The existence of white privilege is not an accusation; it is a description of an uneven playing field, writes teacher and teacher educator Nuzhat Uthmani. Here, she offers direction for how white privilege can be used to combat racism.

Let’s stop pretending white privilege doesn’t exist.

If you’re white in Scotland today, your identity isn’t something you’re constantly asked to justify. You can walk into a classroom, a council office, a newsroom, or a government meeting and know that your presence is assumed, accepted, even expected. That’s not “neutrality.” That’s privilege.

White privilege doesn’t mean you haven’t worked hard. It means your ethnicity hasn’t made that work harder. It hasn’t forced you to code-switch, suppress your culture and language, navigate microaggressions, or prove your humanity in every space you enter. It hasn’t meant your child avoids using foreign-sounding names in the stories they write or avoids taking traditional food for their packed lunch in fear of being ridiculed or humiliated. It hasn’t meant that you find yourself second-guessing why you were not served in a queue or why someone assumed you must be related to the other brown person in the room.

Scotland, like the rest of the UK, is built on the legacy of empire and colonisation, a legacy that never ended, only rebranded. Racism isn’t something that happens “down south” or “in the past.” It’s enshrined into our........

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