Whiteness vs. Stanford Prison Experiment

In Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art, Maurice Berger talks about white people and thier mindset of white being the "norm." When interviewing people for research, he found that most white people believed that conversations about race were only for people of color.
After reading about the Stanford Prison Experiment in Paul's blog for Performance Imaging, I started to think about the role of whites being similar to the experiment in that there was an expected role to fulfill. Whether or not a white person considers themselves racist, there is an underlying knowledge that as a white person, you have the upperhand, greater opportunities, less things in which to conquer to be treated with the respect and kindness you deserve.
In the prison experiment, students began to unconciously take on the roles they were expected to play. They were rebellious as prisoners and overpowering as guards. Even though the students did not show signs of this type of behavior before the experiment, they were unable to control thier unknown desires to take on these roles.
Similarly, Whiteness deals with the same mentality - Ruth Frankenburg is quoted saying, "to speak of whiteness is to assign everyone a place in relations of racism."