Yeah, I guess I thought that among intelligent people, the historical and current fact of white privilege would just be a given. I am not surprised, but disappointed, to see that I’m wrong.
To the ignorant masses who feel that white privilege doesn’t exist: no amount of hard data (which readily exists) will convince an already shut mind to examine other possibilities. I will say that for those of you who are in close relationships with people of color, this is an every day reality for your friends/coworkers. It is as intuitive as the underlying assumptions inherent in a white woman clutching her purse tightly when a young black man passes by and as insidious as not getting the job because, at best, the white person who interviewed you felt more comfortable with the white candidate. It is reflected in the sheer mass if young black men slapped with th death kiss felon label and given lengthy prison sentences for what a more advantaged white person, with a lawyer, would plead down to a misdemeanor. It is inherent even in where cops go looking for crimes. They’ll be all over the inner city street corners looking for rock while Clancy Smith Jr in suburbia throws yet another party for his snorting and shooting in the bathroom white friends. It is plainly evident for those who care to look.
To those who at least acknowledge privilege while fearful that they may have to give it up: yeah, that’s what race equity is all about. You didn’t earn it, you acknowledge it’s existence, and if you really care about humanity, you do what you can, when you can, to level the playing field. It starts with not denying that its happening in the first place.
On this very board, someone posted a thread about a Cheerios commercial highlighting a multiracial family. The comments on the you tube channel were so bad that General Mills had to disable them. Here, I saw much of the same bigotry. Just wrapped up in bigger, prettier words.
Thing is, I know that hostility and anger does not change minds. I just get so tired of the denial and the ignorance. I am an upper middle class middle aged white woman. I have a good job, my Indian husband has a great job, and we never have to worry about how we are going to pay the bills. I know that I do not fully understand what my loved ones and friends experience but the day that I adopted my Indian son, and in the years since as love grew and we came to see each other as mother and son, with all of the helpless angst that comes from loving your child far more than you could ever love yourself, it became a personal struggle to me. I pray for the day that my son will know his success (and failure) is tied to nothing more than his effort and ability.
That was my original intent. I didn’t think it would spark a debate about whether white privilege even exists in the first place.
I had assumed we may be debating the contextual definition of culture, actually. I had never thought to wonder if I even have a culture, although I am probably making American values interchangeable with culture.
I would have agreed that privilege and power were what shaped our culture; not that we (white Americans) don’t have one. In fact I wonder if another tenet of white culture is the steadfast refusal to see ourselves in terms of color; it is how we define other people, not ourselves.
And of course how I define my culture as a Midwestern resident of suburbia will differ quie significantly from someone who lives in a cabin in the Ozarks or in a closet space of an apartment in New York City. But I had always assumed we probably do share similar values, or at least intuitively understand them even when we disagree.
Something I’ve noticed when Stuff White People Like* comes up is that some of my fellow white Americans seem to get pretty offended at the idea that someone is making generalizations about white Americans. “What’s wrong with liking Wes Anderson movies? You don’t have to be white to wear sweaters! Lots of people all over the world drink coffee! Hey, I’m a white person and I don’t read the Sunday New York Times!”
Talking about a culture requires making generalizations though, and I rarely here these kinds of objections to inoffensive generalizations about other cultures such as “The Japanese like sushi” even though sushi is also eaten outside Japan and there must be Japanese people who don’t like sushi.
I think between being the majority/dominant group in the US, our cultural emphasis on individualism, and the fact that many Americans haven’t spent much time abroad, a lot of white Americans aren’t used to and don’t like having generalizations made about us. Generalizations about specific subcultures or regions of the country are more acceptable, even if these subcultures/regions are majority white.
*Which, although tongue-in-cheek, is IMHO a pretty accurate look at middle class white American culture.
I think Stuff White People Like is funny, but it’s clearly parody. If you were to grab 10 random entries, I doubt the average person would “like” more than 5. And some are so generic (Facebook) that it’s impossible to find anyone that doesn’t like them. Or it’s so specific (“Taking A Year Off”) that even 90% of white people are confused. So no, I wouldn’t say it’s very accurate. At all.
It’s not really making a larger point and doesn’t make much sense for a discussion like this, is I guess what I’m saying.
So what specifically would you do to remedy that? Like you said, it’s a condundrum - and not nearly as easy to fix as you might think, no matter what you do. It’s hard to think of any policy that won’t be unfair to someone.
Of course. I don’t understand why you’re saying that though.
Sure, if a store employee bases suspicion ONLY on race - but I doubt many do that. If a white guy walks into a store with a big long coat, glancing around as if he’s being careful not to be seen, has big bulges in his coat when he’s leaving and doesn’t buy anything, he’s probably going to be considered suspicious. Most store security’s primary goal is to stop shoplifting, not persecute blacks.
Yes, of course. That’s white privilege (and female privilege - but that’s another topic).
