In the process of researching bus sitting behavior and male privilege I stumbled on this paper which I found very interesting. The authors suggest that even in an academic environment where there is a presumption of openness, educating people about their privilege is a challenging task.

“Three themes emerged from our analysis of our stories of struggle. First, we were teaching about white privilege in such a way that our students questioned our legitimacy to teach about race and privilege. Second, they felt they had to disconnect from us when they felt implicated in a system of racial privilege. And third, once they were disconnected, we did not know how to reconnect them back into course material in such a way that they felt ownership of the learning lessons or able to expand on their meanings for their own lives. We roped them back in, if at all, through our emotional labor in the classroom; our personal interest and involvement with them were all that we had to keep them involved, even if marginally.”
White Women Teaching White Women about White Privilege, Race Cognizance and Social Action: toward…

ABSTRACT In this article, the authors describe a four-phase pedagogical project they undertook in response to the strong resistance they encountered from a number of their white women students who objected to the readings and discussions of white skin privilege. In an
interdisciplinary program where…

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