Like many (but not all) of you, I was #blessed enough to go home and celebrate Thanksgiving with my family over break. And, of course, as we sat around the table filled with excellent food, we held hands and shared what we were thankful for this year. It was Norman-Rockwell-level adorability, let me tell you.

My mother said she was thankful for everyone being home. My father was thankful for the undefeated season the Hawkeye football team had been having (“Straight to the national championship, God-willing”). My brothers, an ecologist and a geographer, were thankful for a year of good data analysis.

Then it was my turn. The answer, for me, was obvious: “I’m thankful I’m white.” My family nodded in understanding, and a few of them added “amens” of agreement.

I love being white; it’s not hard to figure out why. There are so many things in my life that have been simplified by my race, and the least I can do is say ‘thank you’ every once in a while.

It all started when I was a little girl, learning to read: no matter where I turned in the library, there were books with main characters I could relate to and empathize with.

According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, over 90 percent of children’s books they review in a year have no significant characters who are people of color. The books that found their way into our public library and into my hands were made by and for people with similar backgrounds to mine. It’s not surprising I grew up loving reading. Like so many things, my love of reading was simplified by my whiteness.

Also, as a white child, I could expect teachers and librarians to deal fairly with me and not assume I was up to no good. Even though I was often up to no good, I received the benefit of the doubt because of my whiteness. I traveled the hallways of my high school freely without ever being asked for a pass by the adult hall monitors employed to keep the peace. New to the public school system, I commented on this phenomenon to a friend.

“Of course you don’t need a pass,” she scoffed, “you’re white.” Her experience as a person of color in our school was hugely different from mine. Despite being an equally involved and pleasant student, she was stopped by hall monitors and asked for a pass often, and I had no idea until she made that comment. What I saw as fair treatment at school was actually preferential treatment, and I could have graduated without finding out any different.

Unawareness of the experiences of others is probably the most exclusive luxury afforded to me by my social position as a white person. In my previous example about hall monitors in high school (a school about eight miles southeast of here, for those of you who do field experience in the Cedar Valley), notice that I had no idea my experience was not typical until I was informed of that by a person of color.

I’m thankful for the veil of ignorance I am allowed to live behind. I’m thankful that being aware of others’ lived experiences is a two-step process for me. First, I have to be told by someone when my experience is not a typical one. Second, I get to choose whether or not I believe that person.

While I’ve been at UNI, I have availed myself of every opportunity my whiteness gives me to be ignorant of what others may face in the same spaces I walk through with ease.

When I get an email from President Ruud or Provost Wohlpart about the tough conversations happening surrounding diversity on campus, I can click delete. When I pick up a copy of the Northern Iowan, I can flip past the testimonials of students of color and go straight to the best part: Michael Jackson’s column. When I check out the news across the country, I look at student protests at Mizzou and Yale with no personal investment.

The primarily white spaces at UNI are ones that don’t make me confront my perception of race. I can relax into the belief that race is something belonging only to people who are not white.

At UNI, the only time I have to think about persons different from myself (not white) is in required classes like “Non-western cultures” or “Multicultural Literature,” and even then the way these classes are packaged and separated from others feeds into the idea that “white” is some kind of default setting for humanity.

I am always welcome and comfortable as a white person at UNI, and I have the paradigm of whiteness to thank.