Bullshit. That’s not “White” privilege, that’s part and parcel of being a member of the dominant ethnic group in an area. Calling it “white” privilege is a deliberate attempt to demonize and vilify white people.
And, unless you immigrated from some other country, that culture is at least partially your own; black culture isn’t that far off from mainstream white culture, and in most ways, black entertainers are at least proportionately represented, if not over represented in the media. Black people are 12% of the US population; it seems like black participation in entertainment is far higher than 12% if you consider music and sports to be entertainment.
If I (as white as can be) moved to say… Russia, I’d have almost all of those challenges you describe above, and yet everyone would be white.
Or, you know, being accurate in pointing out that that’s exactly who it is a privilege for. This notion that the term is a deliberate attempt to “demonize and vilify” just displays blatant ignorance of the origin of the term.
By your standard then there was no “white privilege” in Apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South and today there’s no “Jewish privilege” in Israel and no “Muslim privilege” in Iran(not to suggest the countries are all morally equal).
You describe yourself as “white as can be” and yet you seem so certain black culture is just a part of white culture. I wonder, have you studied black culture in any kind of serious academic way? Because people do, and they wouldn’t really agree with you. But of course you, as a white person in this country, feel like you are an expert on other people’s lives and experiences and feel confident that you can make all sorts of pronouncements just by virtue of your higher status. Minorities and people who study structural racism have just as much insight as you, a white guy. Everything they know and have learned and studied and named (white privilege) you can just dismiss by calling it a “deliberate attempt to demonize and vilify white people.”
It’s not your fault. Society has given you that false confidence. It’s a part of the privilege you have as a white person in this culture, knowing your voice and opinion will be treated as valuable, even if it has no merit.
It would depend on the circumstances.
If the person who was unfairly graded received the poor mark because the instructor had a personal animus against that individual, then it would be rare in our current language to say that you had been privileged.
On the other hand, if a group of persons were unfairly given poor marks and either they or the members of the group who were graded fairly shared some trait in common, (ethnicity, religion, love of C&W music), so that the fair marks were granted only to those who either had or lacked those traits, that would satisfy the definition of an “. . . advantage, . . . granted or available only to one person or group of people,” the group being identified by the presence or absence of the trait. Being graded fairly is something to which everyone should have access, but it is certainly an advantage over anyone to whom it is denied.
I am sure in all 3 cases we could find actual examples of privilege. For example, in Israel you can receive a living allowance from the state for studying the torah. No such benefit exists for those studying the koran.
OK, if someone receives a cast iron benefit for belonging to a group, that’s a privilege.
Otherwise if someone is simply treated fairly while someone from another group is treated unfairly then the term “privilege” may be appropriate depending on the specifics. I would agree with that.
On the subject of the US specifically, I’d say a lot of it is down to the privilege associated with having money. Now, while it’s true that white people are disproportionately represented among the wealthy, so are largely recipients of this benefit, I think it would be misleading to call it white privilege.
If you are born into a wealthy black family you will gain this same benefit.
Go find a fictional work about the last member of a non-white ethnic group, tribe, warrior class etc. and you’ll find the titular last one is a white person who through some bizarre circumstance came to join them.
Or a role that calls for a non-white actor for plot reasons, they will cast a white person with a handwave like saying he is half Mongolian or whatever. They could make a movie called The Last Zulu Warrior and cast Shia Lebouf as the lead while mentioning a shipwreck when he was a baby.
I agree that the term sort of overstates the idea of “privilege” and confuses the issue that needs resolved. If whites are treated above average, and blacks are treated average, then that is a privilege which the solution is that everyone should be treated average.
If whites are treated average, and blacks below average, then it is a bastardization of the language to call that a privilege. It is racial discrimination in which the solution is to improve the lot of blacks.
If there is a privilege as the flip side of every discrimination, then we have just made up two terms for the same problem.
The list in the linked article was absurd. 90% of the stuff in there is simply the product of being a majority. Of course the front page of the newspaper will contain more stories about white people when whites are a majority of the community. That isn’t privilege, discrimination, or anything.
Go back and look at the video link about the bike theft provided earlier. “Wealth” had nothing to do with the reactions of the people walking by the “thief.” The reactions were all based on race and sex.
Expand that out into millions of (less extreme) events all across the country every single day.
