The DoubleTree Hotel, a sprawling complex just a quick shuttle ride away from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, mostly hosts stranded passengers, pilots, and flight attendants whose shadowy silhouettes can be glimpsed at insomniac hours rolling their suitcases down the plushly carpeted hallways, and windbreaker-clad locals from nearby Puget Sound towns, for whom the hotel’s sports bar and decent cheeseburgers are a draw during the Pacific Northwest’s long, chilly rainy season. The SeaTac DoubleTree also, this year, hosted the Fourteenth Annual White Privilege Conference (WPC14) from April 10 through April 13.
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White privilege—what’s that? It was a question I was asked several times by the non-White Privilege hotel guests whom I encountered in the DoubleTree’s elevators and stairwells, since I was required by conference rules to wear at all times my official badge, conspicuously hand-lettered and yellow-highlighted “PRESS” by me. I always answered the question as honestly as I could, drawing on the four days’ worth of White Privilege keynote speeches and workshops I attended over a long, wet, April weekend near the airport. “It’s where you learn that white people oppress everybody else,” I said. This seemed fair enough. WPC14’s own website declares that “the WPC has become a venue for fostering difficult and critical dialogues around white supremacy, white privilege, diversity, multicultural education and leadership, social & economic justice, and the intersecting systems of privilege and oppression.”