No, not at all. The term “white privilege” would only make sense if it refers to some privilege that applies to all white people. If 22% of blacks and 9% of whites are below poverty line, that does not in any way constitute a privilege for the entire class of white people. A human being does not experience life based on statistics concerning their racial group. (Race is defined arbitrarily anyway.) A human being experiences life as an individual. If an individual is poor, belonging to a racial group with below-average poverty rate does not benefit that person in any way.
Asian Americans have average wealth that is quite a bit higher than whites’, but no one ever discusses Asian privilege, nor should they, for the same reason. If a particular individual is Asian and lives in poverty, the average wealth of his race gives him no privilege.
Likewise if a particular white person is subject to police brutality, which certainly happens, no counting up of police brutality episodes by race whould make that person privileged.
But white privilege does refer to all white people. And it doesn’t refer to economic status. “White privilege” doesn’t mean “being rich”, it means “being more likely to getting respectful treatment”, “being less likely to be subject to searches”… it means that when your car is stopped by a US officer a few miles north of Laredo, the officer takes a look at your face and says “oh, you’re American, just go on”. I’m about as American as Felipe VI, but hey, I’m white! Just like Felipe VI.
You know people actually have agency. There is actually cause and effect with regards to the poor and their behavior. Now is all poverty self-inflicted? Absolutely not. But quite a bit is and I don’t think we should blindly piss money away without working on the root causes. And what does segregation have to do with cultural practices and poverty? There are poor people of every color.
Said it before; White Privilege does not exist, it is a term used to further an agenda by those who believe in conspiracy theories about some masochistic malevolent cabal of rich white men spending resources and money to inhibit progress of another group. A political buzz that has no meaning except to scapegoat an entire group of people as the sole reason for another groups unfortunate circumstances, that likely stem from within. Saying group ‘A’ is better off/doesn’t have to go through something, doesn’t help group ‘B’ whatsoever and is only counterproductive in that it lets the second group off the hook for trying to fix endemic problems in their community and attributes all of it to the other group.
People who believe in White Privilege might as well listen to Alex Jones if they are keen on baseless conspiracies.
I would generally agree that while eastern Kentucky and the south side of Chicago are both poor, government and society are very different in the two places. However, there’s no need to jump to the conclusion that this arises because of racism. Rivers of federal money have been flowing to poor areas through a huge number of programs, for a long time. That money is usually awarded based on poverty rates, while race has no effect.
Take this article on school budgets. It found that the one district in the country with the highest budget per student is Camden NJ. The lowest budgets per student were in rural counties in Utah and Idaho, which I’m guessing are heavily white. The difference is mainly because of federal aid. So the claim that the government beats down black, urban areas while offering assistance only to white, rural areas does not hold up.
Now looking at the issue of police brutality, it is indeed true that there’s been much brutality by police against black people in Chicago. Well, who’s in charge of Chicago? The city has been governed by Democrats since forever. And every election day, black voters show up at the polls and re-elect the same politicians who give them all that police brutality. So why is that?
I’d say it’s because the typical black voter on the South Side worries about getting shot by the police very little, and about getting shot by a gang member quite a bit. This is a logical way of thinking, giving that the gangs kill hundreds of times more innocent people than the police do. The black voters on the South Side want a strong, aggressive police presence, and they demonstrate this by voting for more of the same, time after time.
(As someone will surely respond by accusing me of defending police brutality, I’ll point out this isn’t discussion of how I would vote, even if I lived in Chicago. I’d be quite happy if black voters started voting Libertarian and got abusive police forces reined in, but plainly that’s not happening.)
You say it doesn’t refer to economic status. But I was responding to a post by someone else who said that it refers to exactly that. If you folks who believe in “white privilege” want the idea to be taken seriously, perhaps you should start by figuring out what the definition of it actually is.
I agree with these statements. Like I pointed out, most of the problems tend to be endemic and start in the community that is plagued by them, you must fix the source of the problem, and blaming someone else does not do it and detracts from any progress. As a lifelong resident, the [corrupted] democratic machine in Chicago promises so much, has tons of programs and opportunities, yet nothing changes. This can and does lead one to believe the problem is located in the community. When this is observed, more police are sent in, and the news sources only report on isolated incidents of brutality affecting the black populace, scaring people and then not allowing police to do their jobs. Reinforcing this “privilege” myth when in fact it is just a sad truth that it is something that plagues black communities stemming from many factors in the community. This leads to a vicious cycle and when nothing gets resolved, another group is blamed, and nothing gets done.
Personal opinion; raising punishments and awareness for gang members can work, as gangs likely keep these communities down. But increasing punishment for gang offenders will and usually does lead to an outcry of profiling and over punishing minorities. It is a sad but very true fact that most street gangs are made of minorities. If punishments are too harsh, people look at “racism” instead of the coincidence and the benefits of tough gang laws. Something needs to be done and it starts in the originating community, but when people don’t know what to do, its easier to pass blame of sorts on someone else; “White Privilege”.
…“whites are less likely to suffer from poverty, police brutality, and other problems” is a typical outcome of white privilege. It isn’t the definition of white privilege, but in the context of your discussion with k9bfriender it doesn’t appear they were trying to define the concept but was addressing the point that you made.
