“That person who spoke first is wrong and racist.”

“That wasn’t the way to please a crowd.”

“That girl is racist towards White people.”

These are some of the criticisms I received from White people about my speech at the ‘Tell Your Story’ assembly on Race Day. I get it; nobody wants to be called racist. I hope this article will clarify my message. If you are White, you benefit from systemic racism, but that does not mean you are a bad person.

There is a difference between active, passive and anti-racism. Beverly Daniel Tatum differentiates the three with a moving walkway metaphor. Active racists walk quickly forward, passive racists stand idly by and anti-racists walk against the conveyor belt.

The vast majority of White students at the high school are passively racist. The system of racism carries us forward, and we become racist merely by existing in an unfair world. By standing still on the moving walkway, we benefit inadvertently from racism. We breathe the racist “smog” and we develop racial prejudices, but we rarely think or talk about racism, so we cannot see how we are contributing to it.

If you are White, you are born onto this moving walkway. You are born with prejudice, and you are born with systemic power. This is the definition of racism.

If you are still convinced you have no racial prejudice, I encourage you to take Harvard’s online Implicit Bias Test. If you do not believe that your skin color grants you systemic power, consider this: a recent study showed that although White students constitute 59.8 percent of the high school, we account for only 30.3 percent of out-of-school suspensions. We are not inherently better behaved than any other race, so what accounts for this discrepancy?

People’s perceptions of us become our realities. Everyone has prejudices, but what we do not realize is how deeply these prejudices shape who others become.

As a White person from a well-educated, high income family, I am expected to achieve academically. Teachers started tracking me into advanced groups starting in 3rd grade. Now, in my senior year, I see only White and Asian students in my Advanced Placement Calculus class.

My skin color does not make me smarter than anyone else, but it has placed me here. I have an unfair advantage: White privilege.

So why is there not a single Black, Latino, or indigenous student in my math class? A 3rd grade teacher probably tracked her into a lower group. If people do not expect her to succeed in advanced courses, it is harder for her to believe she can.

Implicit biases are real. White people are not smarter or better behaved than any other race, but because people expect us to be, we are more likely to be tracked into advanced courses and less likely to be disciplined than people of color.

So whose fault is it? Is it our teachers’? Our peers’? Our families’? It has been hard to confront the concept of racism: I was born into a system that gives me unearned power because of my white skin color, and I have no choice about it.

The only way I can wrap my head around this is to remind myself that it is no single person’s fault. The world molds us. We did not invent racism, but ending it is our responsibility.

I am not an expert on White privilege. I am racist and I have prejudices too. But if anything I have said or written rings true to you, I challenge you to do something about it:

-Ask a librarian for a book recommendation about White privilege.

-Participate in Racial Reconciliation, a program designed to bring together youth of Color and White youth to discuss, expose and address structural racism at its roots.

-Come to Race Committee: Thursdays, 2nd lunch, in room 406.

-Take Identity, Race and Literature Honor as a School Within a School English class next year.

-Come to monthly Race Reels movie nights.

-Read Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”

-After reading, bring up White privilege and racism to your White friends and family.

We are born onto the “moving walkway,” but we each have the power to decide whether to walk forward, passively stand by or walk against the conveyor belt of racism.

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