Yes, you can certainly go on demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of what privilege means. Privilege doesn’t mean everything is perfect for you. White privilege didn’t mean that poor whites didn’t have it tough it just meant that they benefited from being white. If you don’t think white women in the 1910s benefited from being white I don’t know what to tell you. The fact that the couldn’t vote does not mean they didn’t benefit from being white.
Part of what makes white privilege a privilege is the fact that if you’re white, you can ignore it. Visible minorities, do not have that option of pretending race doesn’t affect them.
I’m a half black half white person who looks white to 99% of white people, and I am aware enough to appreciate that it benefits me to look white such as when getting pulled over, among many other instances. The problem is white people are over defensive about it to the point of denying it exists or playing semantic games about whether it shouldn’t be called privilege if it’s “the norm”, which is a very white way of saying anything non-white is an abnormal exception. Kind of like how Ron Paul said that the TSA workers “don’t look very American” to him. It’s pervasive, and I honestly don’t have a solution to the problem, but I believe it probably starts at awareness on the side of white folk.
People arguing against the term “White Privilege” on semantic grounds are exactly the same as people who say, “I’m not homophobic, I’m not scared of gay people!”
It’s just as dumb and transparent when you do it, guys.
Bullshit. There is a fundamental difference. The people making arguments that they are not homophobes are still supporting descriminatory practices against homosexuals. No one in this thread is saying that about non-white people.
I just think the term is used to promote guilt and vilify people who are not doing anything wrong. I’ve never heard anyone use it for any other purpose. To tell the truth, I thought the term had died out to more useful approaches to the problem the term is trying to correct. We fight against discrimination, not privilege.
I am only privileged in the sense that you are underprivileged. I choose to focus on granting you privilege. Yes, this necessarily means I will lose some of my privilege, as the whole thing is relative. But that’s not my focus. My focus is in making life better for nonwhites, not making it worse for white people.
It’s not just semantics. It’s a differing philosophy. It’s a different technique for dealing with the same problem. Vilifying people doesn’t help. If that offends you, tough, as you are part of the problem. You are intentionally stirring up strife and vilifying people who are trying to help. You admit the term bothers people, so stop using it.
[misread]
I certainly am not asking white people to feel guilty about the privilege they receive just for being white, but it might be a natural reaction to a sudden realization that you’ve had it better than minorities for no good reason your whole life if you’re made aware of it. But that isn’t the point.
I’m sure for some spreading guilt is a non-constructive way for them to get jabs in, but that doesn’t invalidate the concept.
I agree white women had more privileges than women of color…but it was only the white male who had true privilege. We still acknowledge racism but sanction sexism.
This thread isn’t about sexism, and it’s insulting to play the Oppression Olympics here. Racism and sexism are incredibly common in society. They are both bad. They should both be fought against. This thread is about white privilege, not male privilege. If you want to talk about male privilege you should start another thread. It’s seriously messed up to say that there is more sexism than racism, or sexism is worse than racism.
If white privilege does exist whos fault is it? When whites become a minority will this go away? I think mainstream is a better word than white when talking about the USA.
I’m all for white privilege. I’ve found it has helped me score girls in non-white countries. They say I look like that guy who played in the Titanic movie. I do nothing of the sort. They probably have difficulty distinguishing white people, like Europeans often have distinguishing Asians. But I’m not one to complain.
Are there any suggestions on the table on how we can extend and broaden white privilege?
I don’t think that “fault” plays a role here.
We actually do not know whether it will go away when whites become a minority. It is quite possible that “white” will become a more all-encompassing term as people who were not originally regarded as white are accepted into the majority. (That has already happened, as noted above, regarding Irish, Italians, and others and has now begun–to a limited extent–among Asians.) From that perspective, using the term “mainstream benefit” might work better. However, the term “white privilege” was coined when it was clearly a matter of whites benefiting from it. Like the word homophobia, (which rarely means a genuine fear of homosexuality), or the word antisemitism, (which means hatred of Jews, not hatred of all Semitic peoples), it is the term currently used to describe the phenomenon. I could see the point of launching an effort to change the term from “white privilege” to something else. I see no point in trying to deny that the phenomenon identified by that phrase does not currently exist.
