There's been quite a bit of discussion on Olyblog lately about racism and white priviledge.  There are two things I'd like to point out here.

The first is that there has been a lack of concrete evidence describing the reality of insitutional racism in our discussions.  Educational inequality, environmental racism, white flight, etc have only been hinted at.  I'd like to strongly recommend the book Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol to anyone who is interested in the issue, or who doubts that institutional racism is a reality.  The book describes the current state of segregation in the school system (schools are currently more divided along lines of race than they were before Brown v Board of Education), and provides a wealth of data, case studies, and anecdotal information showing that poor black students get a lot less funding for their education than middle class white students.

The story of East St. Louis (I'll abbreviate: "ESL") stands out the strongest in the book.  At the time that Savage Inequalities was written (I don't know if anything has changed or how), ESL was an extraordinarily poor, predominantly black neighborhood separated from the white middle class neighborhoods by a river. 

The schools of ESL were funded at about half the level, per capita, of the white neighborhoods, with high drop-out rates and low test scores.  ESL, like many poor black neighborhoods, was also the dumping grounds for pollution.  It housed a trash incinerator on one side of town, and a Dupont chemical factory on the other side of the neighborhood.  The employees of these factories primarily commuted in from the white neighborhoods, but the pollution primarily affected ESL.  Arsenic levels in the soil were far beyond the acceptable levels, causing developmental defects and learning disabilities in the local children.  In addition, the funding for infrastructure was inadequate and as a result the trash and sewage services had fallen apart.  There was no trash pick-up, so garbage piled up in yards and streets.  Raw sewage regularly backed up in yards and homes, as well as the local elementary school.  The schools were marked, in addition to the raw sewage on the floors, by large holes in the roofs, Cold-War era textbooks, underpaid faculty, large class sizes, lack of janitorial staff, lack of arts, music, and sports programs, and a very clear sense among students that they were less valuable to society than their white counterparts.

The book describes the affects of white-flight, attempts at busing students, attempts at -and resistance to- equalizing the per-capita spending on education, the affects of pollution on education and IQ, along with a host of other issues.  Its scope spans the nation, focusing on the "donut city" model in the urban centers of poor inner-city vs rich suburbs, and comparing spending levels on education in each area.

Savage Inequalities can be found at:

Amazon.com

TESC Library

I'd also like to talk for a moment about theories of oppression, anti-oppression workshops, and the language of priviledge. 

It has been my experience that the current paradigm for understanding and communicating about priviledge and oppression is an abject failure.  It succeeds in rallying progressives to action, but it absolutely fails to convince the people who most need conversion. 

It also tends to make progressives look a bit self-righteous in the eyes of our ideological opponents, and inspires extraordinary defensiveness among well-meaning people who don't understand the jargon. 

The problem, as I see it, is that the language of oppression dynamics attempts to pack extraordinarily large concepts into a small handful of words.  The data to support the concepts is out there, but it is certainly not mainstream knowledge (it tends to be seriously ignored by both the mainstream media as well as by mainstream educational institutions... at least below the PhD level) and as a result the jargon and the concepts it represents are sorely inaccessible to most of the population. 

And then you have a bunch of crazy progressives trying to tell people that they need to change their behaviors, and using inaccessible language to bludgeon the message into people's skulls.  It doesn't work, and is, in fact, counterproductive.

I think we'd do a lot better to show the concrete reality of things.  We don't need hypotheticals, we don't need theorizing, and we don't need specialized jargon or vague generalizations.  The facts of educational inequality, of white flight, of environmental racism, of disproportionate arrests (even when adjusting for disproportionate crime rates!), etc are positively astounding.  Let's get some of that data into the mainstream.