They began to distance themselves from what they said and what they felt, to dissociate themselves from stereotypical, negative views of blacks, and even began proclaiming the need for integrated neighborhoods, schools, jobs, and public services (Brown et al., Citation2003 Feagin, Citation2014). With the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and the introduction of the Civil Rights and Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions in the late 1960s, whites began concealing their racism more carefully than ever before. White privilege pedagogy does this by focusing on personal identity (whites’ personal identity) over institutional structures, by paying more attention to whites’ experiences than to blacks’, by falsely claiming that the confession of white privileges leads to social action beneficial to blacks, and by restoring and expanding whites’ sense of moral rightness. On the contrary, it makes them more complacent, more at home in an unjust world, and more comfortable with their whiteness. Teaching whites to “unpack their invisible knapsack” does not make them more willing to take action against racial inequality. This article uses Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, an interpretive strategy directed to the hidden or repressed meanings behind texts, to examine the origins of white privilege pedagogy, in particular their foundational technique, “unpacking the invisible knapsack.” This article’s chief finding is that this pedagogy, though designed to fight racism, has the unintended effect of supporting white privilege.
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