The wikipedia article on white privilege describes it quite well, and matches both the expected outcome described by k9bfriender, and the explanation given by Nava. I would have thought that the very least one would do is to check out the wikipedia definition before confidently asserting that they have never seen “any evidence that white privilege exists.” If you don’t understand what white privilege is, then are you surprised you haven’t seen any evidence of it?
(On preview: thought I was first to mention social mobility, but got multi-ninjad)
The main reason whites still occupy many of the top positions is because the US is a country where success is strongly linked to how successful your parents were. It’s not at all surprising that the descendents of slaves (who didn’t even have full rights until a couple generations ago), or migrant labor, have not yet reached equality in terms of attainment. You don’t need discrimination for that inequality to still be there although that is still a factor too.
Also, WRT discrimination, I want to push back against the assertion that things are necessarily improving right now. The long-term pattern of course has been towards improvement, but in recent years I would argue things may have taken a turn for the worse. It would be absurd to claim the president is an abberation, and most of the country has become more progressive – the president is reflecting an (unpleasant) shift towards white tribalism.
Well, being white doesn’t give one financial privilege, does it? Everyone has some type of privilege over some group.
Like I said, white privilege doesn’t mean everything is going to go your way. I don’t think anyone here said that being white is the key to happiness, or even that being a minority automatically makes your life suck.
No, but I was just pointing out the elephant in the room.
Several people in this thread are saying “Whites have privilege; look at how many executive positions they still hold” and several others are saying “No they don’t; hiring policies are broadly equal maybe even some positive discrimination for minorities”.
The fact is, in the US it’s mostly a matter of money; going to the right schools, networking with the right people and avoiding most of the hardships that affect poor families.
We can ignore parental income and then imply there’s no disadvantage (or even an advantage) to being an ethnic minority, as some upthread have tried to do. But that’s very misleading IMO.
Right; no-one has said that (apart from the OP’s paraphrasing of someone else’s words)
Claudia Rankine is preaching hate. It’s disgusting and very wrong to say any group is evil. Above and beyond that she’s ignorant to the facts of she beleives white men still make all the money (and are 100% Republican is they make over $100K per year).
I hope some of the outrageous parts of her event are captured on film, as this person should treat the same way a KKK person or nazi is.
As for the audience thing, the company at one point was terrible under Obama. Those who lost their jobs and can’t fine one become depressed. Not only is Rankine a rasist, she’s ignroamt to the facts as well.
I took a look at who she was. She is a black woman from Jamaica. Just imagine is any white author said something like this. My guess is the white privilege she is talking about won’t help him or her, but if your black, you are fine speaking such hate.
White privilege basically just means that, for any given individual scenario, being black or brown would probably make things more difficult than being white. If you’re poor and white in Kentucky, it’d probably be even harder to get out of poverty if you’re poor and black in Kentucky. If you just graduated from Harvard, getting a great job will be harder for black graduates than white graduates. If you’re driving down whatever neighborhood, being black will increase the chance of being pulled over by police and mistreated compared to if you are white. If you’re poor and sick, being black will decrease the chances of getting good health care than being white. Etc.
So for any given scenario, being black in America will probably make things harder than being white if everything else is the same.
It’s just part of the black privilege (which, unlike “white privilege” is real). You can speak absolutely hateful, ignorant things and no one will bat an eye.
The operative word that keeps being used in arguments fomenting this ridiculous theory of a “White Privilege” is “probably” which is tantamount to a guess or estimation. I have a semi-rhetorical question, are black or brown police officers in urban centers more likely to pull over someone with their own skin color as well? Many of the Urban centers have close to the same representation in demographics in police as the populations they reside ()http://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/police-department-officer-demographics-minority-representation.html. Specifically New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles. So it is just the white officers going out of their way to pull over those with darker skin color? Is this part of the elaborate conspiracy?
Maybe some people just cannot accept that things are how they are because that is how they are? That most of the time, there isn’t some angle or nefarious motive.
Of course they’re. They know who commit the disproportionate number of crimes and base their actions accordingly. It’s just common sense.
Look at Bodymore. The majority of policemen are black. The mayor is black. The state attorney is black. White privilege :rolleyes:
Remember that recent case where a black criminal with a rap sheet longer than Wilt Chamberlain’s arms died in police custody?
Then we had the idiots blocking traffic, state attorney charging (mostly black) officers with god knows know (all of the charges got tossed out of court and she’s now herself being sued by the officers for malicious prosecution).
The outcome was mundanely predictable: the silly “Nobody kill nobody” weekend (take a wild guess on how many people were killed during it) and Bodymore setting the record for number of murders.
Well it depends, surely. Even if blacks commit a disproportionate proportion of crimes, they are a minority of the population in most places. Do the rates of stop and search correctly reflect that?
I’m not sure your point. If we’re going to judge whether there’s equality based on only the proportion of police officers, mayors and state attorneys then the answer is easy: no.
And as we’ve seen there are examples of blacks being beaten or even killed without justification by police, with video evidence to prove it.
How does the single anecdote game work? Whoever posts the last one wins?
Isn’t the theory that blacks are rightly targeted for scrutiny because they are ‘probably more likely to be criminals’ also based on an estimation or a guess?
Someone might be able to dredge up a statistic that indicates the guy driving past is slightly more likely to be a criminal based on their skin color, but it might be better to wait until there is probable cause rather than a guess based on some statistical factoid.
Giving people a pass because they’re white is part of what is included in white privilege.