Poor, White but Still Privileged:
The Dollar Value of White Skin
For decades now, the United States academic landscape has been littered with the clinical observations of sociologists and psychologists attempting to perform a grand diagnostic on the collective psyche of European Americans. In fact, European Americans are arguably the most studied demographic, not because they are an enigma of human nature, but because of the sheer, monumental difficulty in convincing large portions of them that their thoughts, decisions, and daily behaviors are the structural beams of a rigid racial caste system rather than a neutral meritocracy.
To maintain the illusion of the “self-made man/woman,” one must be committed to a profound level of cognitive dissonance. This is where the work of Dr. Jay Klusky and Andrew Hacker become essential. On pages 155-156 in his 2017 book, “Reverse Integration: Helping White America Join the Village,” Dr. Klusky revisits a haunting thought experiment from Hacker’s 1992 classic, “Two Nations.”
Professor Hacker once asked a room of white college students from Queens, New York to imagine that a mysterious official visited them to apologize for a “clerical error.” Starting at midnight, each student would live the next 50 years—the remainder of their lives—as Black people. Their souls, memories, relationships and personalities would remain intact, but their “outer casing” would be Black. To “compensate” for this mistake, the official offered them a settlement.
AFTER SIX LONG YEARS OF INTELLECTUAL AND EMOTIONAL LABOR, I CONTINUE TO SEARCH FOR CONTENT STUDENTS, NOT CONTENT CONSUMERS.
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