And here’s the obligatory white person telling a member of a racial minority to get out of the country. This massive sense of entitlement is one of the results of white privilege.
I was turned down for a government job about a decade ago, I was qualified but the problem not only the fact that I had a penis. But it was white. Yeah I’m privileged alright.:rolleyes:
“I’m such a bummer… I shouldn’t be, I’m a lucky guy. I’m healthy, I’m relatively young… I’m white, which thank God for that shit, boy. That is a HUGE leg up, are you kidding me? I love being white, I really do. Seriously, if you aren’t white you’re missing out, because this shit is really good. Let me be clear, I’m not saying that white people are better, I’m saying that being white is clearly better. Who could even argue? If it was an option, I’d re-up every year: “Oh yeah I’ll take white again absolutely, I’ll stick with white, thank you.” This is how great it is to be white: I could get into a time machine and go to any time and it’ll be fucking awesome when I get there! That is exclusively a white privilege. Black people can’t fuck with time machines! A black guy with a time machine is like “Hey, anything before 1980, no thank you, don’t wanna go!” But I can go to ANY time. The year TWO? I don’t even know what was happening then. But I know when I get there it’ll be “Thank you for coming we have a table for you right here, sir.” I can go to any time! In the past. I don’t want to go to the future and find out what happens to white people. Because we’re gonna pay hard for this shit. You can’t just fall from one to two. They’re gonna hold us down and fuck us in the ass and we totally deserve it. But until then, WEEEEEEEE!”
Louis CK
Thank you. It’s nice to see that someone gets it. Honestly a bit surprised it’s you, as usually you’re the one who doesn’t understand that how you frame the issue often makes people defensive. I voted that this was a message I disagreed because of exactly what you said: whites are not privileged.
And rachellelogram’s post is horrible as she completely missed the point of the person she was responding to. Stop commending her for creating a strawman.
I’m white and I think it’s really pretty damned obvious that whites are privileged. I think this is a great analogy.
No, she is. That’s the whole point. There’s no reason to tell white people that they are privileged unless you are telling them that they need to stop being so. That’s the entire problem with this crap.
I’m all for supporting minorities. I’m all for affirmative action. But I do that to help other people, not to decrease my privilege. My goal is to make everyone equal, not disparage one group to make another group better.
Heck, the idea that affirmative action is giving up privilege is probably the reason there are so many white people that object to it. The focus should be on helping you, not hurting me.
This.
The problem with telling white people they are priveledged is IMO it sounds like several things. First it makes it sound like they have it easy. I don’t know many white people that I would go that far in describing their lives. Second, it makes it sound like it’s THEIR fault for not having it as hard as black people/whoever. Thirdly, it also sounds like its their fault black people/whoever have it harder than them. Fourthly it makes it sound like all the good stuff they have is just given to them (again, I aint seeing it).
And this whole approach just seems to me like a way to piss off any white people who don’t already suffer from the white guilt complex.
Tell me as a minority about all the ways you are treated wrongly and I’ll probably be sympatheic and say this or that IS wrong…blah blah blah.
Stand there and tell me I’ve got it easy just because I am white and my first inclination is to say “bite me”.
What it actually means is that white people have it easier. If you want to assign your own strawman meaning to the phrase that’s your business but it’s not a valid point.
No, it doesn’t imply either of those things. It says that white people, not by virtue of anything they’ve done, have systematic advantages including ones they aren’t aware of unless someone who doesn’t have those advantages explains it to them.
No. It just means that whatever their accomplishments, they would have been more difficult, or their success less assured, had they not had the advantage of being white.
You can impute whatever idiosyncratic meanings you like on the word, but making up meanings for words and then getting defensive and angry about the meanings you made up is absurd.
Sure. A lot of members of any majority group will get angry and defensive and try to shout down anyone who points out the ways in which they have things easier. And they’ll make up all sorts of imaginary strawman arguments and often react with outrage. Look at Lonesome Polecat’s posts for an example. That doesn’t mean that no one should say those things, though.
If its counterproductive to your cause its bad mkay?
Of course I am white so I really don’t care about your cause so have at it.
Do you actually have ideas for how to address the issue in a way that is productive? Or do you just want to complain and say things like “bite me” to people who correctly point out the existence of systematic racism and its effects on people?
[QUOTE=billfish678]
Of course I am white so I really don’t care about your cause so have at it.
[/QUOTE]
Ahh. This clears that up.
All right, I’m going to move this over to Great Debates now. I think it suitably reached that level a bit ago.
I pointed out a productive way VS a IMWO a less productive way. But you missed it apparently. Hint, it read something like this:
“Tell me as a minority about all the ways you are treated wrongly and I’ll probably be sympatheic and say this or that IS wrong…blah blah blah.”
“White people have it good” = bad way.
“Black people/minorities have it bad” = good way.
The first just trys to make whitey feel guilty. The second way appeals to whitey’s sense of justice.
