Considering that it’s written into the law and on the money, no. The dollar doesn’t have “In White People We Trust” on it. But by the same reasoning it’s not the same thing. And you hear plenty of people claiming that you have to be religious to be more, and that non-religious people are by nature amoral mass murderers. For a racial equivalent to that, you have to go well beyond “white privilege” and into blatant racial hatred.
Why does he, who lives in Colorado, who isn’t affected by this amendment, who doesn’t work every day with a person whose custody of her own daughter is endangered by the amendment, who didn’t do anything to work against the amendment, get to be the emotional one in this situation?
Once again, where is the evidence that “nearly everyone” uses the term to mean something different than the standard definition provided in this thread?
I am perfectly willing to believe the term is misused sometimes, though I can’t think of an example offhand. But you need to back up this argument.
I would also be willing to hear arguments that white privilege improperly dominates discussions that would more usefully focus on class. But again, can’t think of an example.
The insults in this thread are at people who insist on taking the term as an insult, when it actually isn’t one.
Der of course just destroyed his whole argument. He’s been rambling on about how it’s “insulting to white homeless guys” to talk about “white privilege” but apparantly has no problem talking about “Christian privilege” regardless of how many poor and/or homeless people are Christian.
Be honest Der, you didn’t have any philosophical objections to the term, you were just upset because you hate having to admit to the privileges you get based on your skin tone.
True, but it doesn’t have “In Jesus we trust” either.
Oh please, are you seriously trying to suggest being a white atheist in America is remotely as tough as being a “person of color”(hate the term but got tired of typing out non-white).
Look I’m not white and I don’t believe in God so I think I’m in a pretty good decision to judge. I’ve gotten far more flack for the first than I’ve ever recieved for the second and I’m pretty sure even Sam Harris would be cringing at what you just wrote.
I agree with you, but honestly, I have to wonder what it’s like being a minority atheist. My impression is that minority communities are, on the whole, more religious than white communities. The Latino community where I work, for example, is very, very Catholic. Is this a stereotype? Maybe I just know a lot of really religious minorities.
Where is the evidence that outside of this very specific political usage, people use it in the way it’s defined in this thread? I’ve never heard the word “privilege” used this way, except as applied to this specific issue of “white privilege”. Which is largely why I lean towards considering it a deliberate distortion, and not a “technical term”.
Say what? Are you trying to claim that it isn’t better to be a well off black guy than it is to be a poor anything? Class is much more important than race in modern America. I think that part of the reason for coming up with an idea like “white privilege” is that it lets people sneer at the poor as long as they are white while pretending to be egalitarian. Americans love to hate the poor, and wouldn’t want to give that up; this idea allows them to label a major portion of the poor population to be legitimate targets.
It certainly looks like one to me. And more importantly to quite a lot of other people, which largely answers the question this thread is supposed to about.
Except of course I do no such thing. Not while using the term “privileges” as it is defined by the vast majority of people. Nor am I going to start hating myself for your entertainment.
It might as well, we all know it means exactly that.
Of course not; it’s easier to hide. Atheists may be among the most hated groups in America, but we don’t stand out as much.
See every post Der Trihs has made in this thread.
Listen to any AM radio station when the term “white privilege” comes up.
People have been twisting the term to make it sound like anyone that uses the term is playing the race card.
And THIS is white privilege. It is a blind spot white people have when it comes to racism.
The notion that being an athiest has a larger negative impact in America than being black is just silly. I don’t think you need to be religious at all unless you want to be a politician or a preacher.
Oh please. Who do “we” have to “hide” from?
The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice?
No, that’s not what he was saying. You’re building a straw man and not even doing it well.
Beyond that, you already demolished this argument by insisting it was proper to talk about “Christian privilege” in American, despite there being huge numbers of poor Christians in America.
In fact, blacks and Hispanics have significantly lowers median incomes than whites, while Jews and Buddhists have significantly higher median incones than Christians and Muslim Americans and Christian Americans have roughly equal median incomes.
