IT HAS BEEN almost a decade since Shaw-

their analysis of college-level family texts in which they found that families of color were underrepresented or portrayed as problem-atic if they did not conform to the white middle-class norm. Since that time, we have noticed that textbook authors have at-tempted to address these concerns by strengthening recognition of the importance of diversity in family life by making their texts more inclusive of the experiences of all types of families. One issue not ad-dressed by Shaw-Taylor and Benokraitis’s critique, however, is the issue of white privilege. To fully understand the nature of race and ethnicity in the United States it is important that students be aware not only of the disadvantages experienced by families of color but also the nature of the privileges that are experienced by whites (Frankenberg 1993; McIntosh 1989). The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which texts portray the experiences of whites and white families in our culture as normative in rela-tion to families of color. There is a tendency to dichotomize social phenomena into opposing categories that are evaluated to one another. The problem with this tendency to dichotomize is that it leads to invidious comparison and an evaluation of one element of the dichotomy more posi-tively than the other (Epstein 1992) as well as the likelihood of treating the more pow-erful group in the dichotomy as normative. Feminist theorists have applied this under-standing to the male/female dichotomy, but this is also relevant for understanding the use of the dichotomy of black/white, or in this case of white/other. This distinction can be applied to racial categorization in which the dominant white group is seen as th