Or they mean, “as a white person you have no experience with the sort of institutional racism we are discussing here and your anecdotes may not apply”
You win, Babale. But thank you for not telling me my position was privileged.
It will always feel like a club, because it’s a tough pill to swallow. Every iteration will be "saying it that makes people uncomfortable " because the content is uncomfortable. I don’t think a magic phrase exists that will so gentle the message that white people have and continue to benefit from structural racism that white people won’t mind hearing it.
[quote=“Manda_JO, post:123, topic:913927, full:true”]
It will always feel like a club, because it’s a tough pill to swallow. Every iteration will be "saying it that makes people uncomfortable " because the content is uncomfortable. I don’t think a magic phrase exists that will so gentle the message that white people have and continue to benefit from structural racism that white people won’t mind hearing it.[/quote]
You know, I’m someone who agrees with privilege as a theory and think it’s a useful lens to use. I think I know the difference between using it as a club and using it properly and I don’t need to have it wokeplained to me.
I think there may be a parallel there.
THIS I agree with.
For example, the person above said applicants with black sounding names were turned down for job. Well, what did they do about it? Did they confront the companies? Did they turn in a EEO complaint? Their happen to be laws dealing with this and other issues.
No, they just published an article in some journal in order to make a point I guess. And, and get paid well too.
This is what I was replying to.
Again, if this happens, what are they doing about it? Are they filing EEO complaints? Have they confronted the company?
Data in itself might be fine. But how is that data used?
Getting back to the original OP, what I’ve seen of Jane Elliott is in her workshops she likes to slam people in order to wake them up I guess. That’s why in the original “Eye of the Beholder” she did the thing with putting collars around blue eyed people and treating them bad. HERE is a link where she did it on Oprah.
BTW, if you have a chance you should Google her and watch her videos.
Now lets say she changed that around and asked people “do you say black people being discriminated against and if so who would like to raise their hands and share what they are doing about it”. I’m guessing every hand would be raised. She would probably hear stories about people working as mentors, giving time and money to different causes, etc…
Isnt that what we want? Everyone doing their own little part?
“Uncomfortable” isn’t really a strong enough word for a Voight-Campff like exchange. “You flipped over that tortoise. Why did you do that?” “I didn’t flip over a tortoise” “TELL ME WHY YOU FLIPPED OVER THAT TORTOISE!”
Many here have already agreed that many examples of structural racism don’t provide a benefit to white people, but now you’re saying that they do, like a Motte and bailey argument.
“It shouldn’t be called a privilege because it is not advantageous to be less hurt from the existence of racism.”
“Privilege is just a term of art to describe being less hurt by it.”
“Well, it still sounds bad, but at least we all realize that we’d all be better off with less police brutality and resources spent on maintaining this.”
“People will never accept hearing the hard truth that they benefit from structural racism.”
“Ohhhh…kay then.”
It SHOULDN’T be but that doesn’t mean it’s NOT. It’s wrong that what should be a basic right is a privilege only some of us get. Don’t like it? Great, work to fix it. Don’t just complain that the term is unpleasant.
I agree that use of the term to glibly dismiss dialogue has poisoned it from being used in this way, but the freedom to be oblivious is a real phenomenon that needs a name, unlike institutional racism, which already has a name so doesn’t need another one.
These were studies with fake resumes. There’s no one to complain to. And no one gets paid for publishing studies.
And in real life, you don’t have a smoking gun. You send out 200 resumes and get 5 responses. Your friends with white names seem to get a lot more responses. If you suggest maybe it’s because you are “Tamika”, not “Tiffany”, you get attacked. Maybe you aren’t as qualified as you think. Wow, you are angry and entitled to think you deserve interviews. Maybe Tiffany is just the better candidate. Why are you always making excuses for your own inadequacies?
Hell hath no fury as the outrage of a white person who feels like they have been vicariously accused of racism through the proxy of some other white person they’ve never met.
I agree with this.
