Losing white privilege? Exploring whiteness as a resource for ‘white’ Dutch girls in a racially diverse school

Much research on the role of race in education focuses on young people with a migrant background. The racial experiences of ‘white’ children are under-researched, especially in the Netherlands. This article examines whether ‘white’ Dutch working-class students experience white privilege and if so, how they make use of it as a ‘resource’ in their school settings. Most studies on ‘white’ working-class students do not take white privilege into account, and most work on white privilege has inadequately disentangled the impacts of race and social class. The ethnographic findings from a Dutch senior vocational school where the vast majority of students are of colour suggest that the whiteness of working-class ‘white’ Dutch students may or may not act as a form of white privilege, depending on their interaction with their middle-class teachers. Due to its intersection with social class, white privilege in this setting appeared to be conditional upon meeting teachers’ expectations.