In my race and politics class last week we talked about the well-worn concept of White Privilege in American society. Of course, i trotted out Peggy McIntosh’s seminal article identifying numerous instances of White privilege. The concept made sense to students on an abstract level, but when I asked them to apply it to the political process, I got blank stares. One of my students shared with me Tim Wise’s article on how Sarah Palin benefits from white privilege which I shared with my class.

After reading the article, my students were surprisingly nonplussed. It made me wonder if anyone has empirically tried to test white privilege’s effect on politics? I imagine you could do some sort of experimental design where one group is given a set of candidate attributes and told the race of the candidate while the other group is given the same set of attributes and not told the race of the candidate. If anyone has seen work like this on white privilege…give a shout!

Oh…and speaking of my favorite subject from last week. I found this Sarah Palin moment on SNL odd but funny. What’s the angle here? Does she know she’s being mocked? Does the campaign want her to be mocked? The mind reels when it’s procrastinating.