'White Privilege' Essay Winners Selected In Westport

WESTPORT, CT — The essay "The Colors of Privilege," written by an African-American teen, was the winning entry in the TEAM Westport essay contest on "White Privilege," the organization announced.

Written by Staples High School student Chet Ellis, the essay discusses what it feels like to be black in an overwhelmingly white community, where students occasionally make assumptions about race in non-malicious yet still cutting ways.

In second place was the essay, "White Privilege and Me," by Josiah Tarrant, which traces how he's grown up virtually never thinking about race until he became acutely aware of it while shopping for books for his adopted black brother.

Claire Dinshaw's "The Privilege of Ignorance" came in third. In it, Dinshaw talks about how white privilege is a sort of "trust-fund" or "bonus" that white individuals are handed at birth.

The annual contest sparked controversy this year when it asked students to write an essay based on this question: "In 1,000 words or less, describe how you understand the term ‘white privilege.’ To what extent do you think this privilege exists? What impact do you think it has had in your life—whatever your racial or ethnic identity—and in our society more broadly?"