White male privilege, as I understand the term, isn’t so much about policies of explicit discrimination in the workplace or elsewhere, since such practices have been largely prohibited. (Granted, I’m not asserting that it doesn’t still happen on an informal level.)
At this point, I think WMP is more about what I might call the “savings account of experience and education”. As a white male from way back, I enjoyed certain definite advantages growing up that would not have been available to a disadvantaged person. My upbringing in an upper middle class environment by well-read university graduate parents, was reflected in the schools I attended and the universities I went to later. My public high school was pretty much in a position to feed its honors graduates into the UC system.
It would be foolish for me to deny that my background has opened doors for me. In my case, because of my parents’ background, I don’t think gender would have mattered, but I know anecdotally it was once quite common for daughters to be encouraged to enter “typically female” professions, which either required no college degree or were poorly renumerated. It’s as if there’s a whole deck of fifty-two cards out there, and the magician says to pick one, any card, but 49 of them are stuck to the conjuror’s hand.
Long story short, the environment you grow up in does have an impact on the opportunities that come your way later.
I don’t know if it’s just poor and working class whites who are the backbone of Trump supporters and I wonder if there isn’t a relationship between a backlash against the liberal views on minorities and the support for Trump.
My BIL is an engineer, so hardly working class or poor, and he feels that white males are the now the class facing the most discrimination in America. Seriously. It got to the point that our world view points were so different that a conversation was impossible.
I’ve never had anything handed to me because I’m white.
The rich and upper classes are primarily white. But they are a small segment of the population. The vast majority of the working class are busting our ass at jobs we dislike and living paycheck to paycheck. It doesn’t matter what race you are.
The tax burdon can be overwhelming for working class people. Starting with income tax and then property & sales tax.
There’s no race involved with working class people. Watching our health insurance premiums skyrocket and taxes go up. We’re all in the same sinking boat.
After all this discussion, the fact that you can still say something like this shows that you’re not actually listening when people try to tell you what white privilege is.
It’s not a privilege where you’re given anything, it’s a privilege where nothing additional is taken away.
Every struggle and frustration you experience is likewise experienced by people who are neither white nor male… and they have additional burdens on top of that.
Yes, you’re carrying a 100 pounds of crap on your back you can’t set down. And the person next to you who isn’t white is carrying 150 pounds of crap on his back.
What in the world? A poor white person using non-standard English is absolutely not described as “charming” nor “colorful”. He is called hillbilly, redneck, or white trash.
I agree with everything except this. Historically, whites using non-standard English dialects or accents have been disparaged by the mainstream culture, including most popular media outlets. However, that may be in the process of flipping, not least because of the stranglehold on the national legislature by Southern and rural states, and a billionaire President who hopes to pass himself off as a prole by sounding stupid.
Seems to be in contradiction to your earlier statement that all relationships are context-dependent. You can’t possibly know that a teacher, mentor, boss, hiring manager (not even to say ALL of them) would have treated you the same in your own past had you been female or Asian. How would those relationships have all had the same context if your skin or gender were different?
None of this is in any way a reflection of anything but your, um, interesting life.
You know the answer to this. You also know that you will not get a good-faith answer.
So if I’m reading you right, you attribute this under-representation to inherent deficits/inabilities in the under-represented group? (my bold)
(My bold) But aren’t you guilty of doing exactly this? According to you, the over-representation of white men being discussed is basically because white men are fundamentally more able to succeed than other groups of people.
Because they are fundamentally inferior human beings (according to those who deny WMP).
The stupi, I mean the misunderstanding is strong in this one.
I would actually respect someone denying WMP more if they were just fucking honest about what is obvious to all of us. The reason(s) you give supporting your beliefs basically boil down to 2 facets: 1) WMP is contradicted by the fact that poor, unsuccessful white men exist. And 2) what is described as “WMP” is actually just a product of inherent superiority from white men. I just wish one-single-person had the fucking balls to own their beliefs. Glibness and obfuscation is about as much as we can hope for.