It remains true, even today, that people of the same class but different “races” are not equally privileged; this holds true even at the upper-class level, to some extent – and, to the extent that nonwhite upper-class Americans exist. It also remains true that the further you go up the class ladder, the fewer nonwhites there are. From The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind:
I think a good way to sum up white privilege is: no matter how good or how shitty your life is right now, if your skin were a different color, your life would be worse. Let’s use a car analogy:
You’re a spectator at a racetrack and notice the lead car is *way *ahead of the other cars. The driver is happy, and secure in the knowledge that he’s much more skillful than than the other drivers. He earned his way to first place! But actually, unbeknownst to him, the frame of his car was secretly designed with a rare, strong, super-lightweight metal alloy. The car was designed a couple hundred years ago, and nobody who’s responsible for its lightweight, superior design is still alive today. The alloy lets him accelerate faster than any other car on the track, and it’s the biggest reason why he’s in the lead. He’s a fine driver, sure, but this alloy gave him opportunities that the other cars never had. If he’d crashed into the wall then he’d be out of the race, of course. Nothing about the alloy prevents him from crashing. But the other cars are heavier, and they corner more slowly. It’s much harder for those drivers to do as well as our lead driver. Unless the lead driver makes a huge mistake, he’s not going to lose the race; in fact, that gap will never be closed, it’s only going to get wider.
As it turns out, the racetrack owners only recently found out about this alloy. The driver himself doesn’t even know about it, because he’s only ever driven one car his whole life. That’s how it’s always been. But soon, the owners pull him aside and tell him, “Listen. You’re a fine driver, and we appreciate all the work you’ve done to get so many sponsors and first-place trophies. But it turns out you’ve been racing with an unfair weight advantage for a couple hundred years now. We hope you can agree that it’s not a fair race unless all the cars weigh the same amount. Unfortunately, we can’t give everyone the exact same frame as you, since the people who designed it died centuries ago and they didn’t leave the blueprints. But we don’t want to take away your frame, either. You’re used to driving your car like it is, and it wouldn’t be fair to take that away from you. So instead, we’re going to change some parts around on all the other cars. In the end, all the cars will weigh exactly the same. We’re going to check and make sure that this is a fair race for everybody from now on.”
At this point, they’ve decided that it doesn’t matter how his car got an unfair advantage. They’re not going to take away any of his old trophies or his existing sponsorships. They just want to make it right, because the only thing that matters is moving forward and being fair from now on. So the other drivers get lighter tires, or a more-efficient engine, or a more-streamlined design (whatever mod is most appropriate, given their car’s current design). But **his car never changes. **If he’s still the lead man after the next few dozen races, then his skill was truly superb all along. But more likely, he will slip in the standings (perhaps a little, perhaps a lot depending on his skill). Because it was never pure skill that got him the lead, it was the alloy. He will start to lose some sponsorship money. Maybe he only gets a trophy once a year now. It’s harder to get laid by hot chicks at tailgate parties; now he has to take a few 9s instead of all 10s (or have sex less often, which is unthinkable! :p).
His response at this point defines him as a person:
[ul]
[li]If he’s a good person, he will humbly acknowledge that *of course *the other drivers deserve a fair shot to win. He realizes there is no point in getting angry at the other cars, it’s not their fault his car was lighter. He doesn’t blame himself, because he didn’t know his car was lighter–it was only recently brought to his attention, after all. And there’s no point in getting pissed at the racetrack owners, they just want a fair race for everybody at the track they work so hard to keep profitable. If anybody is to blame, it’s the designers of the car. But they’re all dead, and we can’t ask them why they designed things the way they did back then. Now that he has to actually try to succeed in life, he dedicates himself to doing better. He gets used to living on less money and sleeping with fewer super-hot babes. He doesn’t complain that he’s not always #1 anymore.[/li][li]If he’s a whiny, self-entitled person, he will deny that he ever had an advantage in the first place. He might go on TV and proclaim that the racetrack owners are out to get him. That alloy doesn’t exist, they made it up as an excuse to give the other cars unfair advantages. Their lighter-weight parts and more efficient engines are why they’re beating him now, not their skill.[/li][/ul]Nobody is taking anything away from our driver. He had an unfair advantage for centuries that was camouflaged so well, nobody ever even noticed it was there. And for all that time, the drivers of slower cars have had to exert herculean efforts just to end up in the top 10. A lot of the more downtrodden cars that end up in the middle of the pack had to try harder to *just barely *get by than the lead man *ever *had to try to attain his obscene levels of success.
Now that the playing field is level, some of the slower cars are likely going to pass our driver. But no matter how uncomfortable that makes our driver, we owed it to the slower drivers to remove the barriers that were holding them back. And sure, some of the slower cars will still fail, even after we’ve given them faster parts. Some of those drivers will attempt to cheat the system by making their cars even lighter than our driver’s car. That’s part of the automotive condition. 
Regardless, the failure or poor qualities of some slower drivers can’t be used as an excuse to deny a faster parts to *all *of the slower cars. They didn’t ask to be born heavy and slow any more than our driver asked to be born light and speedy. It just happened that way, and we can’t change it. But now that we can see the lead driver was lighter and speedier than he should have been all along, we have a moral obligation to bring the others up to speed.
Within a few hundred more years, all the cars will be placing based entirely on their efforts. And that’s the way it should be.