What can be done to correct it? I would think that calling attention to the phenomenon when it can be identified–without getting into nasty calls of racism against people who were not actively seeking to be racist–would be the best way to eliminate it. Simply getting people to consider their actions and to examine underlying assumptions has already reduced much of what would have fallen under the term in 1968. Going beyond that to set objective guidelines that would remove its influence in various arenas would go far to eliminating it. (I have, in previous threads, pointed to the drug rehabilitation program in Northeast Ohio that was offered at a much higher rate to whites than to blacks with nearly identical situations, (income, criminal records, family structure, etc.). That offer was extended based on the gut reactions of prosecuting attorneys, police, and judges, (including whites, blacks and Hispanics), who genuinely thought that they were being fair and who were surprised to discover that they had not been. Setting objective guidelines for entry to the program rather than allowing gut feelings to dictate who got in would reduce, if not eliminate, the white privilege in that situation.)
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As to the various claims that the term was coined to incite guilt or otherwise disparage white people, I notice that no one in this thread who has defended the term has made any such suggestion that whites should feel guilty or that they should be ashamed of their behavior. It has only been the posters who opposed the term who claimed that some unidentified group intended to use the term in such a hostile manner.
This post is utterly disgusting. If you were joking, that might actually be worse.
I was going to suggest the term ‘normative advantage’ but yours works too. Progressive types that coin these types of terms are both terrible marketers and bad academics. I don’t think anyone truly believes that white people don’t have advantages in many if not most most areas of American society today but that hardly a universal phenomenon especially in terms of world history and it isn’t even universally true among all groups of white people in the U.S. From a sociological perspective, it is much more sound to define the term broadly as something that can manifest itself in many different ways in different places and times. That gives us something to actually study and try to remedy at a detailed level depending on the specific causes and circumstances.
Instead, the term ‘white privilege’ pretends to describe a universal phenomenon, the cause and the solution one easy term. That is just terrible science and tends to infuriate people who have rightful objections about why it isn’t always that easy to sum up.
By assigning a social problem a term like that, you are guaranteed a perpetual fight when one party says that it exists in general and another brings up specific cases of when it isn’t true. Both are right in a way but there is no way for either party to win. That is the fault of the presented model, not the thought processes of the people making the argument.
Progressive types need to learn a few things from the hard sciences. You shouldn’t just gloss over contradictory data points or say they aren’t important. Instead, you should look at the model, revise it and test it again and see if it is really as universally true as you think it is. That is what Einstein did for Newtonian physics. I don’t know why you don’t see the same scientific method applied to some of the soft sciences because it works just as well.
Hint: Change the name to something more universal, see where it fits and it doesn’t and stop trying to do a hard sell on a term that was simply made up to fit a specific agenda.
Even controlling for income, whites get shorter prison sentences than blacks, pretending it is socio economical only and there isn’t a racial element, is just that.
This sure seems like white, not class, privilege to me.
Let’s ask MrDibble if white privilege goes away when whites are a minority.
Is this supposed to be funny? Or did you just feel that the passive racism going on in this thread wasn’t complete without being combined with some active sexism?
This semantic nitpicking is silly. White privilege is a thing that exists everywhere in the ‘western world’. Acknowledging this doesn’t mean you have to feel guilty for being white. The fact that you benefit from the social structure that is in place doesn’t mean that you’re culpable for that social structure. But refusing to acknowledge that you are benefiting from a rotten system helps that rotten system to continue unabated. My ancestors were white people who never had anything to do with American slavery. I’m quite visibly white, and even as an immigrant that gives me a leg up on American blacks as well as immigrants from Africa, Asia, or Latin America in the job market. This is not my fault. But it is real, and it’s something we should all be acknowledging and working to overcome.