So were we to apply your economic argument, the idea of “Christian privilege” has even less of a leg to stand on than white skin privilege.
However, you insist “Christian privilege” is real because it lets you feel special, like your the plucky outsider agaist the man who has to constantly hide who he is lest the big bad Christians come to kill you.
You don’t need to twist the term; you just need to take it at face value. Which is why the answer to the thread title is “yes”.
I didn’t say that it was; in fact, I specifically said that it wasn’t.
Or work for any number of people who will find excuses to fire you if they discover you aren’t religious.
It’s not the same thing. Religions are institutions, not just individuals.
:rolleyes: Or it might have something to do with the polls showing how disdained atheists are, and political leaders from the Presidents on down openly regarding atheists as evil and traitorous.
And this reality-denying insistence that atheists aren’t a hated minority just underlines how hypocritical the people who make speeches about “white privilege” actually are. And that it has nothing to do with any desire for social justice.
I agree that the term probably needs to be changed because it has its roots in the very obvious white privilege that existed during segregation. But I assume you don’t have an objection with the concept, right?
Oh, I see you don’t UNDERSTAND the concept. White privilege doesn’t mean that being white will result in a life of privilege. It means that all things being equal, life is easier if you are white in America.
We can have the argument about whether race or the socioeconomic status of your parents are more important but lets do that in another thread.
Noone is asking you to hate yourself. You had no more control over being white than black folks have over being black. But if you aren’t even willing to acknowledge that the playing field is tilted in your favor (or tilted less against you) because of the color of your skin, then there is no way to make you understand the scope of racism today. Its not the pernicious, lynch mob white hood type of racism, it turns out there is a deeply ingrained societal racial preference that works in favor of whites generally (not specifically). Society was built with you in mind.
Puhleaze. Thats like when Jewish folks tell me that they are subject to as much racism as blacks and the only reason that we don’t SEE the racism is because Jews don’t wear yamulkes as much as they used to so people don’t know who to target. Actually, there is probably more animosity towards Jews than athiests (unless you are one of those evangelical athiests, noone likes those fuckers).
The proper response to what question?
To the question:
What term should we use to discuss white privilege? I suggest we use the term white privilege. It describes exactly what we are discussing.
To the question:
How should we address people who are offended by the term? I suggest we point out that it is not an attack on their person. If they don’t believe it exists, then we should point out where it exists. If they think it is an attack on their person, note that it says nothing about any individual and that it is intended only to call attention to issues that we ought to address as a society.
Since the phenomenon does exist and since there is no term that will not engender the same feelings of discomfort in some people, our best option is to take action to eliminate it–which we can only do if we recognize it and address it.
I would note that your point number 2 is in error. That pretty much should disassemble the whole chain.
Racism does not function as a result of white privilege. White privilege is simply one of many phenomena associated with racism. It is related to the other maligned term, institutional racism.
The point of acknowledging one and fighting the other is not intended to simply make certain people feel badly. The point is to work toward eliminating the pain inflicted through those phenomena. We have done a pretty good job of reducing racist laws and overt racist behavior in our society. Our efforts have not been completely successful, but those of us who were alive and aware over the last several decades can see the progress that we have made. As a quick example, I can remember when each of the first three black families moved into Warren, MI and were each burned out or driven out by vandalism. There are currently over 18,000 black people living in that city and while I suspect that some incidents continue to occur, (the DoJ puts them below twenty incidents per year), those 18,000 people are not hiding in closed communities or fearing cross-burnings each night.
I doubt that we will ever eliminate conflicts among perceived groups. Blacks may get some surcease if we decide to go hate on Middle Easterners for a while, but as long as blacks can be considered “other” in this country, there will always be a few idiots who will choose to act hatefully toward them–and skin color makes a really easy marker for “other.”
What we can do is continue to look at various phenomena and, when we find examples of whites getting preferential treatment, call attention to those examples with an eye to treating everyone fairly.