I am sure that, in general, a black man in a three piece suit with good diction will be given somewhat better consideration than a scruffy white kid in torn clothes whose speech is slurred and punctuated by obscenities. However, if both are wearing jeans and a T-shirt and neither are speaking, I suspect that the majority of people in the U.S. who encountered them wrestling would assume that the black man was the aggressor. Class and wealth do have a bearing on individual situations. I have encountered a black man who was raised in the middle class with a good education who claimed that his life was harder than a poor white man who had to quit school to support his mother and found himself sweating his life in a foundry and I say that black man had no idea what he was talking about.
However, some aspects of his life were more difficult: being stopped for Driving While Black was something that the white man never encountered.
The reference to “white privilege” is not a claim that no white person has to face adversity or that no black person ever gets a break. There is not some nice, clear rating scale in which we can make universal declarations of everyone’s life based on nothing more than the color of their skin. That overstates the argument for “white privilege.” However, it is pretty clear that in equal situations, a white person will generally be given better treatment than a black person, (or, depending on the locale, an Asian or Indian), a treatment based on nothing more than his or her perceived race. Whites will generally enjoy advantages or immunities based on their membership in a particular group.
Yes but again: I’m not saying that there is not racism against blacks.
What I am saying is that given the terrible social mobility of the US, that that alone explains much of the difference in outcomes. And that it’s misleading to call that white privilege.
At the very least it may mean directing our attention at the wrong thing: racism, when in fact a better social safety net and higher education support might do more in the long run.
Let’s play Spot the Difference, between what I said, and what you’re accusing me of saying.
Let’s see, you mention stalking and being pulled over, I don’t. I’m talking about a privilege some subset of the population enjoys, you are talking about discrimination that a subset experiences (and note these two sets are not inverses of one another). My thing matters to how people’s lives turn out and the opportunities they have, yours (these examples at least), does not.
White privilege is about more than just not experiencing racism. It’s the privilege of knowing when you talk, people will listen and give your idea merit. It’s the privilege of being comfortable in many places, especially places of power. It’s knowing the likelihood of being mistaken for a busboy at that nice restaurant is virtually nil.
Sure, it’s also not being stopped for Driving While Black, or Stop and Frisk, but it’s also a million little ways that a white person’s experience is normalized while a minority’s is marginalized. It’s being part of “mainstream culture” by virtue of birth. It’s turning on the TV and seeing a sea of faces like your own. It’s being seen as the default by the medical establishment. It’s having all of history center around your ethnic group.
And it’s also the immense privilege of being able to ignore the entire thing. Racism is so pervasive, but being white means never thinking about it unless you want to.
ETA: It’s thinking that the discussion of racism is a “game” that is apparently fun and easy to play. After all, it’s not like real people are affected by this or anything. It’s just an intellectual discussion.
Is that at me?
FTR I am not white, and I have experienced racism first hand.
On my last post I did dial the sarcasm up a bit far, but it is pretty annoying when someone not only throws a straw man at you, but persists in doing so.
It’s also having the luxury of hardly ever thinking about race.
I don’t think about race constantly. For the most part, I am just monstro and people are just people. Not __ people. But I will never be able to escape race consciousness. It wouldn’t be wise for me to try, but I don’t even think it’s possible for someone who is not white in this society.
I think only a white person would say something like “When we stop thinking about race, then the racism will go away”. As if simply being aware of race is the problem rather than the way we respond to race. When someone says they don’t think of race, they are colorblind, blah blah blah, it makes me think that person has never been in an work environment where they are the only white person. Or have ever lived in an environment where they are the only white person. It’s easy for race to be non-important when you are aren’t confronted by it on a regular basis.
I think most people have a problem with this kind of “white privilege” because they don’t know what to do with it. You can’t make white people think about race as much as black people do, and it’s not even necessary for them do so anyway. So what’s the point of pointing it out? I think it helps people think clearly…to prevent them from arguing a high-horse of virtuousness they do not deserve.
One of the most significant factors I see at play here is a moving of the goalposts. What is the social issue, the greatest marker of inequity, that this nation has seen - and in fact, was founded upon? It was differential treatment based on race. So to paraphrase Du Bois, the problem of the 17th through 21st centuries is the color line.
That’s not to say that social class, gender bias, homophobia, ableism, to name a few, aren’t salient and persistent problems. But the surest way to perpetuate social inequity is to wave away the root cause and say it’s something else.
I honestly believe that if this nation squared up and faced its history of racism unflinchingly, it is something we could, indeed “get over.” But even an academic discussion of this issue is met with considerable resistance.
Edited to add, sexism and gender bias is a very close second, IMO, regarding being the most significant marker of inequity in American history (if not the world, where it may be number one).