My point wasn’t that white privilege doesn’t exist, but how you fix it. It doesn’t always require taking anything away from whites. If whites are sometimes thieves too (of course they are) it doesn’t hurt them to get proportionate scrutiny, or to lay off blacks. Most blacks don’t think the injustice of being watched in stores too much is that whites aren’t watched too little - watching whites more wouldn’t do much to help blacks, only watching blacks less.
It’s true that “privilege” is much more complicated than people like to pretend. It often goes both ways - females have some privileges over males, for instance, as your example shows. But that doesn’t make it non-existent.
That sounds pretty accurate to me, for a humorous list of generalizations.
But the reason why my comment about the accuracy of Stuff White People Like was a footnote was because it wasn’t particularly important to my main point, which was that in my experience some white Americans seem to take offense at the very idea that someone is making generalizations about white Americans. But it’s pretty hard to have a conversation about what a culture is like without making some generalizations about that culture.
lance strongarm, when everyone was told to drop the hijack regarding white privilege and continue it in a different thread, you were not given an exemption to take three last shots.
When the only allowed generalizations are bad ones, it’s offensive and obviously done with a hostile agenda. “White people” have no culture (because we’re all demons or golems or something), but do have privilege even if they eat out of a garbage can? Suuure they do.
“Stuff White People Like” is a parody of the tastes of a particular segment of the American public (which may, or may not, in fact be racially “White”): namely, urban middle class/upper middle class types inclined towards liberalism - i.e., exactly the sort who would read such a blog and find it funny (because they identify with it).
Naturally, people are going to take more offense at being parodied than at simple generalizations being offered, however valid the parody may be. In this case, it is only valid for a subset of “White” culture (as pointed out, it is really a parody of middle/upper middle class urban liberal-leaning culture, which may or may not be racially “White”), so there are lots of reasons to object to its accuracy.
I’m not talking about people objecting to its accuracy, though. I’m talking about people objecting to the very idea that someone is making generalizations about white people even if they’re as inoffensive as “White people like drinking coffee.” Someone who says, as in my first example, “What’s wrong with liking Wes Anderson movies?” isn’t arguing that lots of white people actually don’t like Wes Anderson movies (although that would be true), they’re basically admitting to liking Wes Anderson movies but objecting to this being described as a “white people” thing.
If someone is objecting in the form of “what’s wrong with X?” it is pretty clear that they are objecting to a generalization they think is implicitly being offered as a negative generalization.
Which would fit with the blog “stuff white people like”, which (taking it at its face value, which one should not do ) is filled with the pretty explicit subtext ‘aren’t these folks really lame and inauthentic?’
Take for example your “Wes Anderson” example. Look at the link you provided.
Someone objecting to being tagged with this isn’t objecting to the “very idea that someone is making generalizations about white people”, they are objecting to being labelled as a lame, inauthentic, pseudo-intellectual boob.
That’s what I’m saying though, that some of my fellow white people react as though any generalization about white people must be intended as negative/critical/insulting even when it’s something inoffensive and harmless such as drinking coffee or wearing sweaters.
I’m really not interested in debating the accuracy or snarkiness of any particular “Stuff White People Like” entry, I only mentioned it because when the site first became well known I encountered a number of my fellow white people who seemed shocked by the idea that things they liked might be seen as neither “normal”/universal nor individual personal preference but rather a sign that they belonged to a particular culture. But a serious discussion of white American culture requires us to identify certain beliefs and behaviors as characteristic of that culture, and if every attempt to do so turns into a bunch of nitpicking about how lots of people like Facebook or whatever then we’re not going to get anywhere.
I don’t know about the rest of Asia, but when I was living in Japan I attended a big rock festival (featuring both Japanese acts and Western bands like The Who and Aerosmith), and people didn’t clap along during the songs at all. Aside from two guys near me who were obviously big Who fans and kept shouting out the names of the band members during their set, the crowd was by American standards so reserved that it was almost surreal.
This is a pretty minor aspect of white American culture, but I’d say we do accept and even expect a lot more rowdiness at rock concerts than the Japanese do. I couldn’t speak to American concerts with mostly non-white audiences or concerts in countries aside from the US and Japan.
Actually, that reminds me of something I saw the first time I ever attended a Broadway show. Sitting right behind me and my companion was a group of English high school students who were doing some sort of summer program in New York. They were all really dressed up, the girls in long gowns and the boys in dark suits and tuxes. They looked like they were going to the prom or something, and from what I overheard of their conversation it seemed like they were a bit disappointed to find that other people in attendance were far more casually dressed.
I don’t know to what extent this is a white American thing or just an American thing, but I think we do tend to be casual in our dress compared to people from some other cultures. Even within the US it seems to me that black women tend to dress more formally for church, weddings, etc. than do white women.
) is filled with the pretty explicit subtext ‘aren’t these folks really lame and inauthentic?’