Does White Privilege Exist

I do not speak for Black Lives Matter.  I am not black.  I am white.  But I would like to share, with those who are also white, some of my experiences as an educator. 

2020 June

In 1971 I was hired by a Catholic high school in Oakland, California, to teach physics. Our student body was about 65% white, 25% black, and 10% Hispanic and Asian.  For the first few years, I did not think about who was in my classes - I was busy trying to start a rather challenging career. 

One day my department chair asked, “How many of your Physics students are black?”  I was surprised to realize it was only about 3% of my students (barely 1% of their graduating class).  I immediately thought, “There’s something wrong with this picture.” 

When I started teaching, our administration had ordained that GPAs average 2.3.  I soon discovered that the school had a 3.0 GPA requirement to enter Physics.  I suspected that was the bar that was keeping most black students out.  I also suspected that our black students had lower GPAs than other students.  Charlie Murray (a Peace Corps colleague of mine) might argue that blacks have a lower aptitude (although to be fair, I have not read his book, “The Bell Curve”).

Fortunately, my administration agreed to print out the GPAs of all our 11th graders (Physics was an 11th grade course), sorted by feeder school (usually grades 6-8).  It was immediately obvious that not all feeder schools are equal.

Why not?  I had several clues.  On report-card nights, the parents who came to talk with me were mostly parents of “A” and “B” students.  The parents of “D” and “F” students almost never came. 

Secondly, my wife was working in a grade school in a rather poor neighborhood of Oakland.  She had noticed that her 1st graders who said their mothers were too busy or too tired to help with homework, rarely finished grade school (grade 8).  They dropped out even before starting high school.  I came to believe that parental involvement is a major determinant of individual learning. 

But in poorer neighborhoods, where more parents are struggling to survive and many are single, and more students are floundering, the class atmosphere is often one of lostness and failure and frustration.  Communal poverty seems to be a major factor in lowering communal learning and achievement.  This is my theory of why GPAs are lower in low-income neighborhood schools.  

An experienced school principal responded to me that individual student performance does not correlate with individual wealth or poverty.  I agree, but if the mass of poorer students is critical, it seems to interfere with learning for the class as a whole.  But whether my theory is right or wrong will not change the fact that the correlation of high school GPAs with neighborhood grade schools is quite clear in the data.

We white people tend to not live in poorer neighborhoods.  So we tend to assume that all children have the same opportunity to learn as our children have.  We tend to not be aware of how poverty makes parents less available to help their children.  For white people, these tendencies are privileges, often referred to as white privileges. 

Can we white people do anything about such privileges?

Physics is difficult primarily because its concepts tend to be abstract.  According to Jean Piaget (a well-known child developmental psychologist), the ability to think abstractly is a function of brain development, which comes with age, but not necessarily with previous learning.  So I assumed that high school GPAs may rank students fairly (probably not perfectly) from the same neighborhood grade school, but certainly not fairly for students from neighborhoods with differing levels of affluence or poverty.  

So each year I created a separate histogram, ie, GPAs plotted on a number line, for each of our 40 or so feeder schools.  I asked our counselors to encourage any interested student who did not meet the 3.0 requirement for Physics, to talk to me.  I admitted into Physics any student who ranked in the upper two-thirds of those from his or her same feeder school.  My Physics enrollment rose from about 25% of our student body, to about 65%.  (The number of young women in Physics also rose, for a different reason, from about 20%, to about 45%, occasionally even over 50%.) 

This was a form of affirmative action.  Although it did benefit black students, it was not based on race.  It was based on communal poverty, and a more sophisticated understanding of what GPAs, and SATs, actually measure.  It gave our students more equal opportunity.  It helped level the playing field, between poor and affluent.  It affirmed the potential of students who had been dealt a poor hand.  (In my opinion, the 1978 Supreme Court ban on racial quotas (UC Regents vs. Bakke) was a most tragic example of institutional white privilege.) 

But getting marginalized students in the door was only the starting point.  The next task was helping them thrive in physics.  Fortunately, I had already introduced several changes in the way I taught physics.  One was to require a detailed, step-by-step, method of setting up their calculations (including proper variables and units, equations, explicit substitutions, and dimensional analysis).  (With the advent of hand-held calculators, arithmetic was no longer relevant to doing physics.)

Secondly, I assigned three students to each lab bench so that every bench had one stronger student and one weaker student.  I said, “I expect you to help each other with your problem sets and lab reports.  If one of your partners does poorly, that means you need to help them.”  In the Kingdom of The One God, every one helps each other.  We do not abandon each other. 

Thirdly, “I tutor after school for an hour every day. If you need help, please come.”  They came.  I noticed that the students who came were mostly women, and mostly from poorer neighborhoods.  Those students who chose to take the Physics SAT (national Scholastic Aptitude Test in Physics) averaged 600, which is one standard deviation above the national average.  I believe that was because my stronger students were actually lifting the weaker. 

Pace e bene

Lorin