Are you sure the highlighted part is universally true or just in the circumstances you personally seen? I am fairly certain there is such a thing as Asian Privilege and even Hispanic Privilege as well in certain contexts (lots of hispanics are white too so you end up with hopeless confusion when you define these things this way).
It isn’t a semantic quibble we are making. It is a theoretical as well as a practical one. ‘White Privilege’ may exist practically in certain contexts but for it to be a sound theoretical construct, it would have to have ways to falsify it under certain conditions. I believe it just happens to be a manifestation of a more universal human phenomenon that takes happens on both a macro and micro form in many different contexts. White people in America are often the beneficiary of that today but it isn’t universally true and could be quite different in other times and places and even within the U.S. itself. There is no need to define a specific, presumptive and antagonist term for a more universal phenomenon.
Why is the bolded section so important to you? I have never heard white privilege described as anything other than an American phenomenon of a specific period in U.S. history. I am sure that different groups have had the same or similar experiences in different times and places, but it was not coined to describe some grand, universal, age-long phenomenon. It was identified to call the attention of its beneficiaries at a particular time and place in this country’s history.
Demonstrating that the same phenomenon occurs, (or has occurred), in other times and locales might provide an interesting, (although potentially off-topic), bit of information, (I am pretty sure that Japanese culture currently provides a similar benefit in Japan to anyone who is neither European, nor Chinese or Korean or Ainu). However, the reality of the situation in the U.S. in the late 20th/early 21st centuries is the point of having coined the term. I have never heard it described as a historically unique situation and I have certainly never heard anyone say that there is some aspect of “whiteness” that causes it. It almost seems as though you are portraying the claims about it as larger than they actually are so that you can rebut the larger (and never actually spoken) claims.
I think we can all imagine archetypal examples of things we all would recognize as ‘White Privilege’ but that is of little use in solving the problem and it may be a symptom of a larger issue. To me, it is no more than a slang term like trailer trash or welfare queen that you can find some good examples of but tells you nothing about the root cause or how to fix it. I have great disrespect for people that use such terms in anything but the most informal ways. They have no place in more intellectual discussions.
My point is that you have to define such a problem, assuming there is one, much more elegantly than has been shown so far in order to address it. There is no one explanation that fits all circumstances in American society even reasonably well.
Let’s break down the term white privilege to see how it works:
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White - I am not trying to be deliberately dense when I say I have no idea what a white person is. The term has changed meaning over time. At one time Italians, the Irish, and Jews were not considered white and now they are as long as they have reasonably white skin. Hispanics are excluded from this for some reason even if they are from Cuba or Costa Rica and are as white skinned as you can be. Many of my coworkers are Portuguese and a subset of those are from the Azores. Some are light skinned and some are quite dark. Are they white? I don’t know. They aren’t technically hispanic but they still grew up in Portuguese ghettos in Massachusetts and now do factory work in the 1st or 2nd generation so I don’t know where they fit into this whole ‘White Privilege’ idea. I am 1/8 Native American and could identify myself as such in some legal contexts but that wouldn’t change the circumstances for this issue at all. What is a white person? Be specific.
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Privilege - I am not sure what this always means either. I assume it means that someone like me could send out a resume and get an interview more readily than someone named DePetrius but I also have a very unusual name of indeterminate origin so I am not sure that part applies to me. I don’t get stopped routinely for suspicion of criminal activity but many of the white rednecks I grew up with certainly do and many of them ended up in prison including one notable one for a crime he didn’t commit. Maybe it means that a white person would usually get a lighter sentence for an equivalent crime but there are so many counter-examples that I am not sure you can say that is a white privilege or a socioeconomic one. I have lived and been in parts of the U.S. where I was the demographic minority and certainly wasn’t openly welcomed in parts of those societies. I don’t think that was because I was white, only that I wasn’t part of that particular norm and that is the true issue.
In short, the whole idea is ill-defined and completely frayed around the edges. I think it needs a more coherent logical framework before it can be recognized as a legitimate idea. The current title and arguments are nothing more than fancy name calling that don’t give any information for real solutions.