“I acknowledge my white privilege,” said Sarah Chadwick, a Florida Parkland student.
Sarah and her Parkland peers were meeting with the Peace Warriors, a Chicago based student group that teaches students how to resolve conflicts peacefully. The Peace Warriors have been working on eradicating gun violence in their Chicago community for years but have not garnered anywhere near the national attention the Parkland students have during their entire fight.
“It was like the room just went silent,” Gerald Smith, the Peace Warrior advisor commented. “I got choked up. When that came to light, there were tears. That was just profound.”
The meeting with the Peace Warriors is one of the ways that Parkland’s student activists say they are working to use their influence to advance minority groups that have been working for years without national attention. “I said it because it’s true. White privilege does exist and a lot of us have it,” Chadwick told TIME in a recent interview. “If we could use our white privilege to amplify the voices of minorities, then we’re going to use it. The more we ignore it, the worse it gets.”
I’ve been grappling with this concept of privilege. But are there other privileges I have chosen to ignore that have helped me get to where I am today? And if so, what am I doing with these privileges?
I had the students think about this questions after we did the ‘Success’ activity which is shown in the video.
Like the Parkland students, once we acknowledge the privileges we have, we need to position ourselves to assist others with information and opportunities to help them reach their goals or develop their full potential as human beings. We can either use our privilege to selfishly stomp on people while trying to achieve our own definition of success or we can use our privilege to uplift humanity and propel our nation forward.
The choice is yours.
We choose to do the latter and we hope you’ll join us.
