http://archive.is/9Qgt8
>Soldiers in the U.S. Army were subjected to a “white privilege” briefing last April during which they were advised that American society “attaches privilege to being white and male and heterosexual.”
>Documents obtained from the Army through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request shed light on the diversity training briefing, which was given to 400 soldiers in the 67th Signal Battalion at Fort Gordon, Georgia, last year. While one slide from the PowerPoint presentation used in the briefing previously sparked outrage, the contents of the full “Power and Privilege” slideshow had not been publicly released until now.
>“Privilege exists when one group has something of value that is denied to others simply because of the groups they belong to, rather than because of anything they’ve done or failed to do. Privilege has become one of those loaded words we need to reclaim so that we can use it to name and illuminate the truth,” the slideshow read.
>“Our society attaches privilege to being white and male and heterosexual regardless of your social class.”
>“Imagine a school or a workplace where all kinds of people feel comfortable showing up … valued, accepted, supported, appreciated, respected, belonging,” the presentation continued. “Something very powerful keeps this from us. The truth of this powerful forces is everywhere, but we don’t know how to talk about it and so we act as though it doesn’t exist.”
>The slideshow instructed the soldiers that such privilege results in a “yawning divide in levels of income, wealth, dignity, safety, health and quality of life [and] promotes fear, suspicion, discrimination, harassment, and violence.”
>The presentation also featured a hypothetical story about a black woman to illustrate that the United States is “organized according to race.”
>“Consider the ‘black woman’ in Africa who has not experienced white racism and does not identify herself as a ‘black woman.’ African, a woman, but not black. She only became ‘black’ when she came to the U.S. where privilege is organized according to race, where she is assigned to a social category that bears that name and she is treated differently as a result,” the slideshow read.
>The slideshow instructed “privileged” soldiers to do something about the alleged problem.
>“The trouble we’re in can’t be solved unless the ‘privileged’ make the problem of privilege their problem and do something about it. The fact that it’s so easy for me and other people in dominant groups not to do this is the single most powerful barrier to change,” the presentation concluded.