# Are Merit Systems in Academia and Work a Method of Enforcing White Dominance? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 13, 2018, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-merit-systems-in-academia-and-work-a-method-of-enforcing-white-dominance/810468 "2018-03-13T03:22:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 10
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2018, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-merit-systems-in-academia-and-work-a-method-of-enforcing-white-dominance/810468/181 "2018-03-30T20:07:05Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > I think lots of people have privilege that other people don’t have. In fact, one of the main points of the concept of “privilege” is that almost **anybody** has certain kinds of privilege that other people don’t have, depending on the context. Rich women have wealth privilege compared to poor men. Poor men have male privilege compared to rich women. Most nonwhite people have straight privilege compared to white homosexuals, and so on and so on. The same individual can have, and generally does have, privilege in some respects coexisting with disprivilege in some other respects. > [@Sam Stone](#): > > It’s not just race and gender, either. A poor white kid from Appalachia has less privilege than ANY of the people protesting at Harvard or Yale, regardless of their skin color or gender. Depends on the context. The poor white kid certainly has less wealth privilege and less social-status privilege than almost all Ivy League students. But the poor white kid walking by a cop on an urban street might well find that he **does** have racial privilege compared to the nonwhite Ivy League student whom the cop automatically regards as more “suspicious” because of his race. Like I said, privilege pertains to a specific identity and context, not to some imaginary “overall net privilege” determined by adding up one’s various social advantages and disadvantages to reduce them to a single quantity. > [@Sam Stone](#): > > It’s a leap of logic to go from, ‘some people have privilege’ to ‘therefore, there’s no such thing as merit, and all differences in outcome can be explained by privilege’. But that’s exactly what the postmodern, illiberal left wants us to believe - that all differences between people are the result of power struggles and power imbalances Strawman. Pointing out that privilege is much more influential and entrenched than the beneficiaries of privilege like to believe is not the same thing as claiming that “there’s no such thing as merit and all differences in outcome can be explained by privilege”. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-merit-systems-in-academia-and-work-a-method-of-enforcing-white-dominance/810468.md?page=9)