Sophia Magazine vol.7 / SUMMER 2018

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Born in Nara, Japan, Deguchi lived in New York from age four, Montreal from age six, and Hyogo, Japan from age nine, before returning to the United States where she com-pleted her junior high to doctoral education. In total, she has spent 29 years of her life in the US.Given her upbringing, it would seem natural that the Cultural Psychology course she taught at Wellesley College would focus on Japan vs. US or East Asian vs. Westerner dif-ferences. To her surprise, however, she discovered that her students wanted to talk about race. “My first reaction was that I didn’t want to talk about racism; it was too complex, personal, and painful,” she recalls. But pushed by her stu-dents, Deguchi began to explore this topic and realized that the discussion was not simply about race.According to racial development identity models, white people go through stages where at first, through no fault of their own, they are not aware of their racial privilege. “We need to move beyond labeling people racist or not racist not only because it’s divisive, but because people are at differ-ent stages in their relationship to whiteness and people can change,” she says. Deguchi explains that she begins her Psy-chology of Positionality course with white privilege because the theories of racial and other privileges can be applied to Teaching the Privilege AngleEducated in the United States, Professor Makiko Deguchi of the Department of English Studies does not shy away from calling herself “privileged.” We spoke with Professor Deguchi, who has recently published a Japanese transla-tion of Diane J. Goodman’s “Promoting Diversity and So-cial Justice: Educating People from Privileged Groups,” about why we need to be conscious of our privileges.the Japanese context. She notes that when people begin to ask themselves what it means to be in the dominant race, they have the potential to become allies to people of minori-ties. “Being in the dominant group blinds you into not seeing yourself as privileged, seeing everybody as having the same experiences as you do,” she says. This is problematic because, “not realizing makes it easier to oppress people by assum-ing that we are all the same, blaming minority groups when they rightfully protest injustice.” This notion has received validation from minority groups in Japan, such as Zainichi Korean, long-term Korean residents of Japan, and Buraku-min, an outcast group that has been a victim of discrimina-tion, reassuring Deguchi that she was not forcing a Western construct onto Japan.Having taught both in the US and Japan, she sees benefits The Dominant Group Must ChangeProfessor Deguchi and students at a screening of LGBT-themed movie “For the Bible Tells Me So”14Research