TL;DR version: http://i276.photobucket.com/albums/kk34/feministing/concise.jpg
In social psychology it’s called Outgroup Homogeneity Bias.
I can understand why you might feel this way, but most of that seems like stuff that you and others are reading into these kinds of messages rather than something that’s being communicated by the speaker.
To make explicit all sorts of caveats: white people don’t have it easy just because they’re white, AND almost all of us work very hard for what we have just like everyone else, AND no individual white person (even if he’s an Archie Bunker-type bigot) is personally culpable for any hardships faced by minorities in this country, AND America’s racism problem is by no means uniquely bad within the world community, AND the U.S.A. is a wonderful place to live with countless great features (both tangible and intangible). That said, all things being equal, it’s harder to be non-white in America than it is to be white, and that’s a problem that bears addressing. Making people aware that there’s still a lot of casual, informal racism — and nudging them to maybe not put up with said when they run across it in the future, or to be vigilant in avoiding it in themselves – is one way to address it. No one is attacking you, I swear. (Or, it’s rare, anyway: there are plenty of asshats in every walk of life.)
Furthermore, I gather that almost everyone here who’s ticked off by this PSA is strongly opposed to affirmative action. Obviously, you’d prefer to see the problem of racism dealt with from within civil society rather than through government. Well, this is what that looks like.
Heh. I know this looks like Der Trihs is saying that people shouldn’t get bogged down in race distinctions, but what he’s *actually *saying is: “I have zero interest in abstract problems with amorphous or nonexistent villains, so I’m going to recast this issue as follows: Rich people are evil. Eat them.”
(Obviously I’m drawing on previous experience here. I agree that it’s typically poor form to drag things from past encounters into unrelated threads, so on that front I apologize up front.)
Anyway, more constructively: linking racial animosity to affluence in this way seems tenuous. Income inequality is a problem, and racism is a problem, but fixing one does not fix the other. There’s some overlap, of course, and plausibly even some vicious-cycle behavior: racism helps to keep minorities poor, which keeps them socially and geographically separated from whites, which increases alienation and racism, etc. – but arguing that one problem is predominantly caused by the other, or is merely a mask for the other, is way too simplistically pat, and Marxist, and unsupported by evidence. Unless you literally believe in a “divide & conquer” scheme perpetrated by the rich, economic inequality is a red herring in this conversation.
And I’m telling you (the general you, not so much the you you if you know what I mean) if THATS the way a good fraction of white people read that message its a bad message and it needs to be delivered in a different way. Now maybe it’s only me that “white people are priveledged” rubs the wrong way. But I doubt it.
I am sure I could come up with all sorts of technically and logically sound advice for minorities. Certain ways would be listened to intently. Other ways, but still the same advice would result in city wide riots if the local mayor said em.
BTW the rest of your post was good.
What occurs to me – and DO NOT MISUNDERSTAND ME, I’M NOT SAYING DRAWING AN EQUIVALENCE TO RACE – is this is kind of like saying “Attractive people are ‘privileged,’ and that’s unfair,” or “people who can speak or write well are ‘privileged,’ and that’s unfair.” I don’t think anyone would dispute the first part of each statement, but to uphold the second parts might be highly questionable, except in some academic sense.
If you’re doing lousy in your life right now, think about how much worse it’d be for you if you were ugly. Uh . . . yeah?
Again, that’s not drawing an equivalence between being of another race and being ugly. But it is saying that human nature works in certain ways, where people – in any country – are at least slightly more accepting of others who are attractive, who are articulate, and are part of their “in-group.” If you’re in a majority white country, yeah, you have a slight advantage on the last count if you happen to be white. But you’ve also got a slight advantage if you happen to be born good looking or smart. Are you going to go around beating yourself up for being either of those two as well?
White and agree, but I don’t generally feel it’s up to me to push for equality. I’d vote for what I wouldn’t picket to achieve.
I disagree with the US current foreign policy concerning the Middle East but don’t feel the need to apologize to every Arabic person I meet.
That’s a bit of an overgenerous interpretation of what he’s doing, since he’s clearly trying to distract from and derail a discussion of racial disparities. It’s unfortunately common for people to try to stop discussions of racial issues that way.
[QUOTE=billfish678]
And I’m telling you (the general you, not so much the you you if you know what I mean) if THATS the way a good fraction of white people read that message its a bad message and it needs to be delivered in a different way. Now maybe it’s only me that “white people are priveledged” rubs the wrong way. But I doubt it.
I am sure I could come up with all sorts of technically and logically sound advice for minorities. Certain ways would be listened to intently. Other ways, but still the same advice would result in city wide riots if the local mayor said em.
BTW the rest of your post was good.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not sure I believe that there’s any way of framing this message that wouldn’t similarly result in lots and lots of white people growing defensive and outraged and self-righteously complaining about how badly they are being treated.
[QUOTE=Sitnam]
I disagree with the US current foreign policy concerning the Middle East but don’t feel the need to apologize to every Arabic person I meet.
[/QUOTE]
Who, specifically, asked you to apologize to every single person you meet of any particular group? What was the context? Because I have to say I find it somewhat hard to believe.