Danette Clark: Students Schooled on White Privilege and ’5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO’

Tomorrow marks the first day of the 12th Annual White Privilege Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This year’s theme is This Land is Whose Land?: Defining Citizenship, Understanding Access and Taking Action.

The White Privilege Conference was founded by Dr. Eddie Moore, Jr. in 1999 to examine “challenging concepts of privilege and oppression and offer solutions and team building strategies to work toward a more equitable world” and is attended annually by more than 1,500 “students, professionals, activists, parents, and community leaders/members from diverse perspectives.”

The conference is “built on the premise that the U.S. was started by white people, for white people” and boasts a long list of radical partner organizations, including Code Pink, The Ford Foundation, and Hip Hop Congress, whose co-founder, Shamako Noble, has collaborated on projects with Public Allies, an organization first led in Chicago by Michelle Obama.

What exactly is ‘white privilege’?

According to some of the speakers and conference goers in this video, ‘white privilege’ is a “transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society,” and if you are white, it means “there is a whole part of you that you are not naming and you’re not understanding because whiteness is just normalized and it’s just there,”

One poor woman in this video says she has to work really hard to keep it in her consciousness that she is white. Perhaps I’m missing the point, but one would think it would be more beneficial for people to keep in their consciousness a constant effort to show kindness and be compassionate to everyone, regardless of race or class.

How can we blur the lines of race and see all men as created equal while focusing on color, differences, and our own ‘whiteness’?

Educators in social justice schools and universities talk to students about race regularly, even incorporating it into their daily curriculum, regardless of the course subject. Kindergarten-age African-American and Latino children by the thousands, and even in schools where white students are the minority, have been led to believe that the seemingly innocent little white girl or boy sitting next to them really doesn’t like them just because they aren’t white, too.

Seattle Public Schools came under scrutiny in 2007 for using federal grant money to escort twenty high school students to Colorado to attend the White Privilege Conference. Seattle is just one of many school districts funded by you, the American tax payer, that promotes the conference to its students. The St. Paul Public Schools website provides a link to the White Privilege Conference and other social justice resources.

Perhaps ending racism and creating equity in schools isn’t the real motive behind white privilege lectures or social justice education. If it were really about racial equity, the organizers of the 2007 conference probably wouldn’t have invited The Coup to perform for attending youth on the last day of the conference.

The Coup is a radical hip hop group whose lyrics incite violence with songs like 5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO and Kill My Landlord.

Lyrics taken in part from The Coup’s song titled 20,000 Gun Salute:

20,000 gun salute, get rowdy like you got a substitute
This slug’s for Newt – shut your mouth don’t pollute…

…. just how we gonna overthrow they b*** asses, give
whiplashes from the force as we make it tight, and ignite
the flames of takin over daily life, make it a right to have
food, threads and homestead

Regarding their 2006 album, Pick a Bigger Weapon, Rolling Stone Magazine called it “the rare record that makes revolution sound like hot fun on a Saturday night.”

The Coup has released several award winning albums including Kill My Landlord, Steal this Album, and Genocide and Juice. Steal this Album is a tribute to Abbie Hoffman’s book, Steal this Book. Abbie Hoffman, a radical 60s activist, was one of the “Chicago Seven” tried for conspiracy, inciting to riot, and other charges related to protests in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Co-founder of The Coup, Boots Riley, is a social justice activist from Oakland, California. When asked in an interview what activism or activists have inspired him, Riley responds, “A bunch of what the Black Panthers did. The Chinese Revolution. Some of the works by Saul Alinsky, the ways he put down for radical organizing.”

Boots Riley recently performed at Fresh Fest 2010, which was produced in collaboration with Van Jones-founded organizations, The Ella Baker Center and Green for All.

Past speakers at White Privilege Conferences include Obama’s Department of Education appointee, Kevin Jennings, founder of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network, and Tim Wise, a white ‘anti-racism expert’ whom Rush Limbaugh says is ignorant about the founding of this country.

Lisa Arrastia — who recently co-edited with Bill Ayers, White Before We Got Here: Youth and the Hidden Curriculum of Whiteness — will speak at this year’s conference, as will Rosa González, the Education Director of the Van Jones organization, Green for All.

As hundreds of youth from across the country prepare to spend the next four days at the Sheraton Bloomington in Minneapolis, I wonder how many parents know what their kids will really be learning.