That’s only true if you’re shoplifting. If you’re not shoplifting, you don’t get away with shoplifting because you’re not shoplifting.
It’s silly to claim that part of white privilege is the ability to get away with shoplifting. Because, you know, white people like do get arrested for shoplifting.
Is the argument that black people are subjected to inappropriately high levels of harassment by security while shopping, or is it that white people have inappropriately low levels? Or both? I mean, it could be that stores should subject everyone to the “shopping while black” level of scrutiny, because that would be the way to catch the most shoplifters. Like, everyone should be harassed, and white people are unfairly not harassed?
But stores don’t care about catching the most shoplifters. They care about making the most money. Following everyone around to the SWB level would be counterproductive because they’d spend more on security than they would save in shrinkage. It seems to me that not harassing potential customers is a better business strategy. White privilege while shopping isn’t about being able to get away with shoplifting, it’s about not being hassled by security guards.
See, this is what people mean when they say that white privilege is invisible to white people. I don’t notice not getting harassed, I just go about my day. If I was black I’d notice being harassed, and I’d notice that white people don’t get harassed. I don’t think I should be harassed just to make it fair. I suppose it’s technically a disadvantage to me if black people can vote, because my vote counts only X/Yth as much. But I don’t see it that way.
See, it may be true that certain transactions are zero-sum, like if I get a particular job because I only had to compete against 10 white guys, and if the black guy was considered he would have gotten the job. But of course in the larger economy the fact that black guys can get good jobs is not a detriment to me, it is a benefit. When I see that 10 million people are unemployed I don’t think “Good”, I think “Bad”, because those 10 million people aren’t producing goods and services. Yes, if they had jobs they’d be bidding to consume goods and services that I might otherwise have purchased more cheaply, but they’re expanding the supply of goods and services by a larger amount than they consume. Supply and demand, increased supply means lower prices
Well, the point is there are two sorts of privileges aren’t there? One is the kind you get something but your neighbor doesn’t get it, even though everyone deserves it. The other is the kind you get but your neighbor doesn’t get, even though no one deserves it.
Not getting harassed while shopping is something that everyone deserves. Stealing from a store but not getting caught is something that no one deserves.
All citizens deserve the right to vote. If white people get to vote the appropriate remedy is to allow black people to vote, not to stop everyone from voting. Nobody deserves the right to murder people they don’t like. If white people can lynch black people without facing legal consequences the appropriate remedy is to prosecute everyone for murder, not allow black people to lynch white people.
If a store employee assumes that black people are inherently more suspicious/more likely to be criminals than white people then that is the same thing as assuming that white people are inherently less suspicious/less likely to be criminals than black people.
How do you know that? If store employees considers black shoppers to be automatically more suspicious than white shoppers then they may not even notice my suspicious behavior because they’re occupied with keeping an eye on black shoppers elsewhere in the store. Even if they do notice me, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll be treated exactly the same way as a black woman in the same situation.
This is a clip from a hidden camera TV show and not a rigorous scientific study or anything, but the show What Would You Do? found that when they sent a white actor and a black actor to behave like bicycle thieves in a public park, people were a lot more aggressive in confronting the black “thief”, more likely to call the police, and less likely to give him the benefit of the doubt about maybe being a park employee or the rightful owner of the bike. And when the producers sent a pretty white woman to play the role of the bike thief, she had an even easier time of it than the white man and was actually treated like a damsel in distress by a number of passers-by.
Just chiming in to say this thread is fascinating and the type of thread that keeps me coming back to SDMB but I hope it’s not some sort of long game gotcha ya.
Just to point out the obvious: if they caught more white shoplifters, that would be to my benefit as a white person, since I don’t shoplift, and less theft means lower prices for me.
Which brings us back to the point that an awful lot of this stuff isn’t a zero-sum game.
In re the OP, as a foreigner who’s spent a lot of time in the US: you could definitely call the default American culture (and yes, there is one) its “white culture”. It’s pretty common that countries with majorities and minorities have a “[Country Name] culture” that belongs mostly to the majority group, then minority groups who consider themselves to have their own cultures. This being the case, it’s hard to see how “white culture” could be plausibly defined by its privilege vis-à-vis ethnic and racial minorities — otherwise, how do we distinguish it from, say, French culture, which is plainly very different? How would you distinguish Anglophone Canadian culture from Francophone Canadian culture?
While this is true, it doesn’t mean an individual law-abiding white person would necessarily appreciate being hassled for dawdling in a store while wearing a big coat.
It’s ultimately better for society if all people are treated fairly and equally, but making things more fair for everyone can mean that some people will lose certain unfair privileges. To take a non-criminal example, if for instance medical schools only admitted white students (which was the case at one point in US history) then it would be easier for a white person to become a doctor than if they had to compete against not only the best white students but also the best non-white students. Having white-only medical schools means society will miss out on some great non-white doctors, but Dr. Bottom-Of-The-Class probably isn’t too sorry about not being edged out by a non-white student.
