Reflecting on Experience

In the reading, Peggy McIntosh discusses how a majority of the time, white people seem to recognize others that are underprivileged but fail to recognize that maybe we are the ones that are over privileged and that whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, ideal and that through history, whites have worked to benefit others in a way to make “them more like us.” This is definitely evident in the history of introduction of white culture to Indigenous Australia.

Australian history is very similar to the history in the United States in the sense that white Europeans “discovered” a new land and decided to make it their own. In this process, Europeans failed to recognize that the native peoples of the land had lived there for many years and had done just fine without the influence of the white person. In my Linking Indigenous class, we are learning about how the Europeans came to settle Australia and stripped the Indigenous people of their culture and their identity because they felt that the natives were savage and uncivilized when really it is just another way of life, another culture that has been thriving for many years.

It is saddening to know that I am a decedent from theses Europeans. I am a white person. I feel guilty at home just like I do here. I do have privileges that I take for granted and am completely blind to. I have no idea and cannot relate to what it feels like to have ones culture stripped from them and to be of the minority and have no control over the changes.

Studying here in Australia as a white person to me is not very different then going about my life as a white person in the United States. I tend to go about my day with the idea of me having white privileges very much tucked away in my mind or none existent.

As an American traveling to Australia, I realize that because a lot of the movies and television shows that people here watch are American, Australians have an idea in their head about what Americans and the United States are like. In a way, Hollywood does Americans injusted. When I came over here, I felt like Australians had expectations of what I would be like based on what they have seen from the television and the cinema. I adopted a duty of showing my peers that what they see in the big screen is not all of the United States. I am an American but not a character from a TV show.