I don't feel white. I don't know what it means. I am just not conscious of it. When I look at my hand, I see a hand. Not a white hand. In my high school, white kids were a plurality, not a majority. But apart from a few gospel services and a party or two, I have never been on the outside, the difference.

I felt white on Thursday night, watching "The Color of Fear," a documentary where eight men talk about racism. For one thing, I was actually the minority in the audience of about sixty, which, as anyone who goes to St. Olaf knows, required an incredible skewing of the usual demographics. But it was also because I realized that, like the unenlightened white guy in the movie, most white people don't ever think about being white. We don't know what white privilege is. We don't know what white heritage is. We don't even describe ourselves as "white," because we don't know what whiteness entails. Somehow it doesn't seem important.

But what this movie convinced me of is that it IS important.

The basic argument of prejudice is that a group of people, as a result of their heritage/sexual orientation/whatever, falls short in some way: in intelligence, morality, beauty, or skill. This supposes a set of standards that all people in a society are supposed to live up to: for instance, you are supposed to strive towards success in school. Ideally, at least in a capitalist system, these standards are all goals that can a person who works towards them can have a relatively equal chance of achieving: human standards, rather than standards applicable only to certain groups.

But all of the American standards are white. The "beautiful" women in magazines are white, or white-looking. The "intelligent" people-inventors, scientists, Ivy League students- almost exclusively white. Supermoms‹white. The people in magazines, movies, cartoons‹all white, with minority-targeted media ghettoized. Our ideas of what people should be able to achieve, and what they should want to achieve, are all influenced by what a white person is able to do, from their position of privilege. But because white is a non-race, we forget the ways that these views are necessarily influenced by the white position, and use them as a measurement for people of all races. We think that because our color does not matter to us, color does not matter. This is simply not the case. We do not notice because the world is white.

This is why we need definition of "white." If we don't differentiate being white from being human, we can't differentiate between our reasonable expectations of other people and those that are based in prejudice. Every time I normalize my race by not mentioning it, I insinuate that whiteness is, and ought to remain, the standard. By refusing to become conscious of the white racial identity that already exists, unspoken, we remain blind. We cannot help but be unconscious racists, because, as those without race, it is not our problem. And because our unconsciousness is, by virtue of our whiteness, the "standard," we forget that many other people in this country are very conscious of their race.

No one should have to fit into a narrow mold of "I am white/black/Hispanic/ biracial, so I must act in this way." But if we are not aware of our assumptions, we can't challenge them. If nothing else, white people need to understand what other people see when they look at them. I think we are afraid to look at our racial heritage because we are afraid that everything there is bad: white people are dominating, violent, cold. We slaughter, we kill, we hate. We think that to explore our race means unearthing the guilt of centuries of oppression and hate that we, as members of this race, are responsible for. Certainly this kind of guilt could keep us busy for the next thousand years. But the past cannot be changed. We can make some reparations, but no amount of money and no amount of affirmative action can ever erase, say, slavery. All we can do is deal with the present, and see things for what they really are: that there IS still racism, and that in order to stop it we have to separate the idea of "whiteness" from the idea of human. The culture must be open to the influences of all the groups that we now agree must be an equal part of it. No group has the genetic monopoly on normalcy. There is no normal, but only individual difference, and whites are a difference too. If I open my eyes to what it means to be white, I may not like what I see. But the white race will never change unless people who are not satisfied with what their race has become strive to change their attitudes and change their actions into something we can be proud of‹not as dominators, but as part of a nation and a world that includes many different traditions‹where whiteness is still important, but only as a part of a whole.