You drew an example of how a black woman thinks, and he said that you didn’t grow up as a black woman, so therefore your “privilege” is different than hers.
It is exactly how the phrase is used in common dialogue. If you grew up white, you had some ill-defined “privilege” that precludes you from understanding the black experience. He turned it on its head and showed its major failing as a useful locution; it feigns objective meaning but is only ever applied to white people.
That’s not what the word means. Nobody here except you and Shodan seem to misunderstand it in this way. People have given definitions for the word in this thread that contradict what you seem to think it means. I won’t speculate on the underlying reasons for your misapprehension, but I suggest you correct it.
Speaking as a Canadian, our immigration laws are such that most immigrants who come here are wealthy and highly skilled, and they tend to hold their children to a much higher standard than your average cornfed white Canadian.
For example, private schools are relatively rare in the white parts of Canada. Where they aren’t rare is in areas that have high east/south Asian populations. Language is likely a motivating factor, but the truth is these schools pump out far more university-bound students than your average white high school.
So to say that white privilege is endemic in this environment rings a bit hollow.
I once responded to a Facebook thing about privilege where the responder had said “so, was Stephen Hawking privileged?”
The answer was obvious to me - that Stephen Hawking, had he been working-class rather than middle-class, or not-white, would have had extra difficulties to overcome.
Not all privileges encounter the same problems, and sometimes they interact.
That’s not a very good example if you want to rebut the notion of white privilege. White privilege does not confer an insurmountable absolute advantage nor does it claim that whites have it easy. White privilege is about the idea that there is an advantage to being white in society (entirely apart from the effects of any intentional discrimination or racism) that white people enjoy and that is invisible to white folks unless they know to look for it.
I am only talking about America so I don’t really know if it exists in Canada the same way it exists here.
It likely exists for indigenous folk here to a large degree. I am certainly not denying privilege exists, I just think it’s more of a class thing, and less about the colour (white) of one’s skin.
Because of our immigration policies, the immigrants we tend to have here are of a higher class.
The people who use it for other reasons than to criticize it are basically always using it to mean what Damuri Ajashi said. This has been explained over and over in this thread. I have dark, suspicious thoughts about why the explanation hasn’t taken yet.
How about you give us examples, preferably ones that show your usage is more prominent than the one we are talking about? Uses by scholars or other thought leaders are probably better examples than blogs by rndom high school students.
It would be, if (as I said in the next sentence) it hadn’t been explained multiple times in this thread. No one is engaging with the explanations and arguments. All you guys are doing is insisting that you will interpret it (or anyway, go on as though interpreting it) the way you wish. I can’t imagine why you’d want to do this. Actually I can.
It IS how a lot of people uncomfortable with the idea of their own privilege misinterpret the word, but it’s not how people intend for it to be understood. If there’s a group of people who are consistently misinterpreting a word, even after they’ve been told what it means, that deliberate sabotage of communication is on them.
It’s not a matter of explaining. You can explain what you think it should mean over and over, and that’s fine. But that doesn’t help the fact that others out there use it a different way, and our beef is with them, not you.
No, you’re the one doing that. We’re the ones dealing with the reality that different people interpret words different ways, and yours isn’t the only one - even if yours is the better one. We’re not really on different sides of this issue. We both need to got tell the rest of the world to stop using the term that way.