Then why do Asians have 20% (pdf) higher median income than Whites?
But your analogy breaks down a bit when you ask white people to be “humble” because white privilege is something other people create, rather than a simple fact of physics like height. I didn’t ask for it.
Better off isn’t quite the right term. White privilege means unfair advantages.
But yes, it’s an observation that whites, in general, have it better.
So what?
There are hundreds of factors about any given person that puts them in a statistical advantage or disadvantage category. That’s life.
It doesn’t automatically equal racist policies though. That’s the hidden implication - that if you have “privilege” it means somebody somewhere is using blatant racism to create it.
It’s a spurious claim. White privilege may be due to racism today, but most of it is probably due to the simple fact that white ancestors benefited from racism in the past, and they passed their wealth advantages to their children.
It’s the possible implications behind it that I object to. That’s why I keep asking why it matters to those who bring it up - what would they do about it?
Yes. The opposite of racism, in other words.
Because in large part, Asian immigrants are the best and brightest in their own countries and they’re moving here to make lots of money after being educated at (mostly) public expense elsewhere.
For example, 9% of US physicians are of Indian origin, and 8% of those are first-generation immigrants. Physicians born in South Asia and China make up 22% of the AMA’s membership, though Indian- and Chinese-born people are comfortably under 2% of the general population.
All those Indian kids winning spelling bees aren’t doing it because Indians are naturally great spellers. It’s because of self-selection: their parents tend to be ambitious people with postgraduate educations (and thus the native intellect and attention spans to complete postgraduate study.)
If you took the most educated 20% of African-Americans and set them all down in, say, Scotland, in 20 years they’d be a model for educational and economic achievement.
So there’s a racial disparity that exists, but isn’t due to racial discrimination.
Interesting.
“Self selection”, “native intellect”, is that code for genetically superior?
If it is, then we’re opening this discussion up to genetics as a possible root cause, I don’t particularly want to go there.
If it isn’t, then what’s being selected for is an ethos, prioritizing academics, hard work and ambition. Anyone can live their lives according to an ethos, and nobody else’s privileges can prevent you from doing so.
No.
No, not that either.
It means he’s saying that the Asians who move here are smart because the smartest Asians move here. That’s all.
Not saying he’s right, just understanding his point.
In the analogy, the humility should be because it isn’t something you earned, this being tall characteristic. Being tall doesn’t make you a better person; it makes you a taller person. And being a taller person, again in this analogy, is an advantageous thing to be.
Right.
But like I said, the analogy breaks down. “White privilege” assumes that I didn’t earn what I have.
Used in that sense, it’s as racist as any other racist generalization.
Aware of white privilege? Sure. Humble? No. Not any more humble than everyone should be about the fact that not everything they have is something they earned for themselves (which is a good kind of humility).
Often, it’s about being treated in a class-appropriate manner. Such as, a middle-class Black person being treated with suspicion concerning shoplifting, on the sterotypical assumption, wrong in that case, that a Black person must be of low class.
The notion is that “class privilege” is reasonable and okay (that is, the stereotypical assumption that those of low class are more of a risk for shoplifting) but “race privilege” is unacceptable. Which makes historic sense.
Why is “class privilege” acceptable?
Why is “class privilege” acceptable?
And if history (I assume you mean statistical probability of a given group committing shoplifting) is your only guide, that would make race privilege acceptable too, wouldn’t it?
Actually, it is a result of discrimination, in that US immigration policy limits immigration by country of origin, and previously (prior to the 1965 reforms) limited it by strict ethnic quotas to preserve the white majority. Thus, the vast majority of Indian immigrants arrived after 1965 and under the 15% allowance for in-demand qualifications, rather than under the general entry system. Otherwise, there would probably be lots of poor, unskilled South Asian and Chinese people here.
You can see how things might be otherwise by looking at the UK. There, there is a much larger South Asian population, and a much greater proportion of un- or low-skilled South Asians. This is reflected to some degree in crime rates; [South] Asians are represented in roughly proportionate terms in the prison population and in arrest figures, whereas in the US we are grossly underrepresented.
ETA: removed gratuitous snark.
No, that wouldn’t explain why Asians are smarter, would it?
Why? Limiting by country of origin doesn’t prevent poor or uneducated people from coming here, just the total number.
The numbers of immigrants, per country, who get in under the general entry system are… if not insignificant, than less significant than other means. Remember, you’re talking about a million legal permanent residents admitted per year, allocated between every country in the world.
The majority of permanent residencies are granted based on sponsoring relatives. Because there aren’t many Indians here to start with, there aren’t many people applying for residence on the basis of relationships to US citizens.
All that means that most Indians who get here will do so via the 15% of residency applications that are reserved for high-demand qualifications.
I’m not claiming that it is, in some sort of moral sense.
Rather, it is in this culture, because in general our culture accepts wealth and class distinctions as normal and inevitable, but rejects racial distinctions as either. The reason is, as stated, because of our history. In our culture, class and wealth distinctions are generally considered as “earned” and thus not in the same category as racial distinctions, as in theory at least someone could gain wealth through their own efforts while one cannot change one’s race.
I know that, in point of fact, social mobility is rather difficult and so this widely accepted generality is generally untrue, but there it is. It is more socially acceptable to discriminate against the visibly poor than against visible minorities.
So then, using your logic, you think it’s wrong to insist that Muslims were privileged over Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire and that Christians were privileged over Jews in Tsarist Russian and 19th Century Poland?
I think most people would disagree.
But there you go! The whole purpose of invoking “white privilege” is to say they are NOT earned!
And I reject the idea that wealth is always earned anyway. Everyone has privileges - white or otherwise - that contribute to wealth. The idea that we’re all a product of nothing but how hard we work is silly.
And further, wealth or class shouldn’t mean more than it does. Poor people shouldn’t be considered more likely to steal stuff, and therefore not allowed into certain stores, etc., just because they’re poor.
Ahem.
In my opinion, class or wealth difference isn’t often “earned” either, so I agree with you there.
My point isn’t that things should be this way, I’m merely saying that they are this way. No-one in our culture is likely to make a video campaign decrying how unfair it is that they are treated like middle-class types while poor people are subject to all sorts of suspicion. Even though class discrimination is “unfair”, it is not “unfair” in a manner that has historical and cultural traction.