The recent adjustment of laws to stop treating crack cocaine ten times more harshly than an equal amount of powder cocaine was one step. Getting the DEA to invest as much energy in tackling suburban cocaine as they currently invest in attacking urban crack will be another step.
Cracking down on examples of men being stopped for Driving While Black will be another effort.
Reviewing programs such as the one in Ohio, in which opportunities for rehabilitation are offered to whites at much higher rates than the same offers to blacks for the same crimes, and finding a way to get the courts and prosecutors’ offices to recognize that they have been extending white privilege and correcting that behavior would be a good effort.
These phenomena are not examples of overt racists going out of their way to abuse blacks, but of people who have good intentions falling into unconsidered mind sets that need to be challenged before they can be changed. (Overt racism is behind some cases of DWB stops, but often police officers–even black officers–make DWB stops on gut feelings that something is “not right” rather than with the intention of harrassing black drivers).
In fact, in the examples I have provided, the people in authority–who have included both whites and blacks–have acted out of the best motives, often not realizing the disparate effects of their actions. I do not disdain them as racists and I certainly do not feel that I am being attacked when I am not the one engaged in the behavior that results in white privilege.
The answer to the OP is not yes because the term itself is flawed, the answer to the Op is yes because it is too easy to confuse people about what white privilege means.
I’m going to need a cite for this. Maybe you are talking about a sector of the economy I’m not familiar with but things like observing the sabbath makes it hard for you to operate in the corporate environment. You generally don’t get every Sunday off. Go to a law firm on a Sunday and you will see about a quarter to a third of the offices occupied at some point during the day. I’d say there is at least as much disadvantage to being a practicing Christian.
I think that there may be a problem for some in regards to understanding what the term actually means.
I offer this analogy.
Two men are caught in a blizzard on different slopes of a mountain. One suffers a sprained ankle in a fall, the other does not. Each must fight their way through four foot deep drifts, up steep inclines in the face of 30 mile an hour winds, enduring sub-zero temperatures with only light spring jackets and thin cotton gloves. After they have both reached the rescue hut near the top, only an idiot would tell the climber who did not have a sprained ankle that he had had it easy because he had no sprain.
White privilege is the lack of a sprain. It does not diminish the efforts and trauma of the man with two good ankles in any way; it simply notes that the other man had an even more difficult trek.
I have, indeed, seen people make fatuous remarks that white people “have it made” simply by being white. Such people are silly. Many whites face all sorts of obstacles that their skin color does not eliminate. The point of noting white privilege is not to claim that whites have it easy, it is simply to note that blacks and other non-whites, to varying degrees, face one additional penalty from which whites have immunity.
It is my great privilege to tell you that I have never noticed the word “privilege” to universally impute evil to the privileged.
I think you are taking unusually strong negative connotations from the word.
I am not trying to stifle discussion of class. You are trying to stifle discussion of race.
White privilege is a real issue, and it is not equivalent to class. So why should it be verboten?
I have noticed many times that people would like to use money in particular as a catch-all. Is the son of highly educated parents, in a highly educated family with a long history of education and good jobs, but whose parents lost all their money in a bad investment and now are on welfare, to be considered equivalent to someone from a family with a long history of not going to college, of not getting high paying jobs, of in fact being excluded from these things because of race, simply because they are both “poor”?
Any useful term for White privilege is going to be perceived negatively by some. White privilege tends to be invisible to White people, and the term needs to be focused on them so it isn’t easy to ignore.
No, atheists in modern day America don’t face remotely the problems that minorities face and is utterly asinine to argue otherwise and with rare exceptions I’ve never met any atheists with the hubris to argue otherwise.
I say this as someone who doesn’t believe in God, is also a minority and can therefore compare the issues both groups face.
I actually think Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and various other religious minorities would have more legitimate reasons to complain.
I think a lot of (most?) people that dislike “white privilige” wouldn’t disagree with this sentence at all.
