Declarations that white people are responsible for the plight of nonwhite people aren’t talking about me personally, or you.
Declarations that I personally need to do anything at all to personally make reparations for anything are silly declarations by silly people and can be dismissed.
Admittedly, I have never seen such a declaration in waking memory. (I don’t go looking for them, either.) If I did see one, it would probably just be some dude on the internet, and like all such people can and will be ignored.
So there is literally no cause for anger or a feeling of marginalization. I’m a white guy! That’s like the opposite of marginalized. Er, not that I try to take advantage of that.
AFAICT it’s pretty generally understood that there are lots of different types of privilege, and the net effect of their combination isn’t easily quantifiable. Yes, the poor white man of your hypothetical does have white and male privilege compared to a rich black woman, but she has wealth privilege (and the social privilege associated with a secure and loving family environment, whatever that’s called) compared to him.
None of those kinds of privilege somehow makes the other kinds not real, or not important.
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Besides, being privileged doesn’t make you a worse person.
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Of course not, which is fortunate especially since pretty much everybody has some kind of unearned privilege compared to some other group(s) of people.
But I think it’s fair to say that refusing to acknowledge the existence of your privilege, or pretending that privilege is totally irrelevant to your good fortune and achievements in life, or automatically interpreting somebody else’s recognition of your privilege as some kind of attack on you, is detrimental as your quality as a person.
As you point out, privilege is bad when it comes with entitlement, and expecting everybody else never to acknowledge the existence of one’s privilege is a form of entitlement.
If “everyone has some kind of unearned privilege” why must ONLY white males be called to account for it, and be demanded to acknowledge it and “dismantle it”?
What that says to me is privilege is okay for certain groups to have…Just not mine.
I don’t. You claim to be strongly against denial of history. White privilege and oppression are facts of history. I don’t get why you think it’s wrong or offensive for people to talk about them openly.
It’s the only thing SJWs want to talk about. The end-game is to make whites hate themselves. To go around like docile, beaten dogs, head down, apologetic, stumbling over every other word, worrying each word they say might offend, the men feminized and browbeaten, the women self hating. That is the endgame here. That is what is desired.The total humbling and breaking of white people; revenge. That is why I will never bend, and never have any empathy with their cause.
They certainly aren’t the only ones. For example, straight and cisgender people are often reminded of their straight and cis privilege when dealing with issues that affect gay and transgender people. Calls to white feminist women for “intersectionality” are reminders to white women of their white privilege. Lots of people in lots of different situations get reminded to “check their privilege” of various kinds.
White males tend to encounter the most references to their privilege because white males have historically had, and currently still have, by far the most significant privilege when it comes to acquiring unearned advantages in majority-white societies. (And also, if you’ll forgive my mentioning it, because white males tend to be the ones who are by far the most touchy and resistant to acknowledging the fact of their privilege.)
If you are being sincere, you have a deeply twisted view of the world. I hope you get the help you need. Everything you post has nothing to do with how people actually interact in the world. I can only assume you are very young with little real world experience.
I left this in Great Debates, this morning, on the off chance that the OP would actually provide a logical argument of some sort, supported by actual evidence.
As i read through the thread, I realized that it was much more of an IMHO opinion piece and was prepared to move it to that forum.
Reviewing it now, however, where the overwhelming majority of the participants are white males who have already declared that they do not share the opinions of the OP, and seeing the several posts in which wildly hostile claims have been made by the OP without a single shred of evidence to support those claims, it is clear that the natural home for this thread is The BBQ Pit.
If that’s the “end-game”, it completely doesn’t work. This thread is full of white people, including me, who don’t feel “browbeaten” or “self hating” at all by the simple and healthy fact of society’s acknowledgement and open discussion of white privilege. Why on earth would we? Do you also feel that, for example, German people “go around like docile, beaten dogs” because it is openly acknowledged that Nazism was a bad thing?
Your tone reminds me somewhat of the people who were scandalized (way before your time) by references in popular media to sexually transmitted diseases, and thought it was shameful and demoralizing to talk about such things in public. I’m guessing that in the future your sort of squeamishness and resentment about the open discussion of privilege and inequality in society will be regarded in the same way as an earlier era’s pearl-clutching about open discussion of STDs.
That’s easy! I’M what you’d call a SJW. And I’m a white male. And I don’t want to destroy myself or all that other stuff you said. I’m actually pretty laid back. QED.
Honestly it’s been my impression that many so-called SJWs are white, and while most of them (us) would prefer that we whites stop being racist shitheads actively stinking up the planet with our presence and giving our color a bad name, none of us want to destroy or enslave ourselves. Contrary to popular belief, most people aren’t cartoon characters.
Reddy, I’m like … 99% sure you’re a troll, but on the slim chance that you’re absolutely sincere: You’re a pathetic, delusional weakling and when your life turns out to be nothing but a string of crippling failures (and make no mistake … that is exactly what your life is going to be) it’ll be, not because you were born a white male, but in spite of it.
Also, I don’t believe that bullshit about your “Mom” for one second. Toodles!
Do you have any pride in any aspects of the past? Do you have any pride in your specific ethnicity’s accomplishments? Do you look at the white race and see only evil?
I don’t believe in apology. The past is dead. Everyone deserves an apology from someone else. It’s a waste of time. I have no sympathy for any of this shit.
Do I want to return to slavery or Jim Crow? Obviously not. But it’s not on me to say sorry for it. It happened. It sucked. What can you do? Terrible things happen all over the world everyday. The world is an ugly, sucky, shitty place. Right now as I’m typing this, a woman is being raped. A child is being murdered somewhere. A man is being beaten because he’s gay, or black, or simply because he’s different and strange. It’s horrible, but that’s the world. Living is a war against the lottery of life, and all of us are in it generally alone.
The past only exists as a lesson, and as nice tales to read; once you go back far enough, it might as well be mythology; it doesn’t matter. As politics has evolved, though, I’ve found myself more interested in fiction, because I have no power to change anything, so it’s easier to simply not play than to play and lose.