I know many poor, white men and I think they are pitiful.
What if you are a white male that really is superior to everyone else? What do you say then?
Just kidding. I am not sure exactly what you mean. I am not shy about my sometimes controversial beliefs here or elsewhere but I don’t quite understand what you are asking. I don’t believe all people are perfectly equal but I don’t believe that being a white male is an inherent advantage in most situations. It can be a useful trait but so can lost of other characteristics. I don’t even think it is the most advantaged group in general anymore.
The whole concept doesn’t make sense. People keep saying that it isn’t about advantages for yourself - it is about lack of disadvantages. That is about one of the dumbest ways to describe a concept that I have ever heard. That isn’t a “privilege”. It means that black people are sometimes DISADVANTAGED when dealing with the police in certain areas and Muslims may get extra scrutiny at airports. I can easily believe that is true but that has nothing to do with white males. It is a separate problem that needs a different term. The Left is incredibly talented at picking the least descriptive and most inflammatory terms for whatever bullshit terms they decide to come up with in any given thought cycle.
Call it what you want – if you recognize that white people lack a whole lot of the disadvantages of many other groups in various circumstances, then you recognize the existence of white privilege, even if you don’t like the name.
But you didn’t answer my question. Why are so many of the most powerful, prestigious, influential, etc. groups and occupations utterly dominated by white men?
There are lots of reasons. There are very real sex differences in priorities. More men than women want to be providers for their family and more men than women are willing to sacrifice their personal life to achieve that. The vast majority of innovators like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and the founders of Google are men but there is nothing stopping a woman from doing the same thing. They just usually choose not to.
Still that type of achievement doesn’t apply to the vast majority of people - men or women. It is like asking why the entire starting line of the New England Patriots are men. They are just a few extreme outliers and that doesn’t apply to anyone else except them. Men have a broader distribution of almost all traits on both the very high and low end.
A lot of it is just age as well. People generally can’t become a corporate CP before 40 and Chief Officers are generally in their 50’s at least. I consult for mega-corps that everyone has heard of. There are women in power positions all over the place and at every level. They have the same, and sometimes better, opportunities than the men. My current big-boss has an uber-boss that is a woman. My ex-wife is a corporate VP. Hillary Clinton only needed a better campaign strategy to become the President of the most powerful nation on Earth. She was a weak candidate and still almost won.
Contrary to popular believe, there is no conversion chart to reduce women’s pay for equal positions. That 77 cents on the dollar bullshit is beyond Snopes worthy and going into the realm of a conspiracy theory. It should be disputed by anyone on this board any time anyone repeats it because it is flat-out false. Marissa Mayer got paid more in a single year than I will ever make in my life to help run Yahoo! more into the ground. She got cut but so would any male CEO that was incompetent.
This only addresses gender, and even some of the factors you mention for women may be related to privilege. Why are the ranks of the most prestigious dominated by people who are white, as well as male?
It takes time for results to show up and corporate executives are generally late middle-aged. You aren’t going to see the full effects of equality movements for several decades after they have already been won.
Still, I don’t think talking about corporate executives is something to focus on. Have you ever worked with them? Yes, they make a lot of money in general but the workload is brutal, long and job security is tenuous at best. Those are overrated positions in my opinion. I don’t know why any reasonable person would want one no matter how much it pays.
Women now make up the majority of medical school and law school grads. Those are also prestigious jobs that can be brutal but have a more human based focus. I don’t really see the difference. I can tell you that there is no block in major companies for women and minorities to go to the highest levels and it is often explicitly encouraged. They usually just don’t want to because they have sense. That type of lifestyle usually means that you can’t have kids or a family life but you can have cash that you don’t have time to spend and all the work you could ever imagine even on vacation because there is no such thing anymore. I certainly don’t consider that a “privilege” of any sort. It is more like selling yourself into slavery just because you love work and punishment. White men seem to excel at that negative trait. Other groups seem to know better.