The term chaffes me somewhat, and I do have a hard time explaining why. I’m very happy to admit that I have an easier time at oodles of things and tons of advantages thanks to my race. But something about the term feels off to me.
As I understand it, that’s actually partly the point. I believe the earliest proponents of “white privilige” as a term were sociologists who explicitly used it to encourage white students to feel guilty and responsible for racial inequality.
I think part of what irks me is that I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do with that information. If you say, “minorities are disadvantaged,” it’s obvious to say, “we should all try to fix that.”
If you say, “white people are priviliged,” my immediate reaction is, “wait, so now does the fact that I’m poor and socially awkward mean I suck at being white, too?”
Well, context matters. If you’re a politician, you’re pretty much screwed as an atheist whereas it’s possible for a Mormon to be rich enough to win a presidential primary. And, hey, black president.
Outside of the context of “running for public office”…yeah, seconded.
I disagree.
I think Christopher Hitchens, who’s hardly the guy one would expect to downplay the way people felt about atheists had a good comparison.
As he said, if you’d asked a bunch of Republicans in 1970 if they’d vote for a divorced, Hollywood actor for President, they’d have all looked at you like you were nuts and said “hell, no.”
Of course, ten years later they’d all vote for Reagan.
The point was, they were willing to vote for a divorced Hollywood actor for President, they just hadn’t met the right candidate.
Similarly, he pointed out that there were many people who might never have voted for black man for President, but then they met Barack Obama.
Get the right atheist candidate and yeah, I think you’d have an atheist President.
I disagree. I think white privilege is not the lack of a disadvantage any more than it is the existence of an advantage. Its not an indictment of whites but the fact is that history has conspired to create an environment particularly hospitable to whites in America. Its not your fault and frankly if European history had occurred in Africa or Asia, we would be calling it black privilege or Asian privilege. Theres no need to apologize for it, you didn’t choose to be white. In fact there may not even be anything we can do about it but at the very least, lets acknowledge that it takes a bit more for a minority to achieve the same success that a caucasian achieves in this country.
But Der Trihs example (along with several others) shows that people prefer to think in terms of minority disadvantage than white advantage.
I think its one thing if you tell yourself that you have an advantage over others, its an entirely different thing if others tell you that you ave an advantage over them.
I think the earliest use of white privilege occurred soon after emancipation. Maybe thats an argument for a more modern term that better captures the current state of the art.
I think its enough that you realize that society is not fair and some of that unfairness is along racial lines. Not just for blacks but for all non-whites. I can get into a conversation about how it affects Asians but it affects blacks more than most.
Race is not the only factor, there is native ability, socioeconomic status, and a bunch of other things but a poor man who becomes rich isnt really affected by his poor past a black man who become rich is affected by the color of his skin.
Have you ever noticed how wealthy white guys can show up in a t-shirt and shorts while the wealthy black guy tends to dress a lot better? Its not just because black folks are just more stylish, they have to go an extra mile.
But we have a black president, we havent had an athiest president.
There are a BUNCH of successful atheist politicians in the rest of the world but it seems rare in America.
I think that there is a lack of trust of atheists in this country. It seems a bit anti-social, perhaps there are remnants of the anti-communist sentiment.
I am not sure of the point in which you think we are in disagreement.
I have offered no apologies and have not suggested anyone else apologize.
I don’t think it is “my” “fault” and, frankly, I am not interested in blaming anyone for the situation.
Note that I have consistently referred to it as a situation or a phenomenon rather than an exercise in racism and have mentioned that it is sometimes the result of unconsidered actions rather than intentional malevolence. (That is why I am puzzled by various people getting riled up or hurt feelings over the term. Nothing in the term, itself, actually suggests that it is the result of deliberate efforts to elevate whites or denigrate others. It is simply a recognition that history has left this society with a set of beliefs and (mis)understandings that can have a negative impact on some people. Recognizing that it occurs and when it occurs allows us to rectify those situations without having to assign guilt or blame.)