Video: African-American instructor speaks out after white students file racial-discrimination complaint | Georgia Straight: An instructor at a Minnesota community college has been reprimanded for highlighting white privilege in class.
English teacher Shannon Gibney has spoken out in the video above about the incident at Minneapolis Community and Technical College.
"I was in the middle of speaking when I had a young white man in the class interrupt me and ask, 'Why do we have to talk about this in every class? Why do we have to talk about this?'," Gibney said. "I was shocked."
She added that his remarks weren't made in a calm manner.
"His whole demeanour was very defensive, and he was taking it personally," Gibney recalled. "I tried to explain, of course, in a reasonable manner—as reasonable as I could, given the fact that I was being interrupted and put on the spot in the middle of the class—that this is unfortunately the context of 21st-century America."
Another white student chimed in with his concerns, according to Gibney.
She told the two white students that this wasn't a "personal attack" and she wasn't talking about all white people, rather about "whiteness as a system of oppression".
