I have experience with reviewing proposals for contractors. It is true they get more credit if they are women or minority-owned. So what a lot of contractors do is make their wives the owner/president of the company. Then they can check off two boxes–small business and women-owned.
It is also true that AA gives preferences to women and minorities. But the make-up of my office is overwhelmingly white male, excluding the administrative staff. Almost every manager is a white guy. The leadership team? White guys. And it’s not just my agency. Every time I go to a professional meeting, it’s a sea of white guys.
So if you’ve got evidence of white guys getting shafted by AA hiring practices, I’d love to see it.
I don’t think you have to prove something in order to have had a reason to say it, obviously. But you’ve been talking about the harm to men that comes from being portrayed this way in popular media, and you said that these portrayals show that women control purchasing. I’m just asking why you said that last part. It seems to me that it’s a hard inference to articulate without some pretty harsh assumptions coming out, but that’s to me; I don’t know your reasons. But it seems unlikely that there’s going to be much of a give and take on the larger issue if what you think is going on in the media is, for example, a phenomenon essentially driven by women’s desire to see men humiliated. I would expect to find that that assumption would be a controversial one.
But we DO live in a world that can be discriminatory. As a white male, I don’t get the poopy end of the stick, (for the most part), so doesn’t that mean there should be laws to protect those who do? Just asking.
I don’t understand your question. Of course there should be laws against discrimination - and my comment logically supports that idea. Whiteness and maleness doesn’t change that either.
I didn’t mean to say that we don’t need laws against discrimination - only that we shouldn’t discriminate in any way, including racial preferences or applying “white male privilege” or whatever to individuals and judging them by it.
I guess what I’m wondering is that if everyone thought they were being discriminated against for whatever reason, wouldn’t we be swamped with cases? Perhaps more than can be handled?
I agree with you… I just wonder if it would be doable.
But what’s stopping that from happening now? We already have laws that forbid racial or some other forms of discrimination in many ways. Anyone can claim to be discriminated against at any time. It’s not a big problem. The system handles it.
We should also refuse to discriminate in legal ways. But that’s not something the legal system is asked to handle, just us.
That’s cute, but it’s not a race, and males and females aren’t a team, and they don’t all come in first or second place. In fact, if there are no male-only gyms, but female-only gyms, that would mean they actually aren’t in “first place,” right? Bad analogy.
You end privilege by ending privilege, not by creating other privileges.
