Early morning talk show Fox & Friends recently condemned an Arizona State course titled “U.S. Race Theory & the Problem of Whiteness” for being racist, hailing it as an attack on white people. The show’s host, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, interviewed an ASU student who said the course’s core textbooks, “The Everyday Language of White Racism” and “Critical Race Theory” (both of which are written by white authors), cause more problems than solutions.

Both Hasselbeck and this student seem to be uncomfortable with acknowledging a basic fact about our society: It runs, even thrives, on white privilege.

To put it simply, white privilege is the underlying societal system that grants Caucasian people advantages over people of color. It grants a white person the opportunity to go to any hairdresser he or she wants and be guaranteed satisfactory and knowledgeable service. It means that same person can later go to the store and easily find the shampoos or hair products they need. On a larger scale it means this person will certainly see their race represented in the media, in movies and on television.

Hasselbeck argued, “If the course were called the problem with blackness, the problem with being female, would that fly at the university?” What Hasselbeck is failing to recognize, however, is that society as a whole constantly points out the problem of blackness and the problem of being female, as well as the “problem” of being any other race, or an immigrant, or transgender or not heterosexual.

It is for this very reason we desperately need classes that point out privileges. We should be applauding the professor of this Arizona State course. We should celebrate the author’s willingness to discuss and understand race relations. We should be thanking God that St. Thomas offers classes like African American History or Communication of Race, Class, and Gender.

One of the underlying issues here is that many people equate racism with conscious hate. It commonly and sadly does manifest itself that way, of course, but racism is also so much more broad than that.

Author and poet Scott Woods defines racism as an intricate social and political system, set in place centuries ago, that is still in operation today in an almost invisible form. “Racism is an insidious cultural disease,” Woods said. “It is so insidious that it doesn’t care if you are a white person who likes black people; it’s still going to find a way to infect how you deal with people who don’t look like you.”

Woods’ statement sums up white privilege well. Many Caucasian people today, thankfully, are not willfully hateful toward people of color. But they still undoubtedly glean benefits from their pale skin: They are statistically pulled over by the police less often; they get jobs with more ease; they are less likely to be profiled and followed around stores for fear of shoplifting; and once they are hired somewhere or accepted to a college or university, they can enjoy it without the bothersome thought in the back of their mind saying it was only to fill some quota.

Students are truly lucky to have the opportunity to take classes that open their eyes to a privilege they may have been unaware of. In my classes at St. Thomas, I have been taught to be wary of the “isms”: sexism, ableism, ageism, racism and heterosexism.

Because I am biracial, I’ve had the unique opportunity to see both sides of our culture. My grandparents lived through the days of legislative segregation. My mother, born after these unjust laws were struck down, still faced prejudice and racism growing up. She’s been called slurs and seen discrimination. She faces willful ignorance today.

My father, on the other hand, being white and blue-eyed, has found most – if not all – doors already opened for him. This does not mean he’s had an easy life or that he’s had everything handed to him, but it means doors were available to him that simply don’t exist for others.

Call it luck of the draw or chalk it up to the cards they were dealt, but this is life in America. Change is not fast; it crawls into the forefront. It is possible, however, if we’re willing to acknowledge that racism is still evident in 2015, where we have a non-white president but rampant police brutality, profiling and stereotypes still exist.

I’m not trying to point fingers here. I am not saying that white people are to blame for society’s problems, which is how the Fox & Friends segment chose to interpret a class studying white privilege. I’m saying racism, and our culture as a whole, is to blame.

The majority of Caucasian people don’t recognize the privileges they have. They aren’t trying to reap benefits while they watch others be disadvantaged. They can’t help the culture they’re born into any more than non-white individuals can, but we all need to recognize that privilege exists. We need to snatch up the opportunity to learn about it through classes, textbooks or simply reading someone’s thoughts on the Internet.

Jamie Bernard can be reached at bern2479@stthomas.edu.