“Ready to get uncomfortable with us?” asked the official MTV Twitter account on Wednesday, preparing its audience for the documentary White People, which aired that night. In the hour-long special, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Jose Antonio Vargas talks to young people — many of them white — about race in America. While white people aren’t the only ones talking, they are involved in every conversation, and each segment has some focus on the white experience of race: a white guy who goes to a historically black college, the white teachers at a school on an Oglala Sioux reservation, white people who feel “attacked” by questions about racism at town-hall discussions in North Carolina and Washington State. It’s a documentary for white people, Vargas acknowledges, and an attempt to get them to reckon with their own racial privilege.

The documentary did make some of its subjects uncomfortable. When presented with evidence that white people are more likely to receive scholarships than people of color, one white student says, “Okay, now I feel like the victim here … I feel like you guys are attacking me now.” Many white people managed to take Vargas’s questions super personally and, at the same time, disassociate themselves from racism. They struggled to understand that white privilege is something that is both bigger than they are and also something they are actively involved in.