A white Ivy League professor has taken to the pages of the Huffington Post to declare that she chose never to reproduce because her children would inherit white privilege.
Ali Michael, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, was prompted to write by the Rachel Dolezal saga, in which the head of Spokane’s NAACP branch was revealed to be a white woman who simply identifies as black and has assimilated into black culture. Dolezal’s aspiration to forsake whiteness and embrace a new race, Michael says, is actually a routine one among whites who are "repulsed by the racism and privilege they see all around them."
Michael says that, like Dolezal, she has gone through an extensive phase of trying to eradicate her whiteness (or as she calls it, Whiteness)– one so severe that she decided she didn’t want to reproduce.
“I sometimes don’t want to be white either,” Michael says. “There was a time in my 20s when everything I learned about the history of racism made me hate myself, my Whiteness, my ancestors… and my descendants. I remember deciding that I couldn’t have biological children because I didn’t want to propagate my privilege biologically.”
Ali Michael, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, was prompted to write by the Rachel Dolezal saga, in which the head of Spokane’s NAACP branch was revealed to be a white woman who simply identifies as black and has assimilated into black culture. Dolezal’s aspiration to forsake whiteness and embrace a new race, Michael says, is actually a routine one among whites who are "repulsed by the racism and privilege they see all around them."
Michael says that, like Dolezal, she has gone through an extensive phase of trying to eradicate her whiteness (or as she calls it, Whiteness)– one so severe that she decided she didn’t want to reproduce.
“I sometimes don’t want to be white either,” Michael says. “There was a time in my 20s when everything I learned about the history of racism made me hate myself, my Whiteness, my ancestors… and my descendants. I remember deciding that I couldn’t have biological children because I didn’t want to propagate my privilege biologically.”