In a racist society Dr. Bottom-Of-The-Class probably wouldn’t even see this as having received an unfair advantage, as he or she might sincerely believe that medical schools only admit white students because white people are just naturally smarter than people of other races.
The point of this conception of “privilege” is to demonize a group of people with an undisprovable accusation. It’s so someone can drive by a homeless white man eating out of a garbage can and dismiss his plight with a sneer because he’s “privileged”. And it’s so the entire issue of class can be dismissed.
That’s not really “white privilege”. All the young white males I know were while shopping watched and on occasion followed around when they were young, white or not.
Yes, that’s what happens with racial/gender/class profiling of all kinds. It makes your security/policing worse not better, even ignoring the moral issues. Especially given how in the real world the police and such have limited manpower; so anyone who spends their time watching or harassing someone due to being the “wrong” race (or whatever) is someone who isn’t looking for characteristics actually correlated with the crime in question. It’s literally less effective than picking people at random.
The topic of this thread is “white culture,” not “Is race real?”, "Is there such a thing as “privilege?” or any of the other hijacks that have been inserted into this thread.
If anyone needs to hash out those discussions, open new threads to do it.
Is there a corollary to Godwin’s Law for smarty-pants message boards where, "“As a discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the Romans approaches 1?”
Wait, I was born in Minnesota, and I’m pretty sure the only members of, shall we say, exotic minorities were James Hong and Prince’s dad. Does this anti-racism training teach people that Swedes and Norwegians can live together in peace?
[aside] Last Sunday our pastor told a joke, but realized that the only jokes he knew were ethnic. So he adapted one that wouldn’t offend anyone alive, “There were two Hittites, Ole and Lena…” [/aside]
I am ethnically Suburban. Drop me anywhere and in fifteen minutes I can find a McDonald’s. (I live near McD’s HQ–here I can find one in five minutes.) Lots of people, of all colors, are also Suburban, and I see many of the people I work with aspiring to be Suburban. Beats the shit out of some of the parts of Chicago where they were born.
It’s not enough to just stop discriminating to conclude that the playing field is now even. Because the players are in their present positions not based on what new policies are enacted today, but the old ones that were discarded.
Let’s say you have two candidates who are up for promotion. One candidate–a guy–was hired during the bad old days of discrimination–when you could walk right through the front door and be hired as long as you had a penis. You know there’s no chance in hell he’d have gotten the job with his credentials had he applied now. The other candidate is a woman and she was hired after the discriminatory practices were stopped and the hiring process became more selective. The male candidate has been working for the company for 10 years and over that time has demonstrated strong competency. The woman has been been there seven years and has demonstrated the same competency.
There’s a conundrum here. Promote the male candidate and you perpetuate his unfair advantage. But promote the woman candidate and then have to justify why you would give her an “unfair” advantage over a guy with more seniority.
You can say that the woman has no right to complain if the guy is promoted over her. Her turn to rise will come in due time. But as long as the people who had the unfair advantage are running the system, and their children inherit their reigns after them, you can’t talk about the playing field being even. You can say it’s “more even”. But you can’t have “even” without significant, deliberate repositioning of the players. This means SOMEONE is going to be unhappy.
Do what most companies do and hire from outside, whether or not the new person is actually qualified. Everybody’s equally pissed but nobody sues and the new person might turn out to not be an idiot. Duh!
Has anybody here ever heard of Tim Wise? This is just a short clip from a longer lecture. I think he gives quite a provocative lecture on white culture and privilege, but I wonder how one-sided or even factually correct he is.
What he points out is that in earlier times, there was no such thing as a “white” person. There was simply upper-class and lower-class. Then, around the time of slavery, the peasants outnumbered the rich so much, that they needed to divide the people by an arbitrary means. So, they gave white peasants “carrots”, meaning a little land and power, and used them to keep black people in bondage. Since then, these ideas of black and white culture have persisted.
Wow, you guys get all riled up about this White Culture stuff.
I would have just said that if you spend a lot of time listening to Jack Johnson and Dave Mathews, running 5ks, playing soccer or kickball, watching Wes Anderson films, drinking microbrews, watching shows like Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother, and Game of Thrones you might be a white person.
The topic is the existence or non-existence of a of “white culture.” I have no problem with all the extraneous stuff being discussed–in their own threads. The mere presence of the word “privilege” is not a valid excuse to hijack the thread into one more tedious complaint that whites do or do not have it.
We have an anti-racism seminar, we also have someone that I assume is running the seminar saying white culture is power and privilege, but when one follows up on that it’s a hijack? Okay you got me there.
The seminar and the purported description set up and provide background for the discussion. Arguing the details (or existence) of those things is not a part of the discussion regarding the actual question asked.