My mother is seriously sick right now. When my sister made the executive decision to take her to the hospital, she expected my mother to resist, but she didn’t. However, she did want something in exchange. My mother requested two hours to get “presentable” first. It ended up taking her three hours to get in the “presentable” state given her poor condition. But my sister went along with it and assisted her with getting in and out of the tub and dressing. And hair and make-up.
Now it is very likely that most 72-year-old women would have wanted the same thing. But when my sister told me about all this, I didn’t feel the exasperation that I’d normally feel over my mother’s “toxic femininity”. Because I totally get why she wanted to put on her Sunday best and wear her nicest wig and get her face as dolled-up as possible before going to the ER. Just about any black person would understand why she demanded this.
An average white person might not get this. They may think that my mother was foolish to waste precious hours sitting in the tub when she could have been en route to an emergency situation.
But my mother didn’t want to roll up into the ER looking like someone the hospital staff would automatically assume was an indigent nobody. She wanted to be seen as a person with dignity. A person with a story, with people who love and care about her. A person with means. It is possible that she could have shown up in sour-smelling pajamas and crazy-looking hair and still have been treated decently. But it is far more likely than she would have been perceived as an attention-seeking indigent nobody just trying to find any excuse to be in an air-conditioned ER room. White people are more likely not have this concern than a black person would. Not because white people are inherently more stoic and less self-conscious. But because they are privileged enough to be able to look like a sloppy hotmess and still be seen as a regular, everyday person.
So is there an institutional racism problem behind my mother’s behavior? Yes, of course. We need to fix the kind of implicit biases in medicine that lead to differences in treatment and outcomes. But a discussion of “privilege” goes a little deeper than just pointing at problems that need fixing. It is also about helping those with a “privileged” vantage point to understand why the folks who aren’t privileged behave the way they do, so that they may have more compassion and sympathy for them. Like, if I didn’t have compassion for my mother’s concerns, it would have been easy for me to be frustrated and angry at her. A lot of times, “check your privilege” is just a response to lack of compassion. If a person doesn’t want to hear it, they can just avoid downplaying other people’s feelings and stories.
No, if they send out the same 2 resumes to say Allied Steel Corporation and only the white sounding name gets a callback they certainly can confront the company or pass this onto the authorities. I’m no lawyer but this clearly seems to be grounds for an EEO suit.
And many corporations do want to go out of their way to hire persons of color. Why do you think companies send recruiters to HBC’s?
And heck yes they get paid. They get paid if they write a book and they get paid to go around giving speeches.
No company got the exact same resume twice. And even if they did, it’s for fake people. No one exists to make a complaint.
Nobody did that.
Ok, I’m confused. I thought they sent the same resume to the same company just with 2 different names attached and then looked at responses. So they picked out say 100 random companies for resume #1 and another 100 random companies for resume #2?
Well your right then, this probably wouldnt hold up in an EEO suit. I thought they had sent the same 2 resumes to the same company.
I would be curious if over the years they tried the same tests with the same companies?
The people doing the study weren’t actually applying for any jobs, so it is not like they could confront companies. And my impression is that they sent these resumes to lots of companies.
In addition, it is not like there was explicit discrimination. No one insulted a person of color, no one explicitly rejected a resume for sounding black.
What the study measured was implicit bias. Which has been measured in other ways. The point was that this study and others indicates that this bias exists. Which you seem to be denying.
What to do about it? A company that wants to solve the problem shouldn’t punish employees for unconscious bias, but should take steps to ensure that those with similar backgrounds get treated similarly, and should measure how well they are doing. Which will no doubt cause some people to say they are discriminating against white people. What they should do is level the playing field.
Why do you think companies do this? Possibly because the law requires them to track hires, and sometimes have to explain when the numbers look bad? (And are bad.)
As for getting paid, very few write books, which in these fields are not that good for getting tenure, and even fewer are paid to give speeches. You don’t get paid to speak at a conference, you have to pay to register. And reporters don’t pay for interviews either.
I doubt they’d want to take the risk of an HR person or hiring manager noting the exact same resume under two names. Would blow their cover.