Issues of everyday racism and bigotry can be overwhelming to some groups and unnoticed by others.

It happens often on white-majority campuses: A speaker asks an audience, "Is racism a problem on campus?" White heads shake no, while people of color nod yes in unison.

Howard J. Ehrlich, director of The Prejudice Institute in Baltimore (see Resources), says white students on a white-majority campus typically don't understand what the victim of a hate crime or bias incident goes through.

Some call that white privilege, the transparent preference for whiteness that permeates U.S. culture. A white student has little reason to worry about being stopped and asked for ID by a police officer or a security person in a store; for a student of color, such an encounter is an everyday possibility.

"Students with white privilege, they've never experienced anything like this personally. They say, 'What's all the fuss? It's just something trivial.' That may be an honest response from their standpoint," Ehrlich said. "But from the standpoint of the victim, this may be the one-hundredth time this kind of thing has happened. Those perceptions are very different."

Part of your efforts to teach tolerance should include information about these varying perceptions.

At Bethel College and Seminary in St. Paul, Minn., in the midst of a series of racist graffiti attacks, students of color created a hallway exhibit designed to illustrate the pain of oppression.

"Many of our white students didn't know what it felt like to be attacked in this way, and (the exhibit) helped convey that message," said Curtiss DeYoung, an associate professor at Bethel.

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