College stories suffering tattoo teaching technology television theology thinking time tolerance transcendence travel trees trust truth Uncategorized Vermont wisdom wonder writing

Select a Month May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz