Is it simply a rhetorical statement meant to draw attention to discrimination against black people? I mean, I watched the Fresh Prince as a kid in the 90s, it’s not exactly a ground breaking revelation. Basically a shorthand for “white people have advantages over black people because of discrimination. So we should end discrimination so that everyone is treated equally.”
Does it mean that white people actually have a distinct set of privileges that are above and beyond what would be considered normal in society? We can create a fair society by revoking these privileges? Think like after the French Revolution where they revoked many of the legal protections nobles had for example.
See I was watching a BBC documentary about the term and I really couldn’t understand the distinction between these two definitions. You could watch that film and take either.
It might come up at work so I d rather not get caught out misunderstanding what’s being discussed.
Essentially it means being born white gives you an advantage over any other race usually concerning wealth, jobs, and access to services such as healthcare, groceries, etc. Everything is supposedly easier if you’re born white.
Sinful Hero wrote: Essentially it means being born white gives you an advantage over any other race usually concerning wealth, jobs, and access to services such as healthcare, groceries, etc. Everything is supposedly easier if you’re born white.
It’s definition 2? Really? So not being discriminated against is viewed as preferential treatment as opposed to the absence of a negative?
Totalwar1402 wrote: It’s definition 2? Really? So not being discriminated against is viewed as preferential treatment as opposed to the absence of a negative?
"Not being discriminated against" is preferential treatment. if you're running a foot race, and you run it on your own merits, but someone keeps knocking your opponents over while they try to run, would it be accurate to say that you won the race on your own with no advantages since you got no bonuses like extra running time or what have you?
No one ever gets a check in the mail for being white. No one who is white automatically gets into Harvard. No one ever is guaranteed success for being white.
These are usually oversimplifications used to dismiss that, at least in the US, there is an implicit bias built into most of our culutural structures that favors being white: people with white names are more likely to get interviews, are less likely to be harassed by the police, are more likely to be offered favorable loans, and so on and so forth. I can source all this stuff if you like but the entire package is what "white privilege" constitutes, and the customary use of the phrase is just to remind you that if you're white, be aware that there are some cultural advantages that you enjoy that you don't even think about, that someone else might not enjoy.
There is no clear, exact definition of the term, but that is the gist.
Totalwar1402 wrote: It’s definition 2? Really? So not being discriminated against is viewed as preferential treatment as opposed to the absence of a negative?
"Not being discriminated against" is preferential treatment.
Privilege implies the existence of a baseline. To have privilege you have to have something beyond what the norm is. Now, given how much objection there is to discrimination against black people that obviously isn’t their position. That treatment isn’t normal or acceptable. So lack of discrimination is objectively not a privilege since the goal is to end discrimination.
There’s a difference between saying “you have it so easy” and “I have it so hard”. The issue itself is the same, the level of work I do is disproportionate. The difference is that one is a complaint of inequity and the the other can be taken as an insult.
Totalwar1402 wrote: It’s definition 2? Really? So not being discriminated against is viewed as preferential treatment as opposed to the absence of a negative?
"Not being discriminated against" is preferential treatment.
No one ever gets a check in the mail for being white. No one who is white automatically gets into Harvard. No one ever is guaranteed success for being white.
These are usually oversimplifications used to dismiss that, at least in the US, there is an implicit bias built into most of our culutural structures that favors being white: people with white names are more likely to get interviews, are less likely to be harassed by the police, are more likely to be offered favorable loans, and so on and so forth. I can source all this stuff if you like but the entire package is what "white privilege" constitutes, and the customary use of the phrase is just to remind you that if you're white, be aware that there are some cultural advantages that you enjoy that you don't even think about, that someone else might not enjoy.
This. The concept of "white privilege" is more complex than some silly notion suggesting "white people have it easy." It's a comment about societal factors, not personal advantage per se. It can effect you on a personal level. As a white American you're absurdly less likely to be pulled over by the police than a black American. In a broader sense though the notion refers fundamentally to a blurry class-race advantage held by white Americans in society.
To be fair some people really are just being pretentious dicks when they say the words, but there is an actual conception behind it.
Totalwar1402 wrote: Privilege implies the existence of a baseline. To have privilege you have to have something beyond what the norm is. Now, given how much objection there is to discrimination against black people that obviously isn’t their position. That treatment isn’t normal or acceptable. So lack of discrimination is objectively not a privilege since the goal is to end discrimination.
There’s a difference between saying “you have it so easy” and “I have it so hard”. The issue itself is the same, the level of work I do is disproportionate. The difference is that one is a complaint of inequity and the the other can be taken as an insult.
To be clear before we go any further, did you want to know what the concept was, or do you want to claim it doesn't exist?
I edited my post while, I think maybe you were responding. So, you maybe didn't see this:
if you're running a foot race, and you run it on your own merits, but someone keeps knocking your opponents over while they try to run, would it be accurate to say that you won the race on your own with no advantages since you got no bonuses like extra running time or what have you?
While I agree discrimination against non-whites is a thing, one must also admit that in some areas you're starting to see discrimination against whites. For example, one of the best ways to get a job in Silicon Valley is to be Indian or Chinese on an H1B visa...
Sinful Hero wrote: Essentially it means being born white gives you an advantage over any other race usually concerning wealth, jobs, and access to services such as healthcare, groceries, etc. Everything is supposedly easier if you’re born white.
Only if you are born white in the correct country though. Being white does not bring so much privilege in Ukraine or Moldova... Plenty of black people across the world who were born with a thousand times the privilege the average Moldovan is born with. Therefore, I think it is an incorrect term. Privilege is based on class, not on race. The real issue is that in many countries, class lines tend to run along ethnic lines, conflating two different issues.
In the US, white Americans definitely do have an advantage over Afro-Americans or Latin Americans by virtue of being the dominant ethnic group, but I think it is wrong to call this "white" privilege, since that implies it is inherent to all white people across the world, while in fact it only applies to a handful of countries that have a significant population of ethnic groups with dark skin, but where the dominant ethnic group has fair skin. Furthermore, calling it "white" privilege takes away the focus from the important fact that this same principle is at work in almost every country with multiple ethnic groups, not just in cases where the ethnic groups have different skin colour. "White" privilege exists in a country like Burundi or Rwanda as well, despite the fact that all ethnic groups there are dark-skinned. You could call that "Tutsi" privilege instead of "white" privilege, but that ignores that it is pretty much the exact mechanism at work. Same in Russia, where you have this same dynamic, but between ethnic groups that are all fair-skinned. Chechens are as white as Russians are, but they still are disadvantaged in much the same way Afro-Americans are in the US. Therefore, it would be better to rename this concept to "dominant group" privilege.
On another note, as a fair-skinned person, I would like to object to the term "white". I am not white, just fair-skinned. Paper is white. Milk is white. My skin definitely is not.
Totalwar1402 wrote: Privilege implies the existence of a baseline. To have privilege you have to have something beyond what the norm is. Now, given how much objection there is to discrimination against black people that obviously isn’t their position. That treatment isn’t normal or acceptable. So lack of discrimination is objectively not a privilege since the goal is to end discrimination.
There’s a difference between saying “you have it so easy” and “I have it so hard”. The issue itself is the same, the level of work I do is disproportionate. The difference is that one is a complaint of inequity and the the other can be taken as an insult.
To be clear before we go any further, did you want to know what the concept was, or do you want to claim it doesn't exist?
I edited my post while, I think maybe you were responding. So, you maybe didn't see this:
if you're running a foot race, and you run it on your own merits, but someone keeps knocking your opponents over while they try to run, would it be accurate to say that you won the race on your own with no advantages since you got no bonuses like extra running time or what have you?
You’ve explained the definition well. I just find it a very difficult one to accept.
Let’s take the foot race issue. You’re identifying the problem with the guy who won the race rather than the “someone” who’s knocking people over. He hasn’t asked him to do that. Most interviews are anonymous for example; he isn’t party to the discrimination. If you remove that someone element, then it becomes a fair race. If you belabour that the guy didn’t win fairly for weeks afterwards it doesn’t change anything.
Plus the analogy works well for job interviews where you can say: I won out at somebody else’s expense. I suspect this is a counter to arguments against positive discrimination. But I don’t think it’s works well for police violence or stuff like loans. There you have a group being unfairly treated and criminalised. Whereas the assumption is that white peoples aren’t criminals. So the problem is with discrimination. It’s normal to not be randomly pulled over by the cops; that isn’t privilege.
I do need to be clear. Iam not saying there is not discrimination. Certainly is.
I mean what is the advantage of describing it as white privilege as opposed to racial discrimination?
I suppose if you unpack the idea: It implies a level of complicity even if you do not actively partake in acts of discrimination. However, that then risks finger pointing. I mean the one interview I had which had an Asian and Black applicant they both beat me on the applicants exam. Fair enough. So, I could turn around and say; well that doesn’t apply to me so stop saying I didn’t earn the current job Iam in. It’s too specific a definition. You can be told that other people are discriminated against. It’s a lot harder to convince people they are part of the problem. But then I would have to ask to what end when ending discrimination is the main goal?
White privilege isn’t just about white people not being discriminated against like black people and other minorities are discriminated against. That’s part of it, because sort of, but it’s more than that. If that was all it was we could just stick to talking about racism and reducing that.
White privilege is more passive, and more insidious. It is the underlying assumption that a white person’s experience is the normal, while every other experience is abnormal. That assumption gives a lot of privileges to white people. A white person speaking out will be assumed to be speaking from a universal position, while a black person will be assumed to be speaking from a black perspective.
Similarly, a black person is deemed first and foremost to be part of the black group, so any actions he takes are thought to reflect on all black people, and actions by other black people are thought to reflect on him. Think about how often people will complain that black leaders aren’t speaking out about a thing done by some black person, and then consider if you’ve ever heard a non-ironic complaint that white leaders aren’t speaking out against something done by a white person.
The thing about white privilege is it doesn’t actually require any kind of malice or conscious race hate. I remember once listening to an aboriginal speaker and going up to them after the event to question part of their argument, and seen multiple people in front of me not comment on the speaker’s idea or the content of his speech, but just to tell them how nice it was to see an aboriginal person doing so well. They didn’t see man with some ideas about financing the expansion of higher education, they saw a black person representing his people so nicely. The guy looked kind of relieved when I questioned one of his claims, at least I was debating his ideas.
Basically, it is the idea that when you see a white person you don’t think of whiteness and any assumptions that come with that, but when you see a person of another ethnicity you think of their ethnicity and start making assumptions.
As a white American you're absurdly less likely to be pulled over by the police than a black American. In a broader sense though the notion refers fundamentally to a blurry class-race advantage held by white Americans in society.
Yes, I am also less likely to be yelled or called horrible gak, because I am white.
I am privileged to be white, but I do not have an advantage, white privilege is less of empowerment and more a commentary of society and how historically 'white' people are not the targets of mass suppression or being pushed down by society.
t is the underlying assumption that a white person’s experience is the normal, while every other experience is abnormal. That assumption gives a lot of privileges to white people. A white person speaking out will be assumed to be speaking from a universal position, while a black person will be assumed to be speaking from a black perspective.
Amply put. Its also like how we are technically racist based on how we answer somes question, do we notice their skin color or do we notice them? If you notice their skin color that is just your human tribalism kicking in. (Our biggest advantage and our curse)
There is no 'norm' to society, because where would we base that norm on? What is the average person? In reality there is no such thing as a norm.
All that matters is what we do with our position in society, do we give back or take away?
You’ve explained the definition well. I just find it a very difficult one to accept.
I don't blame, Its a hard concept to understand till you've met someone who you try to relate to but cannot because well they had an entirely different situation to what I did. I was white, she was mexican. She grew up in a shanty town outside chicago, I grew up in the burbs with two highly educated parents. She was constantly called things by people because of her origins, I wasn't.
The idea is to empathize, to feel and understand the places they come from. Understand you come from a place of power, what little you have you have more than others who are less forunate. This isn't racist this just understanding.
We have to admit that there are different walks of life, and know that not everyone walks the same path.
I mean what is the advantage of describing it as white privilege as opposed to racial discrimination?
Historics. Look at history.
Historically White people have been in power, European and American. We had systematic oppression of minorities in these places for hundreds of years, hell we had a slave trade of minorities for hundreds of those years.
Were white people enslaved, yes the word Slave comes from the Word Slav. But recently very few white or europeans were enslaved. But that took centuries to mend. It doesn't disappear, it will slowly mend but it will be felt by the people and victims of those events.
To put it in perspective Just 50 or so years ago we had the civil rights movement to get rid of segregation between African Americans and white Americans. We still have people who lived through that and are still racist. Hell we have people in power who want to go back to that.
I used to think very similarly it just took my life experiences to show me I was wrong. It took me a year to figure that out, sometimes you need to understand it and it will make you a better person its not about putting people down, but more of a "Hey you don't know them"'
Ouze explained probably the best. I am very rambly and could easily just reduce this to a few sentences of pep talk.
Don't feel ashamed to ask questions. These are bad things to worry about as long as your not calling people names, and treating people like crap.
But of course people make generalisations about groups and assume they are monolithic. You are probably going to judge a Communist, or a Nazi, or a Trump supporter and have preconceived notions about them before you meet said individual. That’s just human nature and I don’t think that’s tied directly to white privilege. I am sure that people from minority groups have opinions and monolithic assumptions about white people. Probably the best example is having preconceived notions of what men and women are like. That’s not just about race.
Totalwar1402 wrote: But of course people make generalisations about groups and assume they are monolithic. You are probably going to judge a Communist, or a Nazi, or a Trump supporter and have preconceived notions about them before you meet said individual. That’s just human nature and I don’t think that’s tied directly to white privilege. I am sure that people from minority groups have opinions and monolithic assumptions about white people. Probably the best example is having preconceived notions of what men and women are like. That’s not just about race.
Well, Nazism is nationalism to an extreme, your an extremist at that point which means you have extreme views. Generally, a Nazi is someone who thinks they are a superior race. So no...The individual has already made that aware just by description.
Vulcan wrote: While I agree discrimination against non-whites is a thing, one must also admit that in some areas you're starting to see discrimination against whites. For example, one of the best ways to get a job in Silicon Valley is to be Indian or Chinese on an H1B visa...
No.
I have to challenge this statement. To clarify, that is not discrimination against whites. That is capitalism.
You really think that the few people (in comparison to their huge populations) who got those H1B visas are more privileged than American whites? Do you know the level of competition in their home countries there is to get those visas and what they had to do to get them?
On white privilege, others have captured it well. It is understanding that others would have a different perspective. The whole term is about viewing the society outside of the "white" view that sometimes considered the default. It is saying " No, that is not the default."
I will admit that White Privilege exists. However, I also think that many aspects of it are over stated, and in some respects are conflated with "wealth privilege".
I feel that there are MANY different categories of people that have different types and levels of privilege. For example, there is such a thing as female privilege.
when you are still 77% of the population, it is default, that % gets much higher the further back you go. Whites are still the majority in more than 40 states.
cuda1179 wrote: ... and in some respects are conflated with "wealth privilege".
It can be hard to get an interview if your name is Jamal. It can also be hard if your name is Cleatus. There's CERTAINLY a racial aspect to white privilege, personally I believe the wealth aspect (or the impression of wealth) is a bigger part than many give credence to. Still not the major aspect, but a larger portion than many believe.
White Privilege is a term used to describe an OVERALL tendency for white individuals to have fewer occurrences of "success inhibiting events" outside their control.
People that, for lack of better term, are offended by the notion of white privilege tend to look at individual cases and point out that there are many forms of privilege and that being white doesn't necessarily mean things are easy or even easier than other individual cases for non-whites.
White privilege is an ironic idea, in that it uses racism to point out that racism isn't necessarily active in order to be present. If, as a white person, you've never experienced racism in your day-to-day life, you probably don't think about it, and you probably think that because you don't engage in racist action, no special actions need to be enacted to combat racism.
I grew up in a small town, in Southwestern Ontario. I can recall having met about 5 persons of non-white ethnicity in my public school years. My parents had no racist comments, or any kind of prejudices that I am aware of... except my Dad had a thing against Dutch people. A farmland deal went sour between his father (My grandfather) and a Dutch person, and I guess there were some hard feelings between them. It's weird, because I'm living proof that racism is learned. I don't think about whether or not a person is Dutch until I have a negative experience with a person and I reflect on their name and start to wonder. I'll glibly point out that I have Dutch friends, and it doesn't bother me that they're Dutch. I had a former boss that was Dutch... and I only *hate* two people in my life, and he is one of them. I sometimes wonder if the two are related, or if it's confirmation bias...
Which wraps back to the real point of coming up with a term for White Privilege. Sometimes you can only understand something by feeling it. By experiencing it. What is blue to a blind man? I inherited something else from my Father, he has no sense of smell. Lost it entirely when he hit puberty. My sense of smell comes and goes, since puberty. Sometimes I can smell, and sometimes I can't.
I worked at a nursing home for a year, before I went to college (for the second time...) and let me tell you. The days I couldn't smell were a lot easier than the days I could. Sometimes, I couldn't smell. So sometimes, I didn't have the DISADVANTAGE that my coworkers shared. Sometimes, I had a bit of a lead in the race, because I wasn't being bombarded with the smell of piss and gak and mushrooms and vomit and decay. (Technically I was, but I didn't sense it. )
I can also say, that as a child of a single parent father that lost his job, with a non-financially-supportive mother (minimum wage store clerk) I experienced living poor. I can say that I had well-off friends and I would often joke with some about "rich kid problems" when they were torn about which cell phone they should buy. I didn't begrudge them... it was beyond their control as much as it was beyond mine. I would not have volunteered to be poor, despite my current gratitude for making me the person I am today. I was nerdy before being nerdy was cool. I had long hair (halfway down my back) when *boys didn't grow their hair out like girls*. I've always been a husky gentleman. So I have experienced discrimination before, but truth be told, I was also able to do something about it. I was poor, so I got a job. I was a hippy-looking dude, so I got a hair cut. I'm still geeky and overweight, but I could hypothetically do something about it.
It's not like I would be discriminated against for my skin colour.
Two more anecdotes... and this is of course all anecdotal.
The key difference between a retirement home, and a nursing home, is that in a nursing home, you generally can't get yourself to a toilet, and you sometimes can't feed yourself. Or, you have dementia. You *need* help to keep you alive. You would either die without it, or live in your own filth.
Personal Support Workers are the people that, for the most part, take care of the residents' needs. Bathing, feeding, dressing, repositioning (avoid bed sores) are mostly taken care of by people with a few months' training, not by Nurses or Doctors. When it comes to administering medications, and things like that, you've got to be a Nurse. I was a "Nurses' Aide" which meant I was an untrained, and truthfully unqualified PSW. I got hired because about 97 of the 100 staff were women, and I was a strapping young lad able to move the residents easily. I was probably a "Minority Hire". The relationship between workers and residents is intimate. I mean, you're feeding them, clothing them, wiping their asses, putting them to bed. You kind of can't help but care for these people. They need you, and they're people at the end of their lives. You learn their stories. They aren't just another customer. They're people.
One of our residents had dementia, and sometimes she would become very upset and confused. I happened to be able to calm her down fairly well, I'd learned to pick up on some of the people she'd talk about and remember a few details of the house she talked about. So when she'd get on an "episode" I would often help out if I wasn't on her wing because I'm pretty good at improvising and sorting out where/when she was and the conversation path that would calm her down and set her on her happily on her way. (Happiness is a state of mind, nothing else.) It was the end of my shift, I was tired, just pulled a double-shift to cover for an absence, and an episode was starting.
A co-worker asked if I would mind helping out with her, and Nurse Lamby (I'm not fething kidding, her name was Lamby, like a small sheep) in front of about 10 of my (women) co-workers said,
"How could he help? He's just a *man*. " and *man* was said in a way I'd never heard it before, because it was derogatory. Like I, as a *man* was lesser, and not able to perform the task of care for another human being as well as a ^Woman^. In that moment, I looked at the women I worked with. I'd say half were nodding in agreement. People that had seen me care, deeply, for these residents. People that knew I was taking an extra shift not for the money (didn't need it then, HA!) but was helping out my coworkers so they wouldn't be short, and proper care could be provided for the residents. People I had shared the hurt of loss for a well liked resident with. Nodding their heads in agreement with Lamby that I was less competent to deal with care, despite having proven myself in that exact situation multiple times. Some walked away, and one started to stand up for me, but was cut off and told to deal with it herself. (She was good, and I can remember her face but not her name. :( )
I was stunned. I'd never before, and I can't remember since having been in a professional situation where I was blatantly discriminated against. It was beyond my control. I was angry with myself for not saying anything then. I'm still angry about it today, right now. It was half a lifetime ago (18 years, ish) and I can feel my adrenaline reaction today, right now. I'm angry at Lamby, I'm angry at the women that nodded their heads, I'm angry with the people that walked away and I'm angry with myself. I didn't say anything. I didn't do anything. I just, left. I went home. I didn't help the resident, or the coworker that tried to stand up for me.
If it hasn't happened to you, you probably don't understand the shame that comes with having your value stripped away, publicly, for no reason that's within your control, and you don't do anything about it. It happens to you, and it's like rain. It just hits you, soaks you, covers you, and you don't do anything about it. Afterwards, you know what you should have done, but you didn't.
Anecdote the second.
More of a general thing. I planned on having a family for most of my life. I hit the teenage angst thing, and was all, "The world's too cruel to bring a baby into it..." for a while but by the time I was 20 I was comfortable with the idea of meeting the right person and settling down, you know, maybe, someday, if it was right, and uhm... I was ready. I had no close family with children. My nearby uncle and aunt didn't have kids. My Dad's side had all kinds of kids, but they were 4 hours away, so I never really had experience with little cousins or anything.
So when I became a Dad, I was all-in on it. I am not a let someone else take care of it guy. I learned to make the formula, how to warm the water, how to feed, change a diaper, proper burping technique, how to "pedal a bike" with their legs to help with gas. I can swaddle a baby (actual technical term) like a melon-fether. When I swaddle, the baby knows it and sleeps like a... baby. My kids are 7 and (almost) 9 and I'm fielding the life lessons like a boss. For a while, my wife was working weird shifts at a hospital (pharmacy techs are legal, professional drug dealers) so I was primary caregiver most days. Getting the kids up, ready, dropped off at daycare, picking them up. I was Dadding the gak out of that, and still do to this day. Proud Papa am I.
It's probably not a surprise to anyone that this is presumed to not be the case.
"Oh, Mister Mom today are you? How cute!"
"Is their Mom sick today?"
"Single parenting can be rough, right?" - I'm happily married. WTF?
"Hi Kids! What's it like with Daddy taking care of you today?"
And society's stream of incompetent Dads on TV and families barely hanging together because Mom makes all the sacrifices. Blech! For the record, my wife is amazing and also an excellent Mom. I'm not trying to take anything away from her.
When it comes to Dads being discriminated against, I can get a feel for the idea of White Privilege. White Privilege is a not-so-great name for an idea with merit. If you don't experience it, you probably don't understand it.
You may not realize that you have advantages over another person simply by fortune of your birth. Nobody's fault. It's not a blame issue. It is a perspective issue. Not all people are created equally, though we must all be treated equally by the law.
In my teens, I had a car available to me, so I could get myself to work. That's a privilege I had, that I frankly took for granted. I still had to work, I had to pay for the gas, but I had more opportunities than some people in similar circumstances to myself. It doesn't take away from my hard work. But I wouldn't have had as many opportunities to work, if I didn't have that car available.
When I applied for my first apartment, I had an established grandmother that co-signed on my application. She's not rich, but she and my grandfather worked (like me) from a young age and were able to purchase a home and her "credit" was extended to me through that co-sign. If my grandmother hadn't been able (and willing) to help me, I might not have gotten that apartment. Without the apartment, I couldn't have gone to college (again) which then provided me the opportunity to gain employment at my current workplace.
If my family had been discriminated against for generations, I probably wouldn't have had a car available to have employment options to better my situation. I would have had to compete for the local "scraps" of employment that were available. I wouldn't have had that credit to leave my home and go (back) to school.
I work hard, and I am my own man. I had benefits that may be taken for granted by some, but without them my options and opportunities would have been fewer, and I may not have been able to achieve the life I have today. (Which I am grateful for.)
The concept of White Privilege is, at its best, an attempt to make people aware of things they take for granted. Particularly, disadvantages they may not face, by the fortune of their birth. This isn't a "my life is harder" contest, but is meant to open thoughts on ways to help bridge these gaps to make for more-even opportunities for all people to succeed.
The concept of White Privilege is, at its worst, a racist talking point. White people can't understand what they don't experience, so no matter what they do, it ultimately hurts "other" people. White Privilege creates a no-win scenario for eliminating racism. White people that want to help are perpetuating the power dynamic that puts white people in positions of power to "lift up" the other races, which continues oppression. White people that disagree are bigots, and racists. The only answer is segregation, or acquisition of power by force, to turn the tide of power.
On white privilege, others have captured it well. It is understanding that others would have a different perspective. The whole term is about viewing the society outside of the "white" view that sometimes considered the default. It is saying " No, that is not the default."
I find it a very silly thing, then. People have different perspectives? That has nothing to do with privilige, that's just life.
And in countries where white people are the majority, their view *is* the default.
It's not the only view, mind, and encouraging people to look at things from someone else's point of view (ie, empathy) is laudable. Doing that by devaluing their own point of view by labeling it as "white privilige" and therefore inherently suspect/subconsciously mildly racist, however, is ironically enough very un-empathical.
Which is probably why the concept meets so much resistance outside of strongly left-wing circles, as a lot of people would probably agree to the underlying principle if it was presented less confrontationally, but resent being euphemistically called a racist and so (quite rightly IMO) reject the concept as it stands.
...
Huh. I just realised that under that definition, the rightly much-hated term "check your privilige" basically means "show some empathy". A clearer example of the irony and of how self-defeating the concept is I cannot think of.
White privilege has a North American context. Primarily American context, but it still applies within Canada and is part of the US / Mexico relationship issues.
While American culture is exported to all corners of the world, the context isn't always carried.
Sinful Hero wrote: Essentially it means being born white gives you an advantage over any other race usually concerning wealth, jobs, and access to services such as healthcare, groceries, etc. Everything is supposedly easier if you’re born white.
Only if you are born white in the correct country though. Being white does not bring so much privilege in Ukraine or Moldova... Plenty of black people across the world who were born with a thousand times the privilege the average Moldovan is born with. Therefore, I think it is an incorrect term. Privilege is based on class, not on race. The real issue is that in many countries, class lines tend to run along ethnic lines, conflating two different issues.
In the US, white Americans definitely do have an advantage over Afro-Americans or Latin Americans by virtue of being the dominant ethnic group, but I think it is wrong to call this "white" privilege, since that implies it is inherent to all white people across the world, while in fact it only applies to a handful of countries that have a significant population of ethnic groups with dark skin, but where the dominant ethnic group has fair skin. Furthermore, calling it "white" privilege takes away the focus from the important fact that this same principle is at work in almost every country with multiple ethnic groups, not just in cases where the ethnic groups have different skin colour. "White" privilege exists in a country like Burundi or Rwanda as well, despite the fact that all ethnic groups there are dark-skinned. You could call that "Tutsi" privilege instead of "white" privilege, but that ignores that it is pretty much the exact mechanism at work. Same in Russia, where you have this same dynamic, but between ethnic groups that are all fair-skinned. Chechens are as white as Russians are, but they still are disadvantaged in much the same way Afro-Americans are in the US. Therefore, it would be better to rename this concept to "dominant group" privilege.
On another note, as a fair-skinned person, I would like to object to the term "white". I am not white, just fair-skinned. Paper is white. Milk is white. My skin definitely is not.
Agreed, it is a very American specific phenomena that is being applied to the rest of the world where it doesn't make sense
Sinful Hero wrote: Essentially it means being born white gives you an advantage over any other race usually concerning wealth, jobs, and access to services such as healthcare, groceries, etc. Everything is supposedly easier if you’re born white.
Only if you are born white in the correct country though. Being white does not bring so much privilege in Ukraine or Moldova... Plenty of black people across the world who were born with a thousand times the privilege the average Moldovan is born with. Therefore, I think it is an incorrect term. Privilege is based on class, not on race. The real issue is that in many countries, class lines tend to run along ethnic lines, conflating two different issues.
In the US, white Americans definitely do have an advantage over Afro-Americans or Latin Americans by virtue of being the dominant ethnic group, but I think it is wrong to call this "white" privilege, since that implies it is inherent to all white people across the world, while in fact it only applies to a handful of countries that have a significant population of ethnic groups with dark skin, but where the dominant ethnic group has fair skin. Furthermore, calling it "white" privilege takes away the focus from the important fact that this same principle is at work in almost every country with multiple ethnic groups, not just in cases where the ethnic groups have different skin colour. "White" privilege exists in a country like Burundi or Rwanda as well, despite the fact that all ethnic groups there are dark-skinned. You could call that "Tutsi" privilege instead of "white" privilege, but that ignores that it is pretty much the exact mechanism at work. Same in Russia, where you have this same dynamic, but between ethnic groups that are all fair-skinned. Chechens are as white as Russians are, but they still are disadvantaged in much the same way Afro-Americans are in the US. Therefore, it would be better to rename this concept to "dominant group" privilege.
On another note, as a fair-skinned person, I would like to object to the term "white". I am not white, just fair-skinned. Paper is white. Milk is white. My skin definitely is not.
Agreed, it is a very American specific phenomena that is being applied to the rest of the world where it doesn't make sense
I think it would make sense in Australia, UK, New Zealand, Canada, France, etc
My main worry concerning the concept of "White Privilege", is how some people sometimes uses the very concept as a weapon, used to shut down conversation and avoid questions.
If a copper pulls me over, it’s because I’ve actually done something.
Nobody looks at me with suspicion.
I can walk down any street without fear.
I don’t get followed round by shop security.
And in hundreds of other ways. Essentially, society just lets me be me, and be about my business. No doors are closed to me in terms of opportunity, provided I’ve the merit.
Sinful Hero wrote: Essentially it means being born white gives you an advantage over any other race usually concerning wealth, jobs, and access to services such as healthcare, groceries, etc. Everything is supposedly easier if you’re born white.
Only if you are born white in the correct country though. Being white does not bring so much privilege in Ukraine or Moldova... Plenty of black people across the world who were born with a thousand times the privilege the average Moldovan is born with. Therefore, I think it is an incorrect term. Privilege is based on class, not on race. The real issue is that in many countries, class lines tend to run along ethnic lines, conflating two different issues.
In the US, white Americans definitely do have an advantage over Afro-Americans or Latin Americans by virtue of being the dominant ethnic group, but I think it is wrong to call this "white" privilege, since that implies it is inherent to all white people across the world, while in fact it only applies to a handful of countries that have a significant population of ethnic groups with dark skin, but where the dominant ethnic group has fair skin. Furthermore, calling it "white" privilege takes away the focus from the important fact that this same principle is at work in almost every country with multiple ethnic groups, not just in cases where the ethnic groups have different skin colour. "White" privilege exists in a country like Burundi or Rwanda as well, despite the fact that all ethnic groups there are dark-skinned. You could call that "Tutsi" privilege instead of "white" privilege, but that ignores that it is pretty much the exact mechanism at work. Same in Russia, where you have this same dynamic, but between ethnic groups that are all fair-skinned. Chechens are as white as Russians are, but they still are disadvantaged in much the same way Afro-Americans are in the US. Therefore, it would be better to rename this concept to "dominant group" privilege.
On another note, as a fair-skinned person, I would like to object to the term "white". I am not white, just fair-skinned. Paper is white. Milk is white. My skin definitely is not.
Agreed, it is a very American specific phenomena that is being applied to the rest of the world where it doesn't make sense
I think it would make sense in Australia, UK, New Zealand, Canada, France, etc
I suppose the concept might have merit in states with histories of racial caste system or settler states, but trying to view the historical oppressions and conflicts in Europe through a white privilege lens is a fools errand. But that wont stop people from trying
If a copper pulls me over, it’s because I’ve actually done something.
Nobody looks at me with suspicion.
I can walk down any street without fear.
I don’t get followed round by shop security.
And in hundreds of other ways. Essentially, society just lets me be me, and be about my business. No doors are closed to me in terms of opportunity, provided I’ve the merit.
Lol under this definition you would lose your "white privalege" by dressing the wrong way, having the wrong haircut or just being in or from the wrong area!
If a copper pulls me over, it’s because I’ve actually done something.
Nobody looks at me with suspicion.
I can walk down any street without fear.
I don’t get followed round by shop security.
And in hundreds of other ways. Essentially, society just lets me be me, and be about my business. No doors are closed to me in terms of opportunity, provided I’ve the merit.
How is this different to not being discriminated against? It’s the norm to be able walk down the street without fear? A previous poster mentioned that this distinction is semantics but it really isn’t considering that it sounds just a repackaging and reframing of old ideas. For example, it’s not a privilege that, if you go into a white neighbourhood people won’t call the police and assume you are up to no good. That’s those people being prejudiced against black people? Again, none of that is controversial or disputed seriously.
If anything I think the term is a weapon of the right that it can use to discredit the left. Rather than be about discrimination and racial bigotry it wastes energy on trying to prove that very poor and impoverished Americans are entitled and have it easy. It’s an act of political suicide with near as I can tell no tangible benefit to those being discriminated against or their cause. It made far more enemies than it did win people over or mobilise people within their community.
If a copper pulls me over, it’s because I’ve actually done something.
Nobody looks at me with suspicion.
I can walk down any street without fear.
I don’t get followed round by shop security.
And in hundreds of other ways. Essentially, society just lets me be me, and be about my business. No doors are closed to me in terms of opportunity, provided I’ve the merit.
Lol under this definition you would lose your "white privalege" by dressing the wrong way, having the wrong haircut or just being in or from the wrong area!
Or are young
Or are Irish (still happens)
Or are a scouse
Or a Brumy
Or a northerner
Or Male
Etc.
White privilege is a lie perpetuating racism while disguising it as “equality”
Frazzled wrote: People who talk about "X" privilege for an entire group, didn't grow up poor.
Bingo!
I live in the U.K. and was so poor when I was a late teens (both parents fethed off and left us) that at times we only had onions to eat as they were so cheap.
White privilege is a lie, pure and simple, and anyone that believes in it has some real issues that stop them being able to process the world rationally.
More of a general thing. I planned on having a family for most of my life. I hit the teenage angst thing, and was all, "The world's too cruel to bring a baby into it..." for a while but by the time I was 20 I was comfortable with the idea of meeting the right person and settling down, you know, maybe, someday, if it was right, and uhm... I was ready. I had no close family with children. My nearby uncle and aunt didn't have kids. My Dad's side had all kinds of kids, but they were 4 hours away, so I never really had experience with little cousins or anything.
So when I became a Dad, I was all-in on it. I am not a let someone else take care of it guy. I learned to make the formula, how to warm the water, how to feed, change a diaper, proper burping technique, how to "pedal a bike" with their legs to help with gas. I can swaddle a baby (actual technical term) like a melon-fether. When I swaddle, the baby knows it and sleeps like a... baby. My kids are 7 and (almost) 9 and I'm fielding the life lessons like a boss. For a while, my wife was working weird shifts at a hospital (pharmacy techs are legal, professional drug dealers) so I was primary caregiver most days. Getting the kids up, ready, dropped off at daycare, picking them up. I was Dadding the gak out of that, and still do to this day. Proud Papa am I.
It's probably not a surprise to anyone that this is presumed to not be the case.
"Oh, Mister Mom today are you? How cute!"
"Is their Mom sick today?"
"Single parenting can be rough, right?" - I'm happily married. WTF?
"Hi Kids! What's it like with Daddy taking care of you today?"
And society's stream of incompetent Dads on TV and families barely hanging together because Mom makes all the sacrifices. Blech! For the record, my wife is amazing and also an excellent Mom. I'm not trying to take anything away from her.
When it comes to Dads being discriminated against, I can get a feel for the idea of White Privilege. White Privilege is a not-so-great name for an idea with merit. If you don't experience it, you probably don't understand it.
I think this is hits the nail on the head on two points
1) A good analogy to what privilege is. A practical example of this playing out would be baby changing. Sometimes we still have baby changing in women's toilets, as it assumes that the child will be with its mother.
2) It also points to the failings of the use of the term "White Privilege". To my mind it has gone from a valid issue addressing an imbalance in society to being an almost racist term in itself. It is now often used by people who assume that any white person is inherently more privileged and are ignorant of the fact that they may suffer from inequality for other reasons, gender, disability, age, socioeconomic background, sexuality etc.
If a copper pulls me over, it’s because I’ve actually done something.
Nobody looks at me with suspicion.
I can walk down any street without fear.
I don’t get followed round by shop security.
And in hundreds of other ways. Essentially, society just lets me be me, and be about my business. No doors are closed to me in terms of opportunity, provided I’ve the merit.
Lol under this definition you would lose your "white privalege" by dressing the wrong way, having the wrong haircut or just being in or from the wrong area!
Hi, I went from getting stopped by a highschool kid who wanted me to buy him cigarettes to 'maybe he's a CEO' with a shave and a new jacket. Because I'm sufficiently white that as long as I'm dressed right I'm judged to belong. So, yeah, actually, it can go pretty much exactly like that. But that's part of the privilege, the judgement of society is generally on your side, no one really questions that I belong in a middle to upper class environment unless I'm immediately involved in physical violence. Now that I'm dressed right.
Meanwhile people are terrified of my brother in law, who grew up upper class and is a puffball of love compared to my trailer trash ass. Maybe it's more obvious when you see it directly.
I think wealth is the biggest divider between people. It’s true that black people are more likely to come from deprived areas, but often the common causal factor is wealth not skin colour, we have several overlapping symptoms and causes and you can’t attribute the impacts of them simply. All the people who get an easy ride through he justice system, get second chances for things, get those opportunities for education and work opportunities, all come from wealthier backgrounds. There’s just as much poverty, drugs, crime and hopelessness in deprived white areas as black areas.
The problem I have with ‘privilege’ is the massive broad strokes it paints huge numbers of people with without any nuance. Seeing someone dismissed with the response ‘check your privilege’. This makes huge assumptions about a person without any consideration for their personal circumstances, it’s just assumed if they are white they have it easy. Not everyone is in receipt of privilage at all times, and being told you’re privileged is just an excuse to rudely ignore you if you’re white, or male, or whatever.
A common counter to male privilege that stupid people come up with, thinking they are being insightful, are things like male suicide rates, or likelihood of dying in work being much higher in men than women. This is only true in the broadest of senses because on average men work in more dangerous, manual jobs that women tend not to do. I cannot claim to be in receipt of this negative ‘privilage’ because I work in a school, my chances of dying at work are practically nil. So stats on men dying in work are utterly irrelevant to any discussion I’m a part of. But following that argument, there are positive privileges men are not always in receipt of either.
How is this different to not being discriminated against? It’s the norm to be able walk down the street without fear? A previous poster mentioned that this distinction is semantics but it really isn’t considering that it sounds just a repackaging and reframing of old ideas. For example, it’s not a privilege that, if you go into a white neighbourhood people won’t call the police and assume you are up to no good. That’s those people being prejudiced against black people? Again, none of that is controversial or disputed seriously.
If anything I think the term is a weapon of the right that it can use to discredit the left. Rather than be about discrimination and racial bigotry it wastes energy on trying to prove that very poor and impoverished Americans are entitled and have it easy. It’s an act of political suicide with near as I can tell no tangible benefit to those being discriminated against or their cause. It made far more enemies than it did win people over or mobilise people within their community.
The one major difference is that the idea of white privilege in a wide sense also encompasses the general assumptions and reality of poverty relative to racial groups. It goes beyond the simple fact of prejudice and factors in the results of generational prejudice.
White privilege is generally speaking the results of consistently not being the group getting shat upon. You can fit in with the big boys if you have the opportunity and scrounge up the correct appearance. If I can do it, anyone can.
In no small amount the idea of this came around due to the people who declared racism over and don't understand why it's an issue anymore since civil rights passed so everything must be totally equal. And then go on to justify their racist as gak views of black people because of unequal results from hideously unequal beginnings.
1) A good analogy to what privilege is. A practical example of this playing out would be baby changing. Sometimes we still have baby changing in women's toilets, as it assumes that the child will be with its mother.
2) It also points to the failings of the use of the term "White Privilege". To my mind it has gone from a valid issue addressing an imbalance in society to being an almost racist term in itself. It is now often used by people who assume that any white person is inherently more privileged and are ignorant of the fact that they may suffer from inequality for other reasons, gender, disability, age, socioeconomic background, sexuality etc.
This is my problem really with the current paradigm surrounding white privilege. It offers no solutions and is primarily used as a conversational battering ram to insult or invalidate someones position. and it obfuscates any conversation on the various social issues that its umbrella term covers.
Worse it makes enemies of many a proponent of the arguements taken individually.
And just to get ahead of anyone making assumptions, I fething hate this and beat it with a bag of hammers every chance I get. Still find the concept rather useful in understanding the sociological bs being perpetuated by various political groups.
Lol under this definition you would lose your "white privalege" by dressing the wrong way, having the wrong haircut or just being in or from the wrong area!
Hi, I went from getting stopped by a highschool kid who wanted me to buy him cigarettes to 'maybe he's a CEO' with a shave and a new jacket. Because I'm sufficiently white that as long as I'm dressed right I'm judged to belong. So, yeah, actually, it can go pretty much exactly like that. But that's part of the privilege, the judgement of society is generally on your side, no one really questions that I belong in a middle to upper class environment unless I'm immediately involved in physical violence. Now that I'm dressed right.
Meanwhile people are terrified of my brother in law, who grew up upper class and is a puffball of love compared to my trailer trash ass. Maybe it's more obvious when you see it directly.
To build on this, class and race are very strongly intertwined. The point of race is to create a class barrier that can't be truly escaped. Colonial powers invented science about race as justification for plundering and enslaving, after all. A white guy can dress better and talk posher and fit right into the middle and upper classes whereas a black guy could do the same things but have one, final obstacle in the way. A white person and a black person acting and dressing the same are still likely to be viewed as being from two different classes.
Additonally, Western racial relations are not exactly transposable to other cultural spheres (and do differ slightly even with the West) and so a white person wouldn't necessarily count for anything in Saudi Arabia or Japan. Being "white" or being "black" or being anything at all aren't immutable qualities because these identifications exist within a particular society.
Steve steveson wrote: 2) It also points to the failings of the use of the term "White Privilege". To my mind it has gone from a valid issue addressing an imbalance in society to being an almost racist term in itself. It is now often used by people who assume that any white person is inherently more privileged and are ignorant of the fact that they may suffer from inequality for other reasons, gender, disability, age, socioeconomic background, sexuality etc.
Okay, so there's a recurring theme in this thread to trot out the tired argument of "not all white people have the same privilege," which is of course true, but also ignores that, at least in the US, not matter what the rest of your identity, you're almost always better off being white than non-white.
So, as others (notably sebster) have pointed out, sociologically privilege is most broadly the benefit of not being "other." Meaning, that whatever identity you have, it is in the majority, which for most people becomes "normal." So, you define yourself, and society defines you, by your more personal traits, such as personality, accomplishments, etc, rather than by your identity. When a person says "I don't see race," they're almost certainly in the majority of their community. They can afford to not see race, because their race seldom, if ever, is an issue. If you want to see a great example of white privilege, look at how quickly the corner cases where white's are discriminated are brought up in any discussion on racism. White people become keenly aware of race the second they perceive it as a disadvantage. You can show some of them reams of data showing systematic inequality, and they will simply point out that one of their friends wasn't hired at the post office because he was white.
Race is a common form of privilege, at least in the US, because it's so stark and clear cut. It's not always the most dramatic (abled vs. disabled is pretty much the most dramatic privilege, particularly for the most extreme disabilities), but it layers pretty nastily with anything else. Meaning, a poor white kid and a poor black have different probabilities for success in life. Both have less privilege than even a black middle class kid, but the poor white kid is less likely to be entangled in the criminal justice system, will generally have access to better schools, and will have better job and financial prospects as an adult. And this isn't just leftist propaganda. There are pretty extensive studies on this stuff. For example, black men with bachelor's degrees have the same median income as white men with only high school educations.
So, to respond directly to the quote here, as a rule, white people are more privileged than a similarly situated person of a different race. Obviously, a wealthy, non-disabled, straight cis-male black person is going to have an easier life than a poor, disabled, queer white person. I don't think anybody argues that outside of the outermost fringes of tumblr and twitter.
Lol under this definition you would lose your "white privalege" by dressing the wrong way, having the wrong haircut or just being in or from the wrong area!
Hi, I went from getting stopped by a highschool kid who wanted me to buy him cigarettes to 'maybe he's a CEO' with a shave and a new jacket. Because I'm sufficiently white that as long as I'm dressed right I'm judged to belong. So, yeah, actually, it can go pretty much exactly like that. But that's part of the privilege, the judgement of society is generally on your side, no one really questions that I belong in a middle to upper class environment unless I'm immediately involved in physical violence. Now that I'm dressed right.
Meanwhile people are terrified of my brother in law, who grew up upper class and is a puffball of love compared to my trailer trash ass. Maybe it's more obvious when you see it directly.
To build on this, class and race are very strongly intertwined. The point of race is to create a class barrier that can't be truly escaped. Colonial powers invented science about race as justification for plundering and enslaving, after all. A white guy can dress better and talk posher and fit right into the middle and upper classes whereas a black guy could do the same things but have one, final obstacle in the way. A white person and a black person acting and dressing the same are still likely to be viewed as being from two different classes.
Additonally, Western racial relations are not exactly transposable to other cultural spheres (and do differ slightly even with the West) and so a white person wouldn't necessarily count for anything in Saudi Arabia or Japan. Being "white" or being "black" or being anything at all aren't immutable qualities because these identifications exist within a particular society.
I think you need to update your analysis a bit, It is true that historically that race was used to justify an economic hierarchy (See slavery), but in modern liberal capitalism that is no longer the case. In modern liberalism identities like race and sex have been incorporated into the leading ideology, so today you can have black governors or presidents, which was unthinkable 50-60 years ago. Of course the realities of a class society remains and the effects of the racial segregation is still felt, but the point stands that the ruling ideology of today doesn't use race to justify those economic hierarchies (IE: class)
Personally I would like to see a real and tangible example of any privilege that white people get that isn’t legally afforded to any other race that lives in our county.
All I ever hear is wishy washy handwavium remarks about “followed in a shop” or other things.
This all boils down to the parasitical identity politics that invests the US these days (and is encroaching on the U.K.), I could go on but don’t want to be too harsh.
dyndraig wrote: I think you need to update your analysis a bit, It is true that historically that race was used to justify an economic hierarchy (See slavery), but in modern liberal capitalism that is no longer the case. In modern liberalism identities like race and sex have been incorporated into the leading ideology, so today you can have black governors or presidents, which was unthinkable 50-60 years ago. Of course the realities of a class society remains and the effects of the racial segregation is still felt, but the point stands that the ruling ideology of today doesn't use race to justify those economic hierarchies (IE: class)
Obama was surrounded by racial fear. "In modern liberalism", maybe, but liberalism is far from the sole thing to motivate white voters and racism has been and continues to be a strong factor in how the entire system of voting is organised. Never mind that the current president campaigned on building a wall to keep brown people out.
Formosa wrote: Personally I would like to see a real and tangible example of any privilege that white people get that isn’t legally afforded to any other race that lives in our county.
All I ever hear is wishy washy handwavium remarks about “followed in a shop” or other things.
This all boils down to the parasitical identity politics that invests the US these days (and is encroaching on the U.K.), I could go on but don’t want to be too harsh.
You're saying that you're going to ignore the answers to the question you ostensibly want answered. The conclusion to draw here is that you are not really interested in understanding what white privilege means, how it's used and any strengths and weaknesses this model of analysis has, but that you're just pretending in order to gain a veneer of legitimacy in your dismissal of the basic idea of there being a racial hierarchy and in order to waste people's time when they try to engage with you in good faith.
If a copper pulls me over, it’s because I’ve actually done something.
Nobody looks at me with suspicion.
I can walk down any street without fear.
I don’t get followed round by shop security.
And in hundreds of other ways. Essentially, society just lets me be me, and be about my business. No doors are closed to me in terms of opportunity, provided I’ve the merit.
I'm white and have been pulled over for being white, the cop even admitted it like it was no big deal. Back in 2002, before I had any cell phone, let alone a smart phone, I looked at a map and decided that traveling north to south through eastern Omaha, Nebraska would be a good shortcut rather than taking the highway. Not only did this in fact add 45 minutes to my trip, I got pulled over for being a pasty-faced nerd in the middle of a Black ghetto. Cops thought I was there to buy drugs.
Every race/gender/religion has its own form of privilege. Try being a man taking your kids to play at a public park. The moms look at you like you are a pedo. Ever look at the clothing sections of any department store? Notice how the women's section is roughly 2.5 times the size of the men's section?
If you have access to Netflix, there's a 15 or so minute show called "explained" and it talks about White Privilege in one of the episodes.
In particular, how White families have been building wealth by virtue of owning land, in valuable locations, while "others" have not. If you're genuinely interested, and can set aside the "I'm white, I had it tough, so other people's struggles are not as hard as mine..." viewpoint, I'd say it's worth the 15 minutes to watch it.
cuda1179 wrote: Every race/gender/religion has its own form of privilege. Try being a man taking your kids to play at a public park. The moms look at you like you are a pedo. Ever look at the clothing sections of any department store? Notice how the women's section is roughly 2.5 times the size of the men's section?
So, that's true, that there are advantages and disadvantages to many different demographic groups, but lets not pretend for even a second that those pros and cons balance out.
You park example does point out how related to "otherness" is to privilege. Normally, child care takers are female, so a male is unusual, and other. While a stay at home mom is accepted, a stay at home dad is a novelty. So you have 100% experienced what it's like to run into bias.
Now, imagine instead of facing that bias once a week when you take your kids to the park, it's every day, in a multitude of situations. You know how uncomfortable that bias makes you feel, not realize that other people feel that far more often, and often for much higher stakes. Think about feeling that way at work, driving around town, etc.
When people say that the concept of white privilege doesn't help, it's because they don't understand that it's about trying to empathize with others.
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Formosa wrote: Personally I would like to see a real and tangible example of any privilege that white people get that isn’t legally afforded to any other race that lives in our county.
All I ever hear is wishy washy handwavium remarks about “followed in a shop” or other things.
This all boils down to the parasitical identity politics that invests the US these days (and is encroaching on the U.K.), I could go on but don’t want to be too harsh.
The 50 percent gap in callback rates is statistically very significant, Bertrand and Mullainathan note in Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873). It indicates that a white name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience.
Another tangible example is in online dating, where black women receive far fewer responses. OK Cupid did a huge study that I'll link to later when I'm not on my work computer, but it's pretty easy to find.
I'm white and have been pulled over for being white, the cop even admitted it like it was no big deal. Back in 2002, before I had any cell phone, let alone a smart phone, I looked at a map and decided that traveling north to south through eastern Omaha, Nebraska would be a good shortcut rather than taking the highway. Not only did this in fact add 45 minutes to my trip, I got pulled over for being a pasty-faced nerd in the middle of a Black ghetto. Cops thought I was there to buy drugs.
I think you need to take a step back and get some perspective.
The thread's frustration with the term "white privilege" reminds me of the hostility to the term "rape culture." Like it was stated, it is just an aggressive way of saying "be more empathetic and see it from another point of view."
Race and wealth mobility have been tied together in the US since before its foundation. And the term "white" is such a fluid thing that basically means "not the other" in america. It was only in the 20th century in America that Irish and Italians were allowed to be considered "white." I would not be surprised that other groups will be considered white in the future.
I can understand why being called "privileged" feels like an attack, but you understand why being called "disadvantaged" feels like an attack too?
And can we please stop the "we had a black president so race is not an issue anymore statements?" Come on. Especially since there was such a backlash against him. Does anyone think it was coincidence that the person who championed that Obama was "not legitimate" (birther) and has been dedicated to destroying the Obama legacy is now the president?
EDIT: cuda1179 comment is an example of him being forced to interact with the police because he was in a highly policed area that he happened to drive through. Now imagine how often the people who lived there get harassed by the police. For just living there.
If only there were some sort of academic concept for how different kinds of disciplines intersect with one another. We could call it, I don't know, Intersectionality. Alas, such a thing hasn't ever been thought of before, so sadly we must conclude that White Privilege can't be a thing because other people can be oppressed too. Oh well.
AdeptSister wrote: The thread's frustration with the term "white privilege" reminds me of the hostility to the term "rape culture." Like it was stated, it is just an aggressive way of saying "be more empathetic and see it from another point of view."
Race and wealth mobility have been tied together in the US since before its foundation. And the term "white" is such a fluid thing that basically means "not the other" in america. It was only in the 20th century in America that Irish and Italians were allowed to be considered "white." I would not be surprised that other groups will be considered white in the future.
I can understand why being called "privileged" feels like an attack, but you understand why being called "disadvantaged" feels like an attack too?
And can we please stop the "we had a black president so race is not an issue anymore statements?" Come on. Especially since there was such a backlash against him. Does anyone think it was coincidence that the person who championed that Obama was "not legitimate" (birther) and has been dedicated to destroying the Obama legacy is now the president?
EDIT: cuda1179 comment is an example of him being forced to interact with the police because he was in a highly policed area that he happened to drive through. Now imagine how often the people who lived there get harassed by the police. For just living there.
How is it an attack to say that black people are discriminated against? You’re saying that because a group is a persecuted minority is itself a term of insult and that the only way to deal with that is to frame the absence of discrimination of privilege. But if that’s the case then why are people calling for the removal of that discrimination. You don’t hear, “we need more white kids getting shot so we can all be equal”. It’s a nonesense. The issue is clearly is one of the majority discriminating against the minority. It’s pride to insist that there be no connotation of victimhood because it implies weakness. I think that is a completely suicidal train of thought. Also how is not condescending to have white people tweeting “woe is me and my white privilege”? That kind of distracts the issue and I’d say that’s more insulting than saying “black peoples are the victims of discrimination. How would not be showing empathy to show concern for instances of racial discrimination?
Well if you know it feels like an attack and you know it’s going to discredit the movement then why frame the issue like that in the first place? Aggressive rhetoric only works if it brings new people to your side or mobilises support. If it has the opposite effect and empowers the right so that you lose influence then it’s a terrible idea.
To be honest the whole rape culture thing is more or less exactly the same problem. The feminist movement didn’t really change its position, but it tried to ratchet up its rhetoric. Saying women are discriminated against and frequently attacked by men is not new. The problem is that our culture overwhelmingly makes it clear that masculinity is built upon a chivalrous notion that men should protect women. How many video games or stories involve a guy trying to save his woman; usually from a cruel guy trying to use her in some way? This goes to films like in Back to the Future where Biff tries to rape Marty’s mother and his Dad beats him up. We have a culture that doesn’t just criminalise and throw rapists in jail. But one which arguably considers it the highest virtue of masculinity to attack the bad men which do it. Yes, this can depict women as victims without power. However it’s extremely clear what the socially accepted ideal is. It’s also ridiculise because it ignores that every man wants to be loved and so the idea of forcing a woman implies that you’re to weak to inspire love in her. So only a loser would rape a woman. Again, how often in films are rapists and gropers depicted as losers? I am not talking modern films, you can see this in films decades old. If a man does something disrespectful to a woman, in a lot of cases, it’s partly an act of rebellion and one that he knows is in contravention to what’s acceptable. Wolf whistling for example. So if you say “Rape Culture” and “Toxic Masculinity” you are again using rhetoric does more to discredit the movement then it does to win people over. Because it sounds far to close to “all men are evil”. I mean, to me these just sound like edgy buzzwords.
If the problem is some of the people using it, then shouldn't we be arguing for better debaters, rather than the term itself? White privilege is still a thing that needs to be talked about, even if it's not the sole thing that effects every person or to as great a extent as other. It's as if the phrase that is one part in in a larger discussion about socio-economics.
It's not like, oh say, "identity politics", which is similarly used to shut down conversations while being inherently antagonistic by accusing peoples beliefs and actions as being purely cynical.
The 50 percent gap in callback rates is statistically very significant, Bertrand and Mullainathan note in Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873). It indicates that a white name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience.
Another tangible example is in online dating, where black women receive far fewer responses. OK Cupid did a huge study that I'll link to later when I'm not on my work computer, but it's pretty easy to find.
A white name? I wonder if someone named 'Ivan Kuznetsov' or 'Juan Herrero' would get the same amount of callbacks as someone named 'John Smith'? Is this really a racial issue, or is it a more broad issue with xenophobia in that any people that do not have a name associated with the dominant ethnic group get rejected more often, regardless of race? Before they can claim that "white names" result in more callbacks, they should have had a more representative sample of "white" names. Because now it proves nothing beyond having an Anglo-American name results in more callbacks, but Anglo-American does not equate to "white". In European countries with a Germanic majority (like England, Germany etc.), Slavic people get discriminated against, even though both are equally white (again, it is usually set along class lines, Slavic people in those countries typically being lower class). Is this different in the US (Seeing as that the US is predominantly Germanic as well)? Does having a Slavic name yield the same kind of benefits as having a Germanic name? And what about Spanish, Italian or other Latin names? Do all whites have "white" privilege? Or is there discrimination against certain white groups as well?
It's a testament to the strength of the Dakka OT that This thread is still going on it second page when the OP admitted in their second post that they weren't looking to "learn about White Privilege in case it comes up at work" but rather looking to deny it's existence at all.
It takes some pretty powerful cognitive dissonance to assert that White Privilege doesn't exist.
However, Iron Captain and others are right in that the ultimate arbiter of privilege is Class, specifically Class based on Wealth.
Yes. Because the main argument against White Privilige is not at all that the term is insulting, needlessly divisive and often (as just now) used to kill an argument, and totally that the underlying goal (be more empathic) and principles are wrong because racism doesn't exist anymore.
...
Warning: I hope your sarcasm detector didn't overload there.
feeder wrote: It's a testament to the strength of the Dakka OT that This thread is still going on it second page when the OP admitted in their second post that they weren't looking to "learn about White Privilege in case it comes up at work" but rather looking to deny it's existence at all.
It takes some pretty powerful cognitive dissonance to assert that White Privilege doesn't exist.
However, Iron Captain and others are right in that the ultimate arbiter of privilege is Class, specifically Class based on Wealth.
it doesn’t take “cognitive dissonance” to deny something doesn’t exist when no one has proven it does exist.
So let’s try this, a different tact if you will, you offer up a clearly defined view on what white privilege is, we will try to work off that premise and then you can try to “change my mind” as crowder puts it.
feeder wrote: It's a testament to the strength of the Dakka OT that This thread is still going on it second page when the OP admitted in their second post that they weren't looking to "learn about White Privilege in case it comes up at work" but rather looking to deny it's existence at all.
It takes some pretty powerful cognitive dissonance to assert that White Privilege doesn't exist.
However, Iron Captain and others are right in that the ultimate arbiter of privilege is Class, specifically Class based on Wealth.
it doesn’t take “cognitive dissonance” to deny something doesn’t exist when no one has proven it does exist.
So let’s try this, a different tact if you will, you offer up a clearly defined view on what white privilege is, we will try to work off that premise and then you can try to “change my mind” as crowder puts it.
So... change my mind.
Other, better posters than me have neatly defined it previously in this thread. If anyone is not "getting it" yet, it's because they are unwilling or perhaps unable.
feeder wrote: It's a testament to the strength of the Dakka OT that This thread is still going on it second page when the OP admitted in their second post that they weren't looking to "learn about White Privilege in case it comes up at work" but rather looking to deny it's existence at all.
It takes some pretty powerful cognitive dissonance to assert that White Privilege doesn't exist.
However, Iron Captain and others are right in that the ultimate arbiter of privilege is Class, specifically Class based on Wealth.
it doesn’t take “cognitive dissonance” to deny something doesn’t exist when no one has proven it does exist.
So let’s try this, a different tact if you will, you offer up a clearly defined view on what white privilege is, we will try to work off that premise and then you can try to “change my mind” as crowder puts it.
So... change my mind.
Other, better posters than me have neatly defined it previously in this thread. If anyone is not "getting it" yet, it's because they are unwilling or perhaps unable.
No other posters have posted circumstantial and anecdotal stories with little to no basis in the real world, so again, you define it, in realistic terms and we can discuss it.
feeder wrote: It's a testament to the strength of the Dakka OT that This thread is still going on it second page when the OP admitted in their second post that they weren't looking to "learn about White Privilege in case it comes up at work" but rather looking to deny it's existence at all.
It takes some pretty powerful cognitive dissonance to assert that White Privilege doesn't exist.
However, Iron Captain and others are right in that the ultimate arbiter of privilege is Class, specifically Class based on Wealth.
So you post just to troll the entire Dakka OT? Well played sir!
The 50 percent gap in callback rates is statistically very significant, Bertrand and Mullainathan note in Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873). It indicates that a white name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience.
Another tangible example is in online dating, where black women receive far fewer responses. OK Cupid did a huge study that I'll link to later when I'm not on my work computer, but it's pretty easy to find.
A white name? I wonder if someone named 'Ivan Kuznetsov' or 'Juan Herrero' would get the same amount of callbacks as someone named 'John Smith'? Is this really a racial issue, or is it a more broad issue with xenophobia in that any people that do not have a name associated with the dominant ethnic group get rejected more often, regardless of race? Before they can claim that "white names" result in more callbacks, they should have had a more representative sample of "white" names. Because now it proves nothing beyond having an Anglo-American name results in more callbacks, but Anglo-American does not equate to "white". In European countries with a Germanic majority (like England, Germany etc.), Slavic people get discriminated against, even though both are equally white (again, it is usually set along class lines, Slavic people in those countries typically being lower class). Is this different in the US (Seeing as that the US is predominantly Germanic as well)? Does having a Slavic name yield the same kind of benefits as having a Germanic name? And what about Spanish, Italian or other Latin names? Do all whites have "white" privilege? Or is there discrimination against certain white groups as well?
This is very true, and why "White Privilege" has a context related to North America and some European countries.
In USA, the Irish people where discriminated agaisnt for some years, and they are 100% white.
The only problem I see with the term "White privilege" is that some people believes that is something that only white people can do. As if, if the dominant ethnic group would be other of a different ethnicity things would be different, when as Iron_Captain has pointed out, it does not matter. Russia, Japan, China, Rwanda, India, the dominant ethnic group always has the privilege of being the "Norm" over the minorities, even when they are all blacks, whites, asians, etc... theres always some difference to discriminate.
The same happens when some people believes that if the world was run by females things would be different, when the root of the problem is the existence inequality, not what group is in the top and what one is in the bottom.
feeder wrote: It's a testament to the strength of the Dakka OT that This thread is still going on it second page when the OP admitted in their second post that they weren't looking to "learn about White Privilege in case it comes up at work" but rather looking to deny it's existence at all.
It takes some pretty powerful cognitive dissonance to assert that White Privilege doesn't exist.
However, Iron Captain and others are right in that the ultimate arbiter of privilege is Class, specifically Class based on Wealth.
So you post just to troll the entire Dakka OT? Well played sir!
No, I was being sincere. Despite the OP starting the discussion in bad faith, this community was able to move this topical hot potato forwards anyway.
No other posters have posted circumstantial and anecdotal stories with little to no basis in the real world, so again, you define it, in realistic terms and we can discuss it.
You reject out of hand the answers to your question. You'll never be able to discuss it.
White privilege is an acceptable racist term that can be openly talked about in the UN without fear of reprisal. Whites have earned the discrimination they receive because their life is easier than yours (if you aren't white). All other races should have a handicap advantage placed on them (standardization)(affirmative action).
It's dumb ideas like this that put the country in the state it is currently in. This will never lead to "healing". It actually makes things worse.
There is an inherent amount of racism ingrained in everyones instincts. People natural fear what is different from them. People naturally favor their own culture over others. This is the human condition. It's can't be corrected for.
No other posters have posted circumstantial and anecdotal stories with little to no basis in the real world, so again, you define it, in realistic terms and we can discuss it.
You reject out of hand the answers to your question. You'll never be able to discuss it.
I reject anecdotes and studies that do not pertain to the discussion we are having, so far in this thread I have yet to see credible realistic proof that “white privilege” exists, pol posted a study that literally had nothing to do with it so I asked for another example, which is quite fair.
So again, define it, it’s an open question for everyone to answer, once we settle with that premise we can move on, if you cannot even agree on the central premise then your entire argument is invalid.
This is everyone’s opertunity to change my mind, go for it.
The 50 percent gap in callback rates is statistically very significant, Bertrand and Mullainathan note in Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873). It indicates that a white name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience.
Another tangible example is in online dating, where black women receive far fewer responses. OK Cupid did a huge study that I'll link to later when I'm not on my work computer, but it's pretty easy to find.
A white name? I wonder if someone named 'Ivan Kuznetsov' or 'Juan Herrero' would get the same amount of callbacks as someone named 'John Smith'? Is this really a racial issue, or is it a more broad issue with xenophobia in that any people that do not have a name associated with the dominant ethnic group get rejected more often, regardless of race? Before they can claim that "white names" result in more callbacks, they should have had a more representative sample of "white" names. Because now it proves nothing beyond having an Anglo-American name results in more callbacks, but Anglo-American does not equate to "white". In European countries with a Germanic majority (like England, Germany etc.), Slavic people get discriminated against, even though both are equally white (again, it is usually set along class lines, Slavic people in those countries typically being lower class). Is this different in the US (Seeing as that the US is predominantly Germanic as well)? Does having a Slavic name yield the same kind of benefits as having a Germanic name? And what about Spanish, Italian or other Latin names? Do all whites have "white" privilege? Or is there discrimination against certain white groups as well?
This is very true, and why "White Privilege" has a context related to North America and some European countries.
In USA, the Irish people where discriminated agaisnt for some years, and they are 100% white.
The only problem I see with the term "White privilege" is that some people believes that is something that only white people can do. As if, if the dominant ethnic group would be other of a different ethnicity things would be different, when as Iron_Captain has pointed out, it does not matter. Russia, Japan, China, Rwanda, India, the dominant ethnic group always has the privilege of being the "Norm" over the minorities, even when they are all blacks, whites, asians, etc... theres always some difference to discriminate.
The same happens when some people believes that if the world was run by females things would be different, when the root of the problem is the existence inequality, not what group is in the top and what one is in the bottom.
This is also the way I see it.
Being of Irish ancestory I always found the term to be totally "white privileged" Ironic. Irish received serious bigotry and racism when they came to this country. Now look at them (us). It's the dominant heritage in the US. How did they do it? Well I will venture to say it wan't because they went around crying about "English Privilege".
No other posters have posted circumstantial and anecdotal stories with little to no basis in the real world, so again, you define it, in realistic terms and we can discuss it.
You reject out of hand the answers to your question. You'll never be able to discuss it.
I reject anecdotes and studies that do not pertain to the discussion we are having, so far in this thread I have yet to see credible realistic proof that “white privilege” exists, pol posted a study that literally had nothing to do with it so I asked for another example, which is quite fair.
So again, define it, it’s an open question for everyone to answer, once we settle with that premise we can move on, if you cannot even agree on the central premise then your entire argument is invalid.
This is everyone’s opertunity to change my mind, go for it.
At best the term is a misnomer. I think it actually means "rich people have advantages over poor people". Yeah...No gak right?
Xenomancers wrote: White privilege is an acceptable racist term that can be openly talked about in the UN without fear of reprisal. Whites have earned the discrimination they receive because their life is easier than yours (if you aren't white). All other races should have a handicap advantage placed on them (standardization)(affirmative action).
It's dumb ideas like this that put the country in the state it is currently in. This will never lead to "healing". It actually makes things worse.
There is an inherent amount of racism ingrained in everyones instincts. People natural fear what is different from them. People naturally favor their own culture over others. This is the human condition. It's can't be corrected for.
No, this is a white right-winger's understanding of what "human nature" is. I posit that people don't naturally fear what is different from them, that "favouring their own culture over others" is meaningless and that all of this could very much be corrected for. How the hell did you think new culture was developed if people weren't accepting and if people weren't open to change?
Being of Irish ancestory I always found the term to be totally "white privileged" Ironic. Irish received serious bigotry and racism when they came to this country. Now look at them (us). It's the dominant heritage in the US. How did they do it? Well I will venture to say it wan't because they went around crying about "English Privilege".
What Irish-Americans did to become white was to join in on lynching black people. They agreed to enforce white supremacy and where therefore allowed into the club.
Xenomancers wrote: White privilege is an acceptable racist term that can be openly talked about in the UN without fear of reprisal. Whites have earned the discrimination they receive because their life is easier than yours (if you aren't white). All other races should have a handicap advantage placed on them (standardization)(affirmative action).
It's dumb ideas like this that put the country in the state it is currently in. This will never lead to "healing". It actually makes things worse.
There is an inherent amount of racism ingrained in everyones instincts. People natural fear what is different from them. People naturally favor their own culture over others. This is the human condition. It's can't be corrected for.
No, this is a white right-winger's understanding of what "human nature" is. I posit that people don't naturally fear what is different from them, that "favouring their own culture over others" is meaningless and that all of this could very much be corrected for. How the hell did you think new culture was developed if people weren't accepting and if people weren't open to change?
Being of Irish ancestory I always found the term to be totally "white privileged" Ironic. Irish received serious bigotry and racism when they came to this country. Now look at them (us). It's the dominant heritage in the US. How did they do it? Well I will venture to say it wan't because they went around crying about "English Privilege".
What Irish-Americans did to become white was to join in on lynching black people. They agreed to enforce white supremacy and where therefore allowed into the club.
Incorrect, I’m centre left and I agree with his assessment but not completely, your last statement is racist in the extreme, just as bad as saying “All Black people are thieves” ... you should apologise.
feeder wrote: It's a testament to the strength of the Dakka OT that This thread is still going on it second page when the OP admitted in their second post that they weren't looking to "learn about White Privilege in case it comes up at work" but rather looking to deny it's existence at all.
It takes some pretty powerful cognitive dissonance to assert that White Privilege doesn't exist.
However, Iron Captain and others are right in that the ultimate arbiter of privilege is Class, specifically Class based on Wealth.
I’ve been very clear that discrimination exists. But I have yet to see an argument that convinces me that the two are actually distinct. One poster even claimed that it was semantics to make the distinction. Another claimed that this is about not portraying black people as victims. Viewing black people as a criminalised other is discrimination. Or are you saying that such views are irrelevant if I don’t accept the rhetoric and think it’s counter productive to keep insisting that you have accept this new doctrine and language to describe the exact same issue?
So let’s say I made a Twitter post, I dunno, showing an innocent black person who was killed in a shooting and remarked “Discrimination strikes again.”. You are saying that this is racist because it doesn’t acknowledge white privilege? That you would take somebody up on that? You think such a fruitful conversation would help anyone? Because you object to a white person implying black people are victims?
Iam trying to make people see the absurdity of this whole thing.
Xenomancers wrote: White privilege is an acceptable racist term that can be openly talked about in the UN without fear of reprisal. Whites have earned the discrimination they receive because their life is easier than yours (if you aren't white). All other races should have a handicap advantage placed on them (standardization)(affirmative action).
It's dumb ideas like this that put the country in the state it is currently in. This will never lead to "healing". It actually makes things worse.
There is an inherent amount of racism ingrained in everyones instincts. People natural fear what is different from them. People naturally favor their own culture over others. This is the human condition. It's can't be corrected for.
No, this is a white right-winger's understanding of what "human nature" is. I posit that people don't naturally fear what is different from them, that "favouring their own culture over others" is meaningless and that all of this could very much be corrected for. How the hell did you think new culture was developed if people weren't accepting and if people weren't open to change?
Being of Irish ancestory I always found the term to be totally "white privileged" Ironic. Irish received serious bigotry and racism when they came to this country. Now look at them (us). It's the dominant heritage in the US. How did they do it? Well I will venture to say it wan't because they went around crying about "English Privilege".
What Irish-Americans did to become white was to join in on lynching black people. They agreed to enforce white supremacy and where therefore allowed into the club.
Incorrect, I’m centre left and I agree with his assessment but not completely, your last statement is racist in the extreme, just as bad as saying “All Black people are thieves” ... you should apologise.
If you believe that the natural state of humanity is fear for each other and that this can't be changed then you aren't any kind of left at all because the key aspect of that range of ideologies is that people are equal and should be free to become as they wish to be.
Xenomancers wrote: White privilege is an acceptable racist term that can be openly talked about in the UN without fear of reprisal. Whites have earned the discrimination they receive because their life is easier than yours (if you aren't white). All other races should have a handicap advantage placed on them (standardization)(affirmative action).
It's dumb ideas like this that put the country in the state it is currently in. This will never lead to "healing". It actually makes things worse.
There is an inherent amount of racism ingrained in everyones instincts. People natural fear what is different from them. People naturally favor their own culture over others. This is the human condition. It's can't be corrected for.
No, this is a white right-winger's understanding of what "human nature" is. I posit that people don't naturally fear what is different from them, that "favouring their own culture over others" is meaningless and that all of this could very much be corrected for. How the hell did you think new culture was developed if people weren't accepting and if people weren't open to change?
Being of Irish ancestory I always found the term to be totally "white privileged" Ironic. Irish received serious bigotry and racism when they came to this country. Now look at them (us). It's the dominant heritage in the US. How did they do it? Well I will venture to say it wan't because they went around crying about "English Privilege".
What Irish-Americans did to become white was to join in on lynching black people. They agreed to enforce white supremacy and where therefore allowed into the club.
Incorrect, I’m centre left and I agree with his assessment but not completely, your last statement is racist in the extreme, just as bad as saying “All Black people are thieves” ... you should apologise.
He won't. In his definition of racism. Only whites can be racist.
IDK if it's been tested, but it would not surprise me of there was more prejudice against non-anglo-saxon especially latin names in the USA than in Europe.
However all whites whether slavic, anglo-saxon or Italian have white privilege in circumstances where the key factor is whiteness rather than the pronunciation of their name.
Totalwar1402 wrote:...See I was watching a BBC documentary about the term and I really couldn’t understand the distinction between these two definitions. You could watch that film and take either.
It might come up at work so I d rather not get caught out misunderstanding what’s being discussed.
Totalwar1402 wrote:Iam trying to make people see the absurdity of this whole thing.
This is why I accused you of acting in bad faith. Don't do that. If you want to have a discussion, state that. Don't come in all "Gee whiz guys, what's this white privilege I keep hearing so much about?"
Xenomancers wrote: White privilege is an acceptable racist term that can be openly talked about in the UN without fear of reprisal. Whites have earned the discrimination they receive because their life is easier than yours (if you aren't white). All other races should have a handicap advantage placed on them (standardization)(affirmative action).
It's dumb ideas like this that put the country in the state it is currently in. This will never lead to "healing". It actually makes things worse.
There is an inherent amount of racism ingrained in everyones instincts. People natural fear what is different from them. People naturally favor their own culture over others. This is the human condition. It's can't be corrected for.
No, this is a white right-winger's understanding of what "human nature" is. I posit that people don't naturally fear what is different from them, that "favouring their own culture over others" is meaningless and that all of this could very much be corrected for. How the hell did you think new culture was developed if people weren't accepting and if people weren't open to change?
Being of Irish ancestory I always found the term to be totally "white privileged" Ironic. Irish received serious bigotry and racism when they came to this country. Now look at them (us). It's the dominant heritage in the US. How did they do it? Well I will venture to say it wan't because they went around crying about "English Privilege".
What Irish-Americans did to become white was to join in on lynching black people. They agreed to enforce white supremacy and where therefore allowed into the club.
Incorrect, I’m centre left and I agree with his assessment but not completely, your last statement is racist in the extreme, just as bad as saying “All Black people are thieves” ... you should apologise.
If you believe that the natural state of humanity is fear for each other and that this can't be changed then you aren't any kind of left at all because the key aspect of that range of ideologies is that people are equal and should be free to become as they wish to be.
I am describing natural instincts. Things that are around from when we were apes. It is the natural state of things - it doesn't mean we have to fear each other. Just understand that it's totally normal for little discrimination to happen without people even noticing about it. OFC I am not dismissing that white children have a higher chance of success for a lot of factors. I just disagree with calling the term "white privilege" It is an extremely racist idea and it sends the wrong message all together. Educate people about the issues they might encounter in life and why - give them the tools of knowledge to help them break through the barriers.
Here is just an example . Oh something I heard about on the subject.
Imagine there is a manager looking through applications - quickly. He is unknowingly being prejudicial to any name he doesn't immediately recognize - it's not racist - he doesn't even know the race of the names he's looking at BUT - he still Tosses Shaniqua aside and picks Kimberly instead to look into.
So instead of crying white privilege. Maybe we should just educate parents when they name their children. "Heres a list of 5000 names that will make your child more successful" "heres a list of 500 names you shouldn't name your child". I don't want to hear any crap about "oh thats our culture" BS - that is you kicking yourself in the butt because this is just the way the world works.
This is just a tiny example. of one factor of "white privilege" which is really most of the time a cultural thing - having nothing to do with skin color. Even white families could doom their child with a name disadvantage. They just don't because they want their kids to be successful.
Xenomancers wrote: White privilege is an acceptable racist term that can be openly talked about in the UN without fear of reprisal. Whites have earned the discrimination they receive because their life is easier than yours (if you aren't white). All other races should have a handicap advantage placed on them (standardization)(affirmative action).
It's dumb ideas like this that put the country in the state it is currently in. This will never lead to "healing". It actually makes things worse.
There is an inherent amount of racism ingrained in everyones instincts. People natural fear what is different from them. People naturally favor their own culture over others. This is the human condition. It's can't be corrected for.
No, this is a white right-winger's understanding of what "human nature" is. I posit that people don't naturally fear what is different from them, that "favouring their own culture over others" is meaningless and that all of this could very much be corrected for. How the hell did you think new culture was developed if people weren't accepting and if people weren't open to change?
Being of Irish ancestory I always found the term to be totally "white privileged" Ironic. Irish received serious bigotry and racism when they came to this country. Now look at them (us). It's the dominant heritage in the US. How did they do it? Well I will venture to say it wan't because they went around crying about "English Privilege".
What Irish-Americans did to become white was to join in on lynching black people. They agreed to enforce white supremacy and where therefore allowed into the club.
Incorrect, I’m centre left and I agree with his assessment but not completely, your last statement is racist in the extreme, just as bad as saying “All Black people are thieves” ... you should apologise.
If you believe that the natural state of humanity is fear for each other and that this can't be changed then you aren't any kind of left at all because the key aspect of that range of ideologies is that people are equal and should be free to become as they wish to be.
The fear of the unknown is part of our basic psychological makeup, this is a fact, through understanding and organic integration we learn to overcome this fear, to the point that it ceases to be a fear and is the norm, so yes I agree with his assessment but not completely.
And yes I’m centre left, but to someone as far left as you appear, we are all alt right, if your not one of us your part of the problem is something I see bandied around by the far left all the time, the sheer and utter refusal to see the world in shades of grey, rather than black and white like they see it.
Kilkrazy wrote: IDK if it's been tested, but it would not surprise me of there was more prejudice against non-anglo-saxon especially latin names in the USA than in Europe.
However all whites whether slavic, anglo-saxon or Italian have white privilege in circumstances where the key factor is whiteness rather than the pronunciation of their name.
What circumstances are the key factors whiteness? What do you mean by whiteness anyways. Are we talking about having a name that sound American?
Ahtman wrote: I see I won't have to go to 4chan today as I can just read this thread.
Is there dissenting voices on 4chan? I thought it was a circle jerk of disaffected little boys trying to out-egdelord one another. Sort of a 'through the mirror darkly" version of tumblr.
Formosa wrote: I read that article pol, it in no way refers to white privilege, do you have another ?
Umm... it was an article literally about how similar resumes got better results when the person had a strongly white name vs. a strongly black name. I cannot think of better evidence for white privilege than a field experiment showing that employers were more likely to call back white applicants than black ones.
Ahtman wrote: I see I won't have to go to 4chan today as I can just read this thread.
Is there dissenting voices on 4chan? I thought it was a circle jerk of disaffected little boys trying to out-egdelord one another. Sort of a 'through the mirror darkly" version of tumblr.
I don't think I would call it dissenting as usually it comes up around things unrelated to the subject at hand. For example it may be a thread about Primaris Marine fluff and someone will start complaining about how white privilege doesn't exist or some other ill informed non-sense. Looking at the ill-informed nonsense happening here and the severe denial of it there is no reason to go there to see that at the moment. All we need now is someone to start using 'SJW' as a slam and the transformation to a 4chan thread will be almost complete.
Formosa wrote: I read that article pol, it in no way refers to white privilege, do you have another ?
Umm... it was an article literally about how similar resumes got better results when the person had a strongly white name vs. a strongly black name. I cannot think of better evidence for white privilege than a field experiment showing that employers were more likely to call back white applicants than black ones.
That’s not white privilege though, that’s not showing how white people have an advantage based solely on being white, if I had a “black” name then I would have been chinned off, it’s not a privilege thing, it’s a prejudism thing.
Formosa wrote: That’s not white privilege though, that’s not showing how white people have an advantage based solely on being white, if I had a “black” name then I would have been chinned off, it’s not a privilege thing, it’s a prejudism thing.
So do you have another example ?
Are you honestly saying that people don't judge between white and black people, but people with white or black names?
And yes, if you had a black name you would be less likely to get a call back... because the employer would assume you were black.
The actual methodology involved controlling for names that were both common in either race, and strongly identified with that race.
Formosa wrote: I read that article pol, it in no way refers to white privilege, do you have another ?
Umm... it was an article literally about how similar resumes got better results when the person had a strongly white name vs. a strongly black name. I cannot think of better evidence for white privilege than a field experiment showing that employers were more likely to call back white applicants than black ones.
That’s not white privilege though, that’s not showing how white people have an advantage based solely on being white, if I had a “black” name then I would have been chinned off, it’s not a privilege thing, it’s a prejudism thing.
So do you have another example ?
feeder wrote:If anyone is not "getting it" yet, it's because they are unwilling or perhaps unable.
Xenomancers wrote: White privilege is an acceptable racist term that can be openly talked about in the UN without fear of reprisal. Whites have earned the discrimination they receive because their life is easier than yours (if you aren't white). All other races should have a handicap advantage placed on them (standardization)(affirmative action).
It's dumb ideas like this that put the country in the state it is currently in. This will never lead to "healing". It actually makes things worse.
There is an inherent amount of racism ingrained in everyones instincts. People natural fear what is different from them. People naturally favor their own culture over others. This is the human condition. It's can't be corrected for.
No, this is a white right-winger's understanding of what "human nature" is. I posit that people don't naturally fear what is different from them, that "favouring their own culture over others" is meaningless and that all of this could very much be corrected for. How the hell did you think new culture was developed if people weren't accepting and if people weren't open to change?
Pretty much spot on - it's part of the fake ad popularum argument used by the right. "Oh everyone's secretly a Nazi, they just won't admit it because of those darn liberals!".
I can't tell if it's a failure to understand normalistic fallacies or a desperate attempt to look big and scary.
Formosa wrote: That’s not white privilege though, that’s not showing how white people have an advantage based solely on being white, if I had a “black” name then I would have been chinned off, it’s not a privilege thing, it’s a prejudism thing.
So do you have another example ?
Are you honestly saying that people don't judge between white and black people, but people with white or black names?
And yes, if you had a black name you would be less likely to get a call back... because the employer would assume you were black.
The actual methodology involved controlling for names that were both common in either race, and strongly identified with that race.
Yes I am saying that particular article does not show what you claim it does, after reading it I agree it shows prejudice against black people but in no way shows a white privilege, one does not equate the other.
Formosa wrote: That’s not white privilege though, that’s not showing how white people have an advantage based solely on being white, if I had a “black” name then I would have been chinned off, it’s not a privilege thing, it’s a prejudism thing.
So do you have another example ?
Are you honestly saying that people don't judge between white and black people, but people with white or black names?
And yes, if you had a black name you would be less likely to get a call back... because the employer would assume you were black.
The actual methodology involved controlling for names that were both common in either race, and strongly identified with that race.
Perhaps you are being blind to the actual problem. People who care about their children success name them for success.
You'd have an equally bad success rate naming your children after Zelda characters. Or like some dumb girl I know - named her child some idiotic name. I think it's Erza. Shes white BTW. Promise you that kid struggles getting jobs with that name. It has exactly 0 to do with race and 100% with familiarity and comfortably - in the instant someone looks at the name.
The study I am really interested in. Is the one that shows it's actually an advantage or have 0 effect to be black in the job hunting game if you have a name that sounds "white" or as I like to say. Sounds American.
If I am untrustworthy, I will assume others are untrustworthy. If I get away with it, it's because the other person was stupid, so I deserved the "win".
Same thing happens with prejudice. I work around a lot of olde-thymey guys. Some in their 70's that are still working in gravel pits. To them, racism was a way of life. My grandfather is 97 years old, and one of the nicest men I've ever met. He has no problems with the colour of anyone's skin... but Muslim? Russian? Chinese? (Those 3, specifically. And specifically Chinese, other "orientals" aren't a problem.)
They think I'm faking it when I say that no, I don't agree with their views on these things. Like my disagreeing with these ideas is a face I'm putting on for the public, not my internally held beliefs. They can't imagine a world where someone does not believe as they do, it's just part of what they are.
If you can't imagine a better way, you stick to what you know.
Formosa wrote: Yes I am saying that particular article does not show what you claim it does, after reading it I agree it shows prejudice against black people but in no way shows a white privilege, one does not equate the other.
Of course it does. I'm arguing that white privilege is the idea that white people have an easier path to success. I cited a study that showed stereo typically white names resulted in more call backs. That is literally an easier path to success.
Formosa wrote: I read that article pol, it in no way refers to white privilege, do you have another ?
Umm... it was an article literally about how similar resumes got better results when the person had a strongly white name vs. a strongly black name. I cannot think of better evidence for white privilege than a field experiment showing that employers were more likely to call back white applicants than black ones.
That’s not white privilege though, that’s not showing how white people have an advantage based solely on being white, if I had a “black” name then I would have been chinned off, it’s not a privilege thing, it’s a prejudism thing.
So do you have another example ?
feeder wrote:If anyone is not "getting it" yet, it's because they are unwilling or perhaps unable.
I have asked you several times to define your terminology, you have refused, I have asked you to keep it civil, you are clearly not, if you want to contribute do so, otherwise pipe down and let the rest of us have this conversation.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: If only there were some sort of academic concept for how different kinds of disciplines intersect with one another. We could call it, I don't know, Intersectionality. Alas, such a thing hasn't ever been thought of before, so sadly we must conclude that White Privilege can't be a thing because other people can be oppressed too. Oh well.
Accepting the validity of intersectionality, using the term white privilege is intellectually lazy and an oversimplification of the privileged social status. The whole point of intersectionality is that there are multiple and varied factors contributing to the creation of the privilege, including but certainly not limited to ethnicity. It can be argued that economic status is far more important than ethnicity in regards to the degree of privilege enjoyed by an individual. There are millions of poor white people in the US who don't have a high level of education and live in rural areas and trailer park type neighborhoods that have less access to services and benefits than millions of poor nonwhite people living in urban ghettos. Poverty strips away a lot of benefits and wealth bestows a lot of benefits, nonwhites that have wealth are able to overcome a large amount of the obstacles faced by nonwhites who lack wealth. Family structure also plays a factor, having a two parent household with one or both parents being college graduates and employed is a significant factor regarding income earned by the family, where they live and the degree of importance placed on education, all of which mitigates obstacles created by racism directed at nonwhite ethnicities. If you agree that intersectionality exists than you must also accept that "white privilege" isn't determined by "whiteness" alone and that therefore "white privilege" as a descriptive term is a misnomer at best and a deliberate obfuscation at worst.
Formosa wrote: Yes I am saying that particular article does not show what you claim it does, after reading it I agree it shows prejudice against black people but in no way shows a white privilege, one does not equate the other.
Of course it does. I'm arguing that white privilege is the idea that white people have an easier path to success. I cited a study that showed stereo typically white names resulted in more call backs. That is literally an easier path to success.
I respect your opinion pol but in this I think your being biased, that study does not Snow White privilege, it merely shows a clear bias towards certain names and the pre conceived notion of which race those names belong to
Ahtman wrote: I see I won't have to go to 4chan today as I can just read this thread.
Is there dissenting voices on 4chan? I thought it was a circle jerk of disaffected little boys trying to out-egdelord one another. Sort of a 'through the mirror darkly" version of tumblr.
I don't think I would call it dissenting as usually it comes up around things unrelated to the subject at hand. For example it may be a thread about Primaris Marine fluff and someone will start complaining about how white privilege doesn't exist or some other ill informed non-sense. Looking at the ill-informed nonsense happening here and the severe denial of it there is no reason to go there to see that at the moment. All we need now is someone to start using 'SJW' as a slam and the transformation to a 4chan thread will be almost complete.
Perhaps you are being blind to the actual problem. People who care about their children success name them for success.
I think that's a bold claim, but we'll move in.
You'd have an equally bad success rate naming your children after Zelda characters. Or like some dumb girl I know - named her child some idiotic name. I think it's Erza. Shes white BTW. Promise you that kid struggles getting jobs with that name. It has exactly 0 to do with race and 100% with familiarity and comfortably - in the instant someone looks at the name.
Citation needed.
The study did note:
The experiment, conducted between July 2001 and January 2002, reveals several other aspects of discrimination. If the fictitious resume indicates that the applicant lives in a wealthier, or more educated, or more-white neighborhood, the callback rate rises. Interestingly, this effect does not differ by race.
there seems to be a strong racial component here.
The study I am really interested in. Is the one that shows it's actually an advantage or have 0 effect to be black in the job hunting game if you have a name that sounds "white" or as I like to say. Sounds American.
So, you'd be interested in a study that confirms your worldview?
The thing is, the names selected aren't uncommon names, just typically black or white names.
Formosa wrote: Yes I am saying that particular article does not show what you claim it does, after reading it I agree it shows prejudice against black people but in no way shows a white privilege, one does not equate the other.
Of course it does. I'm arguing that white privilege is the idea that white people have an easier path to success. I cited a study that showed stereo typically white names resulted in more call backs. That is literally an easier path to success.
I respect your opinion pol but in this I think your being biased, that study does not Snow White privilege, it merely shows a clear bias towards certain names and the pre conceived notion of which race those names belong to
Right. And since it benefits white people... it shows white privilege.
You can't just say "this just happens to benefit white people." White privilege is the term for all of the things that "just happen" to benefit white people.
This isn't some sort of advanced non-Euclidean proof here.
- White people are more likely to have white names
-People with white names are more likely to have an advantage looking for a job
-White people have an advantage looking for a job.
I don't get why people are so adamant in thinking that being white isn't a benefit in American society.
Formosa wrote: Yes I am saying that particular article does not show what you claim it does, after reading it I agree it shows prejudice against black people but in no way shows a white privilege, one does not equate the other.
Of course it does. I'm arguing that white privilege is the idea that white people have an easier path to success. I cited a study that showed stereo typically white names resulted in more call backs. That is literally an easier path to success.
I missed the study. but honest question did they factor in other types of names as well? Asian, middle eastern, black, white, Spanish? what was the spread. if it shows that people with white names have a better pick rate over all then that would show a bias towards white. if everything else was reletivly equal except for black names than it would show a bias against blacks rather than white privilege no?
Formosa wrote: I read that article pol, it in no way refers to white privilege, do you have another ?
Umm... it was an article literally about how similar resumes got better results when the person had a strongly white name vs. a strongly black name. I cannot think of better evidence for white privilege than a field experiment showing that employers were more likely to call back white applicants than black ones.
That’s not white privilege though, that’s not showing how white people have an advantage based solely on being white, if I had a “black” name then I would have been chinned off, it’s not a privilege thing, it’s a prejudism thing.
So do you have another example ?
feeder wrote:If anyone is not "getting it" yet, it's because they are unwilling or perhaps unable.
I have asked you several times to define your terminology, you have refused, I have asked you to keep it civil, you are clearly not, if you want to contribute do so, otherwise pipe down and let the rest of us have this conversation.
I mean, he showed you a study that was as a clear cut example as you could ask for, and yet you insisted that was prejudice and not privilege.
So we circle back to the start of the thread where what is really being argued is semantics.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: If only there were some sort of academic concept for how different kinds of disciplines intersect with one another. We could call it, I don't know, Intersectionality. Alas, such a thing hasn't ever been thought of before, so sadly we must conclude that White Privilege can't be a thing because other people can be oppressed too. Oh well.
Accepting the validity of intersectionality, using the term white privilege is intellectually lazy and an oversimplification of the privileged social status. The whole point of intersectionality is that there are multiple and varied factors contributing to the creation of the privilege, including but certainly not limited to ethnicity. It can be argued that economic status is far more important than ethnicity in regards to the degree of privilege enjoyed by an individual. There are millions of poor white people in the US who don't have a high level of education and live in rural areas and trailer park type neighborhoods that have less access to services and benefits than millions of poor nonwhite people living in urban ghettos. Poverty strips away a lot of benefits and wealth bestows a lot of benefits, nonwhites that have wealth are able to overcome a large amount of the obstacles faced by nonwhites who lack wealth. Family structure also plays a factor, having a two parent household with one or both parents being college graduates and employed is a significant factor regarding income earned by the family, where they live and the degree of importance placed on education, all of which mitigates obstacles created by racism directed at nonwhite ethnicities. If you agree that intersectionality exists than you must also accept that "white privilege" isn't determined by "whiteness" alone and that therefore "white privilege" as a descriptive term is a misnomer at best and a deliberate obfuscation at worst.
As has been pointed out many times, not only does whiteness correlate with higher economic status, white people have a better chance of leaving poverty.
No matter what else is going on in your life, being white almost always makes it easier.
Formosa wrote: Yes I am saying that particular article does not show what you claim it does, after reading it I agree it shows prejudice against black people but in no way shows a white privilege, one does not equate the other.
Of course it does. I'm arguing that white privilege is the idea that white people have an easier path to success. I cited a study that showed stereo typically white names resulted in more call backs. That is literally an easier path to success.
I missed the study. but honest question did they factor in other types of names as well? Asian, middle eastern, black, white, Spanish? what was the spread. if it shows that people with white names have a better pick rate over all then that would show a bias towards white. if everything else was reletivly equal except for black names than it would show a bias against blacks rather than white privilege no?
It was white and black names only. White names got a call back for roughly every 10 resumes sent out, while black names took 15 resumes.
And bias against blacks is evidnece of white privilege. If the answer to the question is "would I rather be white in this situation?" is "yes," it's an example of white privilege.
GreatBigTree, 36 year old married white man, attempts to define White Privilege for the purposes of internet discussion: Off to a terrible start, already.
First off, White Privilege is not a literal term. Part of the problem, right there. It has a North American context. Outside of this, there is different cultural background, so this may not apply to your region of the world, or even ALL regions of North America. They are two words, used to surmise a tendancy of a society to favour one group of people over another. A society that allowed slavery, then disallowed slavery, but did not addequately enfranchise the freed people at that time. This has had a continuing impact over the centuries since. A lot of connotation has been put into these two words.
Here goes, definition.
White Privilege: Passive, institutional racism, that has benefited white people over several generations.
While some white people benefit to a greater and lesser degree, there is a tendency for those currently in positions of power to create situations in which power continues to those of their choosing. In North America, and particularly America, the end of Black slavery prevented White people from owning Black people, but did not end discrimination. Black people did not own property, and as such needed to rent land from White people. Property (land) ownership is a key factor in long-term, generational wealth accumulation. In the past, Black people were not allowed, or incredibly disincentivised, to own land. Even in recent times (last 20 years) the land they were “allowed” to own was only in particular neighbourhoods with low land value. When an entire group of people are renting property, the wealth that property generates goes to the land owners. In this case, rent money from Black renters has historically been funneling into the hands of the White owners.
This has lead to a condition in which the average White family's net worth as increased, while the average Black family's net worth has remained mostly stagnant. The rich keep getting richer, and the poor keep getting screwed. Not all White families are wealthier than a few generations ago, but most are. Most Black families are no wealthier than before, though some are.
White Privilege also describes the tendency of White People to be unaware of advantages they may have over non-White people, as they have not experienced the disadvantages. These advantages are often wealth advantages, but they can also be “lack of disadvantages” such as active discrimination. Tendency for fewer divorced / absent parents. Greater access to health care and education. In observation of the entirety of North America, Black people have less access to job opportunities, due to poorer location, discrimination, and less available capital to take risk ventures (like going to college) which typically result in greater financial returns. Over several generations, this has created a significant financial gap.
Due to lack of awareness, “White Privilege” can blind White persons to the increased obstacles that “Others” face. A White person, with more and often better opportunities may think to themselves, “I worked hard and earned my place, so can anyone else.” But this is not necessarily the case where fewer, less rewarding opportunities exist. “So why not move?” If you're being discriminated against, and do not have the available capital to move to a more opportune location, you can't. There's no wild west to pick up stakes and move to, where anyone with a working body can plant rows of food and grow their own resources. Wherever a person goes, they must pay to be there. They must earn money from their labour. It is a defeating cycle of inability to create the critical mass of resources to begin advancing. A situation actively enforced through discrimination, the effects of which are still being felt.
This lack of awareness, though unintentional, leads people to oppose “affirmative actions” or other efforts to give advantages to non-Whites, as it is seen as giving and advantage, rather than lessening or equalizing disadvantages. It is often justified as “Everyone's got problems to deal with” which they do. And some White people are at greater disadvantage than some Black people, but this is not the usual case. This is a societal observation of overall trends.
It is a tendancy to assume that White people “Normal” is the “Normal” that all other nationalities should conform to. Rather than determining a “Normal” that all people can be compared to equally, White Privilege is a perspective that compares others to “White Normal”. It is not necessarily intentional, and generally isn't. It's is a case of judging in ignorance, using “Ignorance” in the dictionary meaning, as a state of lack of understanding or knowlege. If a man eats at home his entire life, he believes his mother to be the best cook in the world, whether or not this is accurate. Without expanding experience to include the perspective of “others”, White people can only see challenges from their own perspective.
At its best, the term White Privilege is a shortcut to describe the tendency of even well-meaning people to not realize the inequalities that are applied to others. It points out that without knowledge and experience of these factors, the “Privileged” person is unlikely to accurately judge the situation of the “Other” and thus is unlikely to be able to determine a functional solution to the very complicated and longstanding inequality that exists in North America. While the term Black people has been used throughout this, it often applies to anyone non-Western Euopean.
At its best, White Privilege does not ignore or deny that there are other forms of discrimination that impact Whites and non-Whites. It regognizes that there are many issues at play, and that this is a particularly important one as it lies outside of the “Other's” control. It addresses the insidious nature of White power structures to assume their own correctness.
Formosa wrote: Yes I am saying that particular article does not show what you claim it does, after reading it I agree it shows prejudice against black people but in no way shows a white privilege, one does not equate the other.
Of course it does. I'm arguing that white privilege is the idea that white people have an easier path to success. I cited a study that showed stereo typically white names resulted in more call backs. That is literally an easier path to success.
I missed the study. but honest question did they factor in other types of names as well? Asian, middle eastern, black, white, Spanish? what was the spread. if it shows that people with white names have a better pick rate over all then that would show a bias towards white. if everything else was reletivly equal except for black names than it would show a bias against blacks rather than white privilege no?
It was white and black names only. White names got a call back for roughly every 10 resumes sent out, while black names took 15 resumes.
And bias against blacks is evidnece of white privilege. If the answer to the question is "would I rather be white in this situation?" is "yes," it's an example of white privilege.
I dont think that is how data works.
white vs black only shows that there is only a bias between the two. it has the potential to show that there is white privilege and or black disadvantage. there would of need to be a control to see weather or not its one or the other or both. as well it would be intresting to see the spread in different fields such as tech, industry, financials and even menial labor (with all the different types of names).
white vs black only shows that there is only a bias between the two. it has the potential to show that there is white privilege and or black disadvantage. there would of need to be a control to see weather or not its one or the other or both.
I'm genunily uncertain why a disadvantage to one group isn't an advantage to another. It doesn't matter if a white person gets 50% more callbacks or the black person gets 33% fewer, it shows that the white person has an advantage and the black person has a disadvantage.
as well it would be intresting to see the spread in different fields such as tech, industry, financials and even menial labor (with all the different types of names).
From the actual study:
In total, we respond to over 1300 employment ads in the sales, administrative support,
clerical and customer services job categories and send nearly 5000 resumes. The ads we respond to cover a
large spectrum of job quality, from cashier work at retail establishments and clerical work in a mailroom to
office and sales management positions.
I've also heard that having monosyllabic names also increase the chances of a callback. "Jen" is more likely to be called back than "Willimina". I'd be interested to see a study that compares ethnic sounding names with Cleatus, Jethro, Jebbadiah, and other "hick" sounding names.
white vs black only shows that there is only a bias between the two. it has the potential to show that there is white privilege and or black disadvantage. there would of need to be a control to see weather or not its one or the other or both.
I'm genunily uncertain why a disadvantage to one group isn't an advantage to another. It doesn't matter if a white person gets 50% more callbacks or the black person gets 33% fewer, it shows that the white person has an advantage and the black person has a disadvantage.
as well it would be intresting to see the spread in different fields such as tech, industry, financials and even menial labor (with all the different types of names).
From the actual study:
In total, we respond to over 1300 employment ads in the sales, administrative support, clerical and customer services job categories and send nearly 5000 resumes. The ads we respond to cover a large spectrum of job quality, from cashier work at retail establishments and clerical work in a mailroom to office and sales management positions.
Because if its not only white people then its not white privilege. its everyone except (xyz) privilege. (if say white and asian names got 50% call backs and black names only got 33%)
Desubot wrote: Because if its not only white people then its not white privilege. its everyone except (xyz) privilege. (if say white and asian names got 50% call backs and black names only got 33%)
Black applicants faced major discrimination when applying for jobs with a customer focus. Researchers looked for jobs with words like “customer,” “sales,” “advisor,” “representative,” “agent,” and “loan officer” in the description. For jobs such as these, the discrimination gap soared. Instead of facing a 2.8 percentage-point gap between callback rates for whites and blacks, they faced a 4.4-point gap.
This implies that while employers might not be actively racist, they know (or think they know) what will please their customers.
appears Asians have a wee bit better than blacks. though i wonder what the results would be like if they had added some non "American" European names and experiences like Irish or German. as in their paper at least on the resume audit was more about removing racial queues than making them literally white.
on that i think my biggest take away from this is "Despite the diversity rhetoric, the main patterns in this subsample were similar to those observed across all job ads"
This quite effectively shows that white privilege is BS, citations are in description.
Cant watch at work.
what happens?
A black person uses household income to show that white Americans are not even in the top 5 when it comes to the moola, in fact it’s mainly Asians and Africans, not African Americans, he then states its down to the failings within the black community itself that is causing the problems, such as 72% of black homes having a single parent (mother), I could go on but the video explains it better.
I also found Morgan freeman stating pretty much the same and a LOT of African American you tubers stating as much, they know there own communities.
You shouldn't cite a guy who quit because he realized his employer was getting him to say BS.
So it's rather a black guy used the average income of affluent immigrants from Asian and Africa who are slightly higher than the average white American household to not prove their point.
Formosa wrote: I also found Morgan freeman stating pretty much the same and a LOT of African American you tubers stating as much, they know there own communities.
Morgan Freeman is not the emperor of black people. He is a 81 year old man with a net worth of 200 million dollars.
white vs black only shows that there is only a bias between the two. it has the potential to show that there is white privilege and or black disadvantage. there would of need to be a control to see weather or not its one or the other or both.
I'm genunily uncertain why a disadvantage to one group isn't an advantage to another. It doesn't matter if a white person gets 50% more callbacks or the black person gets 33% fewer, it shows that the white person has an advantage and the black person has a disadvantage.
as well it would be intresting to see the spread in different fields such as tech, industry, financials and even menial labor (with all the different types of names).
From the actual study:
In total, we respond to over 1300 employment ads in the sales, administrative support,
clerical and customer services job categories and send nearly 5000 resumes. The ads we respond to cover a
large spectrum of job quality, from cashier work at retail establishments and clerical work in a mailroom to
office and sales management positions.
What you don’t seem to be understanding is that a disadvantage for one group is not to the advantage of the other. It’s that one group is discriminated against. The other group has no direct benefit to getting call backs, only that they are not being discriminated against.
Polonius wrote: I'm genunily uncertain why a disadvantage to one group isn't an advantage to another.
Would you mind explaining it one more time? I'd like to pretend I don't understand again.
Is it a privilege to walk down the street without being harassed? The days that a black man walks down a street without being profiled, are they a privilege or just another day? Does he suddenly have an advantage over other men?
Sinful Hero wrote: Is it a privilege to walk down the street without being harassed?
If you are statistically significantly more likely to enjoy this advantage, yes?
Sinful Hero wrote: The days that a black man walks down a street without being profiled, are they a privilege or just another day?
On days when a white guy and a black guy both are driving somewhere, and the cops don't pull one over; are those days when racial inequality as a longstanding issue suddenly ceases to exist?
Sinful Hero wrote: Is it a privilege to walk down the street without being harassed?
If you are statistically significantly more likely to enjoy this advantage, yes?
So White women don’t benefit from white privilege seeing as how they’re far more likely to be harassed than men?
Sinful Hero wrote: The days that a black man walks down a street without being profiled, are they a privilege or just another day?
On days when a white guy and a black guy both are driving somewhere and the cops don't pull one over days when racial inequality as a longstanding issue suddenly ceases to exist?
Not what I said at all. I merely asked is a black man gaining a privilege he didn’t have on days when he isn’t harrassed by police?
I believe White privilege will dissapear from North America as the demographic changes the next decades. Whites will still be mostly the upper part of society for decades because they will inherit power even when they start becoming a minority in USA, but probably in 60-100 years the power will shift to another ethnic group. Probably hispanics.
Sinful Hero wrote: So White women don’t benefit from white privilege seeing as how they’re far more likely to be harassed than men?
Being harassed is only one element of the many factors that the concept of "white privilege" describe. The most easily used analogy is job callbacks because that's well researched and provable (at least, to horses that are thirsty) but of course privilege involves many things, and having less of one benefit doesn't somehow wipe out everything else.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: If only there were some sort of academic concept for how different kinds of disciplines intersect with one another. We could call it, I don't know, Intersectionality. Alas, such a thing hasn't ever been thought of before, so sadly we must conclude that White Privilege can't be a thing because other people can be oppressed too. Oh well.
Accepting the validity of intersectionality, using the term white privilege is intellectually lazy and an oversimplification of the privileged social status. The whole point of intersectionality is that there are multiple and varied factors contributing to the creation of the privilege, including but certainly not limited to ethnicity. It can be argued that economic status is far more important than ethnicity in regards to the degree of privilege enjoyed by an individual. There are millions of poor white people in the US who don't have a high level of education and live in rural areas and trailer park type neighborhoods that have less access to services and benefits than millions of poor nonwhite people living in urban ghettos. Poverty strips away a lot of benefits and wealth bestows a lot of benefits, nonwhites that have wealth are able to overcome a large amount of the obstacles faced by nonwhites who lack wealth. Family structure also plays a factor, having a two parent household with one or both parents being college graduates and employed is a significant factor regarding income earned by the family, where they live and the degree of importance placed on education, all of which mitigates obstacles created by racism directed at nonwhite ethnicities. If you agree that intersectionality exists than you must also accept that "white privilege" isn't determined by "whiteness" alone and that therefore "white privilege" as a descriptive term is a misnomer at best and a deliberate obfuscation at worst.
As has been pointed out many times, not only does whiteness correlate with higher economic status, white people have a better chance of leaving poverty.
No matter what else is going on in your life, being white almost always makes it easier.
You’ve either missed or ignored my argument. It is not my contention that whiteness/ethnicity is not a favor or that it is not an ever present factor. My argument is that whiteness/ethnicity is not such a predominant factor that it always outweighs any other factor. The negative of being poor outweigh the positives of being white to the extent that poor whites have a less privilege existence than wealthy nonwhites. For example LeBron James’ kids enjoy more privileges than my kids because while his are black and mine are white his kids are in a household worth hundreds of millions of dollars whereas mine are in a household worth significantly less than 1 million dollars. The wealth disparity benefits James’ kids much more than their blackness disadvantages them and much more than my kids whiteness advantages them. Now Bill Gates kids are even more advantages than James because they are wealthy and white but that doesn’t change the fact that whiteness isn’t of sufficient benefit as to outweigh wealth disparity. Therefore I contend that the term white privilege is a misnomer because poor whites suffer disadvantages that their whiteness can not overcome and thusly do not enjoy a privileged life due to their whiteness. White privilege implies that privilege is merely a product of whiteness but intersectionality shows us that it is never that simple.
Sinful Hero wrote: So White women don’t benefit from white privilege seeing as how they’re far more likely to be harassed than men?
Being harassed is only one element of the many factors that the concept of "white privilege" describe. The most easily used analogy is job callbacks because that's well researched and provable (at least, to horses that are thirsty) but of course privilege involves many things, and having less of one benefit doesn't somehow wipe out everything else.
If a black man with a “black sounding” name gets just as many callbacks as the typical white man in these examples, has he gained an advantage over other black men? Did he just dodge discrimination? Or would you argue a combination of both?
AlmightyWalrus wrote: If only there were some sort of academic concept for how different kinds of disciplines intersect with one another. We could call it, I don't know, Intersectionality. Alas, such a thing hasn't ever been thought of before, so sadly we must conclude that White Privilege can't be a thing because other people can be oppressed too. Oh well.
Accepting the validity of intersectionality, using the term white privilege is intellectually lazy and an oversimplification of the privileged social status. The whole point of intersectionality is that there are multiple and varied factors contributing to the creation of the privilege, including but certainly not limited to ethnicity. It can be argued that economic status is far more important than ethnicity in regards to the degree of privilege enjoyed by an individual. There are millions of poor white people in the US who don't have a high level of education and live in rural areas and trailer park type neighborhoods that have less access to services and benefits than millions of poor nonwhite people living in urban ghettos. Poverty strips away a lot of benefits and wealth bestows a lot of benefits, nonwhites that have wealth are able to overcome a large amount of the obstacles faced by nonwhites who lack wealth. Family structure also plays a factor, having a two parent household with one or both parents being college graduates and employed is a significant factor regarding income earned by the family, where they live and the degree of importance placed on education, all of which mitigates obstacles created by racism directed at nonwhite ethnicities. If you agree that intersectionality exists than you must also accept that "white privilege" isn't determined by "whiteness" alone and that therefore "white privilege" as a descriptive term is a misnomer at best and a deliberate obfuscation at worst.
As has been pointed out many times, not only does whiteness correlate with higher economic status, white people have a better chance of leaving poverty.
No matter what else is going on in your life, being white almost always makes it easier.
You’ve either missed or ignored my argument. It is not my contention that whiteness/ethnicity is not a favor or that it is not an ever present factor. My argument is that whiteness/ethnicity is not such a predominant factor that it always outweighs any other factor. The negative of being poor outweigh the positives of being white to the extent that poor whites have a less privilege existence than wealthy nonwhites. For example LeBron James’ kids enjoy more privileges than my kids because while his are black and mine are white his kids are in a household worth hundreds of millions of dollars whereas mine are in a household worth significantly less than 1 million dollars. The wealth disparity benefits James’ kids much more than their blackness disadvantages them and much more than my kids whiteness advantages them. Now Bill Gates kids are even more advantages than James because they are wealthy and white but that doesn’t change the fact that whiteness isn’t of sufficient benefit as to outweigh wealth disparity. Therefore I contend that the term white privilege is a misnomer because poor whites suffer disadvantages that their whiteness can not overcome and thusly do not enjoy a privileged life due to their whiteness. White privilege implies that privilege is merely a product of whiteness but intersectionality shows us that it is never that simple.
Ceteris paribus being white is an advantage though. A poor white man, while not exactly well off overall, is less badly off than a poor black man, on average.
The fact that there are other factors that play a part doesn't change the fact that (perceived) race has an effect.
Sinful Hero wrote: So White women don’t benefit from white privilege seeing as how they’re far more likely to be harassed than men?
Being harassed is only one element of the many factors that the concept of "white privilege" describe. The most easily used analogy is job callbacks because that's well researched and provable (at least, to horses that are thirsty) but of course privilege involves many things, and having less of one benefit doesn't somehow wipe out everything else.
If a black man with a “black sounding” name gets just as many callbacks as the typical white man in these examples, has he gained an advantage over other black men? Did he just dodge discrimination? Or would you argue a combination of both?
It'd be a statistical outlier. Outliers don't change the fact that larger trends exist. The concept of white privilege doesn't deal with society on an individual level, it's a structural concept concerned with whole populations.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: If only there were some sort of academic concept for how different kinds of disciplines intersect with one another. We could call it, I don't know, Intersectionality. Alas, such a thing hasn't ever been thought of before, so sadly we must conclude that White Privilege can't be a thing because other people can be oppressed too. Oh well.
Accepting the validity of intersectionality, using the term white privilege is intellectually lazy and an oversimplification of the privileged social status. The whole point of intersectionality is that there are multiple and varied factors contributing to the creation of the privilege, including but certainly not limited to ethnicity. It can be argued that economic status is far more important than ethnicity in regards to the degree of privilege enjoyed by an individual. There are millions of poor white people in the US who don't have a high level of education and live in rural areas and trailer park type neighborhoods that have less access to services and benefits than millions of poor nonwhite people living in urban ghettos. Poverty strips away a lot of benefits and wealth bestows a lot of benefits, nonwhites that have wealth are able to overcome a large amount of the obstacles faced by nonwhites who lack wealth. Family structure also plays a factor, having a two parent household with one or both parents being college graduates and employed is a significant factor regarding income earned by the family, where they live and the degree of importance placed on education, all of which mitigates obstacles created by racism directed at nonwhite ethnicities. If you agree that intersectionality exists than you must also accept that "white privilege" isn't determined by "whiteness" alone and that therefore "white privilege" as a descriptive term is a misnomer at best and a deliberate obfuscation at worst.
As has been pointed out many times, not only does whiteness correlate with higher economic status, white people have a better chance of leaving poverty.
No matter what else is going on in your life, being white almost always makes it easier.
You’ve either missed or ignored my argument. It is not my contention that whiteness/ethnicity is not a favor or that it is not an ever present factor. My argument is that whiteness/ethnicity is not such a predominant factor that it always outweighs any other factor. The negative of being poor outweigh the positives of being white to the extent that poor whites have a less privilege existence than wealthy nonwhites. For example LeBron James’ kids enjoy more privileges than my kids because while his are black and mine are white his kids are in a household worth hundreds of millions of dollars whereas mine are in a household worth significantly less than 1 million dollars. The wealth disparity benefits James’ kids much more than their blackness disadvantages them and much more than my kids whiteness advantages them. Now Bill Gates kids are even more advantages than James because they are wealthy and white but that doesn’t change the fact that whiteness isn’t of sufficient benefit as to outweigh wealth disparity. Therefore I contend that the term white privilege is a misnomer because poor whites suffer disadvantages that their whiteness can not overcome and thusly do not enjoy a privileged life due to their whiteness. White privilege implies that privilege is merely a product of whiteness but intersectionality shows us that it is never that simple.
Ceteris paribus being white is an advantage though. A poor white man, while not exactly well off overall, is less badly off than a poor black man, on average.
The fact that there are other factors that play a part doesn't change the fact that (perceived) race has an effect.
"Look you poor sods! Those other poor people across the street have it better than you do! That is unfair! You must do something about that! Don't focus on us rich folks stealing your wealth and keeping you down, it is that poor white guy across the street, he is the enemy!" Race has an effect, yes. But the question should be whether that effect is significant compared to the effect of class. Certainly, a poor white guy in the US faces less harassment and discrimination than his equally poor black neighbor, but that ignores the fact that both are pretty miserable and unlikely to ever get ahead in life. To improve the situation of Afro-Americans, I think it is much more important to focus on their economic situation and closing the massive gap between the lower and upper classes in the US. That will do much more to actually improve their lives than focusing on what in the end amounts to fairly low-impact covert discrimination. I often feel that the "race issue" is used as a proxy to distract people from the actual issue, which is economical. I believe that decreasing the wealth gap would also lead to a decrease in discrimination.
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Galas wrote: I believe White privilege will dissapear from North America as the demographic changes the next decades. Whites will still be mostly the upper part of society for decades because they will inherit power even when they start becoming a minority in USA, but probably in 60-100 years the power will shift to another ethnic group. Probably hispanics.
And so will Spain ultimately have taken revenge for the Spanish-American War.
So what your saying is black people don't put your effort in changing the culture of discrimination that holds you back and elevates white people but rather let that be and try to just convince the wealthiest to redistribute their wealth and hope you come out ahead and not just you lose out to that discrimination you didn't address?
BrotherGecko wrote: So what your saying is black people don't put your effort in changing the culture of discrimination that holds you back and elevates white people but rather let that be and try to just convince the wealthiest to redistribute their wealth and hope you come out ahead and not just you lose out to that discrimination you didn't address?
BrotherGecko wrote: So what your saying is black people don't put your effort in changing the culture of discrimination that holds you back and elevates white people but rather let that be and try to just convince the wealthiest to redistribute their wealth and hope you come out ahead and not just you lose out to that discrimination you didn't address?
Why no both?
I don't know why your asking me Iron_Captain made the one or the other argument.
BrotherGecko wrote: So what your saying is black people don't put your effort in changing the culture of discrimination that holds you back and elevates white people but rather let that be and try to just convince the wealthiest to redistribute their wealth and hope you come out ahead and not just you lose out to that discrimination you didn't address?
Yes, because it is not the 'culture of' discrimination that is the main culprit holding black people back. Nor does this culture of discrimination automatically elevate white people (as evidenced by the fact that a lot of white people aren't much better off than black people at all). What is really holding black people back is the unequal distribution of wealth. In the extremely unlikely hypothetical case that black people would indeed be able to change this culture of discrimination (highly unlikely since it is mostly subconscious and gets perceived really quickly as 'reverse racism', which only makes matters worse rather than better), and they would face absolutely no discrimination anymore, they still wouldn't be really better off than they are now. Most Afro-Americans belong to the lower classes. And the vast majority of Afro-Americans that are currently poor would still remain poor. Just like most whites who are poor will also always stay poor. If white people, who face no race-based discrimination at all, can't work their way out of poverty, what makes you think Afro-Americans would be able to? The system would still be working against them, just as it is working against poor whites. Certainly, the success rates of poor Afro-Americans in escaping lower class poverty would equal out to those of poor white Americans. But they'd still be really low. It'd only be a marginal improvement. And overall, Afro-Americans would remain poor compared to white Americans simply because most Afro-Americans belong to lower classes while most white Americans belong to the middle classes. The only way to really improve the situation is by directing efforts to the redistribution of wealth. Tax the rich and spend the money on improving social welfare programs that help people escape the vicious cycle of poverty. That would do much more for Afro-Americans than any campaign against covert discrimination ever could.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: If only there were some sort of academic concept for how different kinds of disciplines intersect with one another. We could call it, I don't know, Intersectionality. Alas, such a thing hasn't ever been thought of before, so sadly we must conclude that White Privilege can't be a thing because other people can be oppressed too. Oh well.
Accepting the validity of intersectionality, using the term white privilege is intellectually lazy and an oversimplification of the privileged social status. The whole point of intersectionality is that there are multiple and varied factors contributing to the creation of the privilege, including but certainly not limited to ethnicity. It can be argued that economic status is far more important than ethnicity in regards to the degree of privilege enjoyed by an individual. There are millions of poor white people in the US who don't have a high level of education and live in rural areas and trailer park type neighborhoods that have less access to services and benefits than millions of poor nonwhite people living in urban ghettos. Poverty strips away a lot of benefits and wealth bestows a lot of benefits, nonwhites that have wealth are able to overcome a large amount of the obstacles faced by nonwhites who lack wealth. Family structure also plays a factor, having a two parent household with one or both parents being college graduates and employed is a significant factor regarding income earned by the family, where they live and the degree of importance placed on education, all of which mitigates obstacles created by racism directed at nonwhite ethnicities. If you agree that intersectionality exists than you must also accept that "white privilege" isn't determined by "whiteness" alone and that therefore "white privilege" as a descriptive term is a misnomer at best and a deliberate obfuscation at worst.
As has been pointed out many times, not only does whiteness correlate with higher economic status, white people have a better chance of leaving poverty.
No matter what else is going on in your life, being white almost always makes it easier.
You’ve either missed or ignored my argument. It is not my contention that whiteness/ethnicity is not a favor or that it is not an ever present factor. My argument is that whiteness/ethnicity is not such a predominant factor that it always outweighs any other factor. The negative of being poor outweigh the positives of being white to the extent that poor whites have a less privilege existence than wealthy nonwhites. For example LeBron James’ kids enjoy more privileges than my kids because while his are black and mine are white his kids are in a household worth hundreds of millions of dollars whereas mine are in a household worth significantly less than 1 million dollars. The wealth disparity benefits James’ kids much more than their blackness disadvantages them and much more than my kids whiteness advantages them. Now Bill Gates kids are even more advantages than James because they are wealthy and white but that doesn’t change the fact that whiteness isn’t of sufficient benefit as to outweigh wealth disparity. Therefore I contend that the term white privilege is a misnomer because poor whites suffer disadvantages that their whiteness can not overcome and thusly do not enjoy a privileged life due to their whiteness. White privilege implies that privilege is merely a product of whiteness but intersectionality shows us that it is never that simple.
Ceteris paribus being white is an advantage though. A poor white man, while not exactly well off overall, is less badly off than a poor black man, on average.
The fact that there are other factors that play a part doesn't change the fact that (perceived) race has an effect.
I thought I had clarified my argument but apparently it’s still too had for everyone to see so I’ll try one last time and then move on.
Yes whiteness/ethnicity is always a factor but it is not always the most influential factor and whiteness/ethnicity is only one factor among a host of intersectional factors that create the benefits of privilege. The term white privilege implies that all the benefits of the privilege derive from whiteness which is not true. Does the term white privilege refer to only the benefis derived from being white or does include the intersectional factors of wealth, education, family, age, gender and location?
While I feel like the concept of white privilege so self-evident it's weird to pretend it's not a thing, I'd be happy to stipulate that on a literal, semantic level, the phrase "white privilege" could be more precise in terms of what it is describing.
Ouze wrote: While I feel like the concept of white privilege so self-evident it's weird to pretend it's not a thing, I'd be happy to stipulate that on a literal, semantic level, the phrase "white privilege" could be more precise in terms of what it is describing.
Who’s saying it doesn’t exist? Not me. Whiteness has benefits but if white privilege only refers to the benefits of being white then white privilege is just one subset of the host of intersectional factors that create a combination of benefits that elevate the level of privilege enjoyed by a person. If we want to refer to that privilege resultant of a host of factors (including ethnicity) then we need a better term than white privilege.
Terms should mean what they appear to mean. Whiteness doesn’t generate wealth for you or guarantee that you’ll have two loving parents or live in a nice section of town it doesn’t guarantee you a quality education. Therefore it is intellectually dishonest to ascribe the benefits of those things to whiteness and white privilege.
Yeah. But it has been researched and studied many times that race has a large effect on economic mobility. Or that race can have an effect on part to education levels. These studies have been done. Below is one of them:
If we were to call it, "Whites suffer fewer disadvantages than Non-Whites" instead of White Privilege, and then made all the points I tried to define earlier, could we avoid the semantic argument of calling it privilege and address the results?
You shouldn't cite a guy who quit because he realized his employer was getting him to say BS.
So it's rather a black guy used the average income of affluent immigrants from Asian and Africa who are slightly higher than the average white American household to not prove their point.
I think both those guys missed the mark. One is comparing household income, the other is comparing individual income. So, in a sense, they are both right, and they are both wrong. At least as far as comparing income.
Totalwar1402 wrote: It implies a level of complicity even if you do not actively partake in acts of discrimination.
This is the problem I have with 99% of the modern discussion and rhetoric surrounding the various -isms. People can bleat "but the academic definition doesn't mean that" all they like, very often the actual words being used when read in the way they're used in normal, everyday, colloquial language have implications of meaning that go well beyond those academic definitions of the terms, and where that is the case any misunderstanding that results is the fault of the people defining the terms not the people reading them. It's even more infuriating when you do understand the academic definitions and agree with most of them in that context, because on one side the fuzzy wording around these concepts is alienating and angering people who could be persuaded and mobilised to support them but instead get turned off from the discussion or who misunderstand so profoundly they end up flipping to the opposition side, and on the other you have plenty of laypeople tuning in to "pop" -isms who take on the imprecise colloquial meaning of the terms and actually start seriously advocating them in that form, which just ends up causing infighting and provides examples the opposition can use to help flip the prior group.
You don't win someone's support by going up to a working class white guy who's just had the sack and telling them they should moderate their anger and/or disappointment because they have white privilege and if they were a working class black guy things would be much worse for them(which I've actually seen some gormless student twonk do at a union meeting). The incessant use of "privilege checking" on social media in situations where the concept doesn't even slightly apply but some smug numpty wants to remind everyone how woke they are by pissing on someone for expressing an opinion or lamenting some garbage thing that's happened to them is hideously counter-productive, but the only reason the phenomenon exists in the first place is the fact you can draw a meaning from the words that is linguistically valid even if it's not the one that was actually meant when the phrase was coined.
Kilkrazy wrote: Aren't there black Brummies and Asian scousers? Do they face exactly the same discrimination as white ones?
No.
There you go.
And this is the other 1%. There has to be some point, some level, some threshold where we stop trying to tease out minute differences in exactly how garbage people's experience of life is, otherwise the whole thing becomes meaningless because there is always somebody worse off than you, or who could hypothetically be worse off than you. A British person of Afro-Caribbean descent in the UK is statistically more likely, in any given situation, to have more to deal with than a white British person given everything else is equal, but there are children in Africa that are starving to death so really all British people are privileged in relative terms; should that in any way impact how we address the relative imbalances within Britain? If the black Brit and the white Brit are both working class then the relative disparity between them utterly pales in comparison to the vast gulf of privilege between both of them and someone from the tippy-top of the professional middle class who went to a private school; is it of greater benefit to the black Brit to emphasise the former disparity or the latter one?
Privilege is far too broad, nuanced, and interconnected a concept for the blunt instrument it has become in the modern discourse, and more and more I see it used to undermine solidarity between groups who share a common interest in upsetting the present form of power hierarchy rather than for any useful purpose.
Sinful Hero wrote: So White women don’t benefit from white privilege seeing as how they’re far more likely to be harassed than men?
Being harassed is only one element of the many factors that the concept of "white privilege" describe. The most easily used analogy is job callbacks because that's well researched and provable (at least, to horses that are thirsty) but of course privilege involves many things, and having less of one benefit doesn't somehow wipe out everything else.
Actually, the often quoted "callback" statistic by the National Bureau of Economic Research is a bit old, done in 2003. It was redone again back in 2015 using the same parameters of the original study. It still found that "black" sounding names were less likely to get a call back, but that the gap had significantly narrowed.
AdeptSister wrote: Yeah. But it has been researched and studied many times that race has a large effect on economic mobility. Or that race can have an effect on part to education levels. These studies have been done. Below is one of them:
That study still acknowledges that class has a bigger impact than race though. It proves that race has an impact, but class is still a bigger influence than race. The graphs make this very clear, since they show exactly the same pattern for white and black people, except with a gap between white and black men. The most interesting finding of this study is that the discrepancy between blacks and whites is entirely due to black men doing less well than white men. There is little to no gap between black women and white women. To me, this suggests there are other, psychological and cultural factors at work here that go beyond mere discrimination. Especially considering that this pattern holds true across races, though to a lesser extent. Black women for example are more likely to get into college than white men of the same income category, according to this study. Also interestingly, it shows that Asians do even better than white Americans. Is it time we start talking about the "Girl privilege" and "Asian privilege" problems now? The big flaw in the study is that is perhaps too abstracted. It treats all income as equal, while that is evidently not true. What really matters is where you get that income from. A white family and a black family could both have the same income from example, but if white families' income is on average more stable than black families' incomes, then you would expect to see black people plummet down again more often purely for economic reasons. That would be something for a follow-up study to investigate. I think this may be significant because I suspect that a lot of wealthy white families in the US have a lot of inherited "old wealth", while most wealthy black families had to work their way up from the bottom only one or two generations ago, which may be a factor in their income being less stable. A lot of 'new rich' families in Russia also tend to crash again in the next generation. There is also plenty of studies that show that 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth again in the second generations, and 90% of those left lose it in the third. Very few people who become rich, stay rich. Only the big bourgeois can manage that. What also remains unrevealed is the reason why men from wealthy families crash more often than women, and why wealthy black and native american men crash especially often. It can hardly be due to being discriminated against by employers, since people that wealthy don't need employers, they are normally employers themselves. Overall, the study suggests that the issue is a lot more complicated than simply "white privilege".
Iron_Captain wrote: [ Is it time we start talking about the "Girl privilege" ".
Actually, this is a thing. Women have documented advantaged in education (from preschool to college), societal advantages, and advantages in legal matters.
Iron_Captain wrote: [ Is it time we start talking about the "Girl privilege" ".
Actually, this is a thing. Women have documented advantaged in education (from preschool to college), societal advantages, and advantages in legal matters.
Men have advantages in different areas though, such as employment and salary. Not to mention the ability to grow beards. Which I sadly still lack.
Iron_Captain wrote: [ Is it time we start talking about the "Girl privilege" ".
Actually, this is a thing. Women have documented advantaged in education (from preschool to college), societal advantages, and advantages in legal matters.
Men have advantages in different areas though, such as employment and salary. Not to mention the ability to grow beards. Which I sadly still lack.
Men have a SLIGHT advantage in employment. Women under 35 still out earn their male counterparts.
Kilkrazy wrote: IDK if it's been tested, but it would not surprise me of there was more prejudice against non-anglo-saxon especially latin names in the USA than in Europe.
However all whites whether slavic, anglo-saxon or Italian have white privilege in circumstances where the key factor is whiteness rather than the pronunciation of their name.
What circumstances are the key factors whiteness? What do you mean by whiteness anyways. Are we talking about having a name that sound American?
Whiteness is the quality of being white.
Whiteness is a factor when you can judge if someone is white or not.
There's no such thing as a name that sounds american. All american names came from somewhere else, and there is a huge variety of them from many different cultures.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: If only there were some sort of academic concept for how different kinds of disciplines intersect with one another. We could call it, I don't know, Intersectionality. Alas, such a thing hasn't ever been thought of before, so sadly we must conclude that White Privilege can't be a thing because other people can be oppressed too. Oh well.
Accepting the validity of intersectionality, using the term white privilege is intellectually lazy and an oversimplification of the privileged social status. The whole point of intersectionality is that there are multiple and varied factors contributing to the creation of the privilege, including but certainly not limited to ethnicity. It can be argued that economic status is far more important than ethnicity in regards to the degree of privilege enjoyed by an individual. There are millions of poor white people in the US who don't have a high level of education and live in rural areas and trailer park type neighborhoods that have less access to services and benefits than millions of poor nonwhite people living in urban ghettos. Poverty strips away a lot of benefits and wealth bestows a lot of benefits, nonwhites that have wealth are able to overcome a large amount of the obstacles faced by nonwhites who lack wealth. Family structure also plays a factor, having a two parent household with one or both parents being college graduates and employed is a significant factor regarding income earned by the family, where they live and the degree of importance placed on education, all of which mitigates obstacles created by racism directed at nonwhite ethnicities. If you agree that intersectionality exists than you must also accept that "white privilege" isn't determined by "whiteness" alone and that therefore "white privilege" as a descriptive term is a misnomer at best and a deliberate obfuscation at worst.
As has been pointed out many times, not only does whiteness correlate with higher economic status, white people have a better chance of leaving poverty.
No matter what else is going on in your life, being white almost always makes it easier.
You’ve either missed or ignored my argument. It is not my contention that whiteness/ethnicity is not a favor or that it is not an ever present factor. My argument is that whiteness/ethnicity is not such a predominant factor that it always outweighs any other factor. The negative of being poor outweigh the positives of being white to the extent that poor whites have a less privilege existence than wealthy nonwhites. For example LeBron James’ kids enjoy more privileges than my kids because while his are black and mine are white his kids are in a household worth hundreds of millions of dollars whereas mine are in a household worth significantly less than 1 million dollars. The wealth disparity benefits James’ kids much more than their blackness disadvantages them and much more than my kids whiteness advantages them. Now Bill Gates kids are even more advantages than James because they are wealthy and white but that doesn’t change the fact that whiteness isn’t of sufficient benefit as to outweigh wealth disparity. Therefore I contend that the term white privilege is a misnomer because poor whites suffer disadvantages that their whiteness can not overcome and thusly do not enjoy a privileged life due to their whiteness. White privilege implies that privilege is merely a product of whiteness but intersectionality shows us that it is never that simple.
Ceteris paribus being white is an advantage though. A poor white man, while not exactly well off overall, is less badly off than a poor black man, on average.
The fact that there are other factors that play a part doesn't change the fact that (perceived) race has an effect.
"Look you poor sods! Those other poor people across the street have it better than you do! That is unfair! You must do something about that! Don't focus on us rich folks stealing your wealth and keeping you down, it is that poor white guy across the street, he is the enemy!"
Race has an effect, yes. But the question should be whether that effect is significant compared to the effect of class. Certainly, a poor white guy in the US faces less harassment and discrimination than his equally poor black neighbor, but that ignores the fact that both are pretty miserable and unlikely to ever get ahead in life. To improve the situation of Afro-Americans, I think it is much more important to focus on their economic situation and closing the massive gap between the lower and upper classes in the US. That will do much more to actually improve their lives than focusing on what in the end amounts to fairly low-impact covert discrimination. I often feel that the "race issue" is used as a proxy to distract people from the actual issue, which is economical. I believe that decreasing the wealth gap would also lead to a decrease in discrimination.
I actually agree with you, but class and race are intimately linked. African-Americans are worse of in a class sense because of a history of racism. It hasn't been the lower economic status of African-Americans that has caused them to be discriminated against, but rather the other way around. In a sense, the class issue is a symptom of the race issue. This doesn't change the fact that the class disparities in the US have to be worked on, but if you focus solely on class you're going to just have African-Americans pushed towards the bottom. Again.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: If only there were some sort of academic concept for how different kinds of disciplines intersect with one another. We could call it, I don't know, Intersectionality. Alas, such a thing hasn't ever been thought of before, so sadly we must conclude that White Privilege can't be a thing because other people can be oppressed too. Oh well.
Accepting the validity of intersectionality, using the term white privilege is intellectually lazy and an oversimplification of the privileged social status. The whole point of intersectionality is that there are multiple and varied factors contributing to the creation of the privilege, including but certainly not limited to ethnicity. It can be argued that economic status is far more important than ethnicity in regards to the degree of privilege enjoyed by an individual. There are millions of poor white people in the US who don't have a high level of education and live in rural areas and trailer park type neighborhoods that have less access to services and benefits than millions of poor nonwhite people living in urban ghettos. Poverty strips away a lot of benefits and wealth bestows a lot of benefits, nonwhites that have wealth are able to overcome a large amount of the obstacles faced by nonwhites who lack wealth. Family structure also plays a factor, having a two parent household with one or both parents being college graduates and employed is a significant factor regarding income earned by the family, where they live and the degree of importance placed on education, all of which mitigates obstacles created by racism directed at nonwhite ethnicities. If you agree that intersectionality exists than you must also accept that "white privilege" isn't determined by "whiteness" alone and that therefore "white privilege" as a descriptive term is a misnomer at best and a deliberate obfuscation at worst.
As has been pointed out many times, not only does whiteness correlate with higher economic status, white people have a better chance of leaving poverty.
No matter what else is going on in your life, being white almost always makes it easier.
You’ve either missed or ignored my argument. It is not my contention that whiteness/ethnicity is not a favor or that it is not an ever present factor. My argument is that whiteness/ethnicity is not such a predominant factor that it always outweighs any other factor. The negative of being poor outweigh the positives of being white to the extent that poor whites have a less privilege existence than wealthy nonwhites. For example LeBron James’ kids enjoy more privileges than my kids because while his are black and mine are white his kids are in a household worth hundreds of millions of dollars whereas mine are in a household worth significantly less than 1 million dollars. The wealth disparity benefits James’ kids much more than their blackness disadvantages them and much more than my kids whiteness advantages them. Now Bill Gates kids are even more advantages than James because they are wealthy and white but that doesn’t change the fact that whiteness isn’t of sufficient benefit as to outweigh wealth disparity. Therefore I contend that the term white privilege is a misnomer because poor whites suffer disadvantages that their whiteness can not overcome and thusly do not enjoy a privileged life due to their whiteness. White privilege implies that privilege is merely a product of whiteness but intersectionality shows us that it is never that simple.
Ceteris paribus being white is an advantage though. A poor white man, while not exactly well off overall, is less badly off than a poor black man, on average.
The fact that there are other factors that play a part doesn't change the fact that (perceived) race has an effect.
I thought I had clarified my argument but apparently it’s still too had for everyone to see so I’ll try one last time and then move on.
Yes whiteness/ethnicity is always a factor but it is not always the most influential factor and whiteness/ethnicity is only one factor among a host of intersectional factors that create the benefits of privilege. The term white privilege implies that all the benefits of the privilege derive from whiteness which is not true. Does the term white privilege refer to only the benefis derived from being white or does include the intersectional factors of wealth, education, family, age, gender and location?
How does "white privilege" imply anything at all beyond the privilege one gains from being white?
AlmightyWalrus wrote: [. African-Americans are worse of in a class sense because of a history of racism. It hasn't been the lower economic status of African-Americans that has caused them to be discriminated against, but rather the other way around. In a sense, the class issue is a symptom of the race issue. This doesn't change the fact that the class disparities in the US have to be worked on, but if you focus solely on class you're going to just have African-Americans pushed towards the bottom. Again.
As was sited earlier in this thread, when you compare Black vs. White women, race doesn't really matter when you compare to women on the same rung on the economic ladder. They have about equal chances of success or failure. For some reason the same is not true of men.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: [. African-Americans are worse of in a class sense because of a history of racism. It hasn't been the lower economic status of African-Americans that has caused them to be discriminated against, but rather the other way around. In a sense, the class issue is a symptom of the race issue. This doesn't change the fact that the class disparities in the US have to be worked on, but if you focus solely on class you're going to just have African-Americans pushed towards the bottom. Again.
As was sited earlier in this thread, when you compare Black vs. White women, race doesn't really matter when you compare to women on the same rung on the economic ladder. They have about equal chances of success or failure. For some reason the same is not true of men.
To be fair, black men probably get discriminated against more than black women. I even notice it in myself. I hate racism, but when I am out in the city at night and I see a group of black men I get nervous. It is a subconscious reaction. I don't have the same reaction to white men or black women. The only other group that can make me feel nervous are Moroccan men (a large group of immigrants here in the Netherlands). What causes this reaction is likely the fact that both groups are overrepresented in crime (as a result of their low socioeconomic status), and I suspect that this causes my brain to make the subconscious equation black man = criminal and Moroccan man = criminal. And I am definitely sure I am not the only person who accidentally makes this association.
And that is what I suspect is the biggest source for discrimination against black men, and the primary reason why the gap between black men and white men still exists where between women it does not. Walrus is right in saying that racism is the original cause for the lower socioeconomic status of Afro-Americans, but when it comes to perpetuating this situation, I think it is then the lower socioeconomic status that fuels the racism. Basically, black people are disproportionately represented in the lower classes, leading them to be also disproportionately represented in crime, leading people to subconsciously associate black men with crime, leading to subconscious discrimination against black men, which holds black men back.
Again, I think that improving the low socioeconomic status of black people would also go a long way towards fighting discrimination.
Frazzled wrote: Define white? How does that work if their name is Cortes, or Khan?
And now we get to talk about the concept of 'white passing' and other fun things.
But roughly speaking, anyone who can look white enough to not get gak. I bet I can take 200 bucks and take the big scary guy you imagine when hearing Cortez and dress him up so people don't look at him twice. Unless he's a real hard case it's surprisingly easy as long as you're willing to abandon everything for the sake of conformity.
But yeah, much like wearing the right clothes, having the right name can get you through things or get you into trouble, because it's all about other people's assumptions and reactions.
Seriously guys, you're not guilty of something over white privilege, you're just getting treated at least marginally better than someone else who doesn't fit the apparent mold by society in general. White privilege is little more than admitting there's a preference granted white folks in the US and similar societies. Understanding those little things and watching as people don't give other folks the benefit of the doubt when someone else doesn't fit as well as you do is the entire point of the concept. Don't let some teenager with half a clue get your panties in a bunch by telling you to check your privilege, take a minute to look at the situation, would someone else have been treated differently? Would you have been treated differently with a different appearance? If so, guess what, privilege, because people get even more offended when we call them racists and beneficiaries of racism.
The resistance to the idea of 'White Privelege' comes from the same place as some other behaviors. People want to believe that they are special and their success was completely a result if their own hard work. They don't want to admit that their success was largely a result of them being lucky. Hard work only has a hygeine effect in success (it doesn't cause it but rather a lack of hard work can keep success from happening).
This myth that it is hard work alone leading to success means they get an overinflated sense of self worth and believe that the people who have lesser success are completely responsible for that. Challenging that myth will get resistance since people are convinced that they 'earned' their success and this is deeply rooted in their psyche.
It's not "white passing." The definition of white has changed over time, starting from English Protestant only, to include British, notgern Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, white Hispanics, North Africa, etc.
Frazzled wrote: It's not "white passing." The definition of white has changed over time, starting from English Protestant only, to include British, notgern Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, white Hispanics, North Africa, etc.
It sounds like B's because it is B's.
That doesn't change anything as long as there's still people on the other side of the white equation.
The fact that more people get to call themselves white doesn't do much for the average DeShaun.
Hypothetically, if African Americans decided to start naming their children more simple names like Jim, Tom, Mark, etc. how much discrimination do you think would fade away?
Part of the reason some applicants don't get response is likely because their names are hard to pronounce, which comes with A LOT of stigmas and assumptions of background.
Which begs the question why black people have to adapt to white naming conventions, as opposed to people in general being expected to have some modicum of language skills beyond English.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: Which begs the question why black people have to adapt to white naming conventions, as opposed to people in general being expected to have some modicum of language skills beyond English.
Not to bring Bill Cosby into this, but as he once pointed out the names that are being invented aren't even African in origin. And some of them really are hard, even for those familiar with "uniqueness". Anyone remember the Le-a incident? For those that don't, Le-a isn't pronounced "Lee-ah", it's pronounced "La Dash Ah", as you are expected to pronounce the dash.
Frazzled wrote: It's not "white passing." The definition of white has changed over time, starting from English Protestant only, to include British, notgern Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, white Hispanics, North Africa, etc.
It sounds like B's because it is B's.
Why would it need a fixed definition to be a thing? We're talking society, it's not a fixed thing. And passing as one group or another is definitely a thing, straight passing has been a massive argument within the lgbt community because some elements of the movement can live in such a way that people don't even realize they're invovled unless they say something. I'm a largely stealth atheist because I'm not a prick about it, but the moment I say it I'm suddenly shoved off into that group.
It's all about people's perceptions, and as someone who's lived the whitening process from trailer trash(which isn't 'proper white' even these days) to mainstream acceptable I can just tell you that you're objectively wrong. I could go outside today looking and talking like I did as a kid and some of my neighbors would straight up stop talking to me. I know because they don't talk to my neighbor's idiot kid who acts exactly like I once did. And it's kinda painful watching how careful people are around my wife, or the stupid racist comments that slip. Not even hateful, just dumb, so far anyway.
This is a tool of conformity based largely on expectations, while white privilege is a relatively small aspect of the totality of all bs involved, it's one of the bigger ones that we can do something about by not caving to fear and prejudice. Similar deal when I say 'proper white' it's the dreaded intersectionality between white privilege and class privilege. I looked like the 'bad element' or some stupid thing and as such I was kept at arms length at a minimum. Problem is, as a white guy, I can just look right and people drop most of their guard. My wife can't change color, my brother in law can't any more than she can, and they've both gotten gak over it. Which is all a part of white privilege all the feth over again, because as somebody said, vicious cycles.
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cuda1179 wrote: Hypothetically, if African Americans decided to start naming their children more simple names like Jim, Tom, Mark, etc. how much discrimination do you think would fade away?
Part of the reason some applicants don't get response is likely because their names are hard to pronounce, which comes with A LOT of stigmas and assumptions of background.
It just gets you past the first round of resumes a bit more. If you're still as other as they'd perceive your name it'll come right back to haunt you. My name was the second most standard gak in the US, but after people got a look at me pre-cleaning up it was clear I was wasting my time at half my interviews.
Prestor Jon wrote:Does the term white privilege refer to only the benefis derived from being white or does include the intersectional factors of wealth, education, family, age, gender and location?
Only the white part. All other things being equal the while person (in the USA) tends to get treated better due to their whiteness. There are also privileges based on gender, class, age (the inverse of age discrimination), and so on.
cuda1179 wrote:Actually, this is a thing. Women have documented advantaged in education (from preschool to college), societal advantages, and advantages in legal matters.
And disadvantages in a corporate environment. It seems that, for example, a similar attitude gets men the "go-getter" stamp while women get written off as bitchy and "difficult" which in turn feeds into their respective expectancy of wage raises and promotions.
Iron_Captain wrote:To be fair, black men probably get discriminated against more than black women.
It's the other way around women get discriminated more. I can't find the study (can't remember what exactly to google for) but it was done with a mix of white, brown/black, male, and female in all kinds of permutations. White and men got the best results, then white women (if I remember correctly), then black/male and at the bottom the black/female combination. There was also another "resume" study where the while high school dropout with a criminal record got similar callback results as the back man with a college degree and no criminal record.
cuda1179 wrote:Hypothetically, if African Americans decided to start naming their children more simple names like Jim, Tom, Mark, etc. how much discrimination do you think would fade away?
Part of the reason some applicants don't get response is likely because their names are hard to pronounce, which comes with A LOT of stigmas and assumptions of background.
Probably the "sent paper application" part of the hiring process. After that there still unconscious biases at work. But the better question should be why should somebody's name be a demerit to them as a person? Your name is chosen for you by your parents and says nothing about you and your achievements. And if somebody really treats people that differently based on their name why would you assume they wouldn't do the same based on skin colour because the name bias seems to be just a shorthand for their preconceptions about race/skin colour and nothing more?
AlmightyWalrus wrote: How does "white privilege" imply anything at all beyond the privilege one gains from being white?
Because it implies that this is a privilege that should be taken away from white people in an effort to make everything equal, instead of aspiring to bring EVERYONE up to what whites now enjoy.
It's equality based on tearing down that which is high, rather than elevating that which is low.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: Which begs the question why black people have to adapt to white naming conventions, as opposed to people in general being expected to have some modicum of language skills beyond English.
It's not about language skills. It's about subconcious discrimination. Everyone is guilty of this. You are too. It's not a conspiracy. It is biology.
cuda1179 wrote: Hypothetically, if African Americans decided to start naming their children more simple names like Jim, Tom, Mark, etc. how much discrimination do you think would fade away?
Not much. The 'ethnic' names are a fairly recent phenomenon, starting in the 1970s when the African-American population got interested in exploring their roots. Before then they used the same pool of names as other Americans. For example, there was George Washington Carver, Jessie Owens, Martin Luther King... even Malcom (as in Malcom X), which if I'm not mistaken is of either Scots or Irish origin.
The "White" part, imo, is less important than the "privilege" part.
"Privilege" isn't simply the advantages inherent in the societal structures it's also the basic ignorance of the hardships that come along with it.
For instance there is a "Male Privilege" that includes when, as a guy, you are walking down a road at night to get to your car you just don't have a fear of being raped. It's not something you think about because realistically it's not something you have to worry about. However, women in general do. They are targeted and harassed in their every day interactions in ways that men just are not.
Likewise, white people don't worry about getting stopped by police super often. It's just not something we think about until we see a cop directly behind us and we know we were doing something wrong. On the other hand there was that black guy in NY who got stopped by cops 2 times a day (once going to work and once coming home) every day for like a month when they were supposedly doing "random" stops of civilians.
My Peruvian friend has been pulled out of line to be checked every time he has gone to the air port, with the sole exception of the time he flew with my black friend.
They would call the general ignorance of the frequency of that kind of bs and the impact it has on the way they live their lives"privilege".
The best, and easiest analogy I’ve ever come across is to simply imagine life as a computer game. All things being equal, northwestern European descended, cis-gendered, heterosexual men are playing on easy and everyone else is playing on progressively more difficult settings. Sure, some people are amazing at the game on Deity Level, and some people do badly on Easy, but you can’t change the settings.
Vulcan wrote:Because it implies that this is a privilege that should be taken away from white people in an effort to make everything equal, instead of aspiring to bring EVERYONE up to what whites now enjoy.
It's equality based on tearing down that which is high, rather than elevating that which is low.
White people receive preferential treatment and you can't give preferential treatment to everyone. When making people equal there will necessarily be those who now receive less than what they used to because they received the parts that others were denied. Fortunately this is a small group.
Xenomancers wrote:
It's not about language skills. It's about subconcious discrimination. Everyone is guilty of this. You are too. It's not a conspiracy. It is biology.
The social construct of racism is not biology. There is no clash of races hardwired into humanity. This is just your own ideology.
ValentineGames wrote: White privilege is a load of horse dung created by brainwashed idiotic American students in those dens of corruption known as universities and colleges.
Same as male privilege or cat privilege red car privilege.
They just love pulling crap out their asses to get attention for their social justice filth.
That’s not true, it started in the US but has spread over a lot of western nations now.
From the research I’ve done (for myself) and looking at both sides it “seems” (as in I am not certain for those of you who don’t understand the word) like this is all the result of a wave of Marxism disguised as the left, modern feminism, social justice, intersectionality etc. Are all symptoms of the regressive (not progressive, there is nothing progressive about these people) left trying to divide people to gain power, socially and politically.
I have seen time and time again these same arguments put forward with little to no evidence, they use lies and obfuscation to push thier regressive agenda, claiming the usual “isms” to stop free speech, even going so far as to attack each other if they are not “left” enough.
This behaviour has led even moderate people like myself to become policital, to push back at the extreme leftists who are poisoning the communities we belong to, I was a lefty, quite far left, until these people came along, my ideals haven’t shifted much but because they are so extreme, I’m basically centre left in comparison.
The worst casualty of the whole social justice debacle is the people they claim to want to help, through their efforts at censorship they have hurt the freedom of speech, which in turn hurts people being able to talk about these issues, their attempts and success of de podiuming people they disagree with is just as bad.
Another fundamental problem they have is a lack of clear principles, they are such a disparate group held together by Marxism that they end up fighting amongst themselves as they don’t see others as “pure” enough for that cause, if you are black and disagree you are a “race traitor” if you are white you have “white privilege” etc. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous.
This kind of toxicity has spread through a lot of “geek” industries, comics, movies and is encroaching on tabletop gaming now, like most of the western world there has been a concerted push back against these people, the rise of the right is almost completely down to the rise of the far left, people are tired of rhetoric, they find the ideal laudable, who doesn’t want equality, but the people behind those ideals have poisoned the well, they are no longer trusted in what they say, thier actions too have led to a fall in trust.
So long as the left keeps letting these extremists speak for them, they will continue to lose ground to the right, sadly the far leftists usually lack the moral integrity to admit they are wrong and double down on thier brand of racism/sexism etc. Flying in the face of science, flying in the face of facts, they continue to ignore the proof they are provided or distort it to suit thier narrative. One of my favourite quotes from these people is
“I don’t care about your facts, it’s just your opinion”
Let that sink in, it’s pretty crazy on the face of it.
That’s not true, it started in the US but has spread over a lot of western nations now.
From the research I’ve done (for myself) and looking at both sides it “seems” (as in I am not certain for those of you who don’t understand the word) like this is all the result of a wave of Marxism disguised as the left, modern feminism, social justice, intersectionality etc. Are all symptoms of the regressive (not progressive, there is nothing progressive about these people) left trying to divide people to gain power, socially and politically.
I have seen time and time again these same arguments put forward with little to no evidence, they use lies and obfuscation to push thier regressive agenda, claiming the usual “isms” to stop free speech, even going so far as to attack each other if they are not “left” enough.
This behaviour has led even moderate people like myself to become policital, to push back at the extreme leftists who are poisoning the communities we belong to, I was a lefty, quite far left, until these people came along, my ideals haven’t shifted much but because they are so extreme, I’m basically centre left in comparison.
The worst casualty of the whole social justice debacle is the people they claim to want to help, through their efforts at censorship they have hurt the freedom of speech, which in turn hurts people being able to talk about these issues, their attempts and success of de podiuming people they disagree with is just as bad.
Another fundamental problem they have is a lack of clear principles, they are such a disparate group held together by Marxism that they end up fighting amongst themselves as they don’t see others as “pure” enough for that cause, if you are black and disagree you are a “race traitor” if you are white you have “white privilege” etc. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous.
This kind of toxicity has spread through a lot of “geek” industries, comics, movies and is encroaching on tabletop gaming now, like most of the western world there has been a concerted push back against these people, the rise of the right is almost completely down to the rise of the far left, people are tired of rhetoric, they find the ideal laudable, who doesn’t want equality, but the people behind those ideals have poisoned the well, they are no longer trusted in what they say, thier actions too have led to a fall in trust.
So long as the left keeps letting these extremists speak for them, they will continue to lose ground to the right, sadly the far leftists usually lack the moral integrity to admit they are wrong and double down on thier brand of racism/sexism etc. Flying in the face of science, flying in the face of facts, they continue to ignore the proof they are provided or distort it to suit thier narrative. One of my favourite quotes from these people is
“I don’t care about your facts, it’s just your opinion”
Let that sink in, it’s pretty crazy on the face of it.
And this is what happens when you let a teenager with half a clue get your panties in a bunch.
We can't let these people talk, or they'll end free speech.
You used to be left, until people were slightly further left.
Their language is harmful, yet you don't see any issue using about half of it.
They'll distort reality and don't care about facts, while you steam roll my pretty basic and stunningly obvious experiences with it that just so happen to align with the basics of the idea.
I know the idiots who got you riled up, and they're idiots. That doesn't mean everything they're parroting is wrong, it just means they have little idea what it actually means, much like you. I'd love to know what the research you did was.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: How does "white privilege" imply anything at all beyond the privilege one gains from being white?
Because it implies that this is a privilege that should be taken away from white people in an effort to make everything equal, instead of aspiring to bring EVERYONE up to what whites now enjoy.
It's equality based on tearing down that which is high, rather than elevating that which is low.
Which we can't do either because then we're granting people who aren't white greater opportunities which gets people even more upset, because no matter what we do entitled people get upset when anything is done about their entitlement. Because any re-allocation of resources, potential or opportunity is seen as taking away from white people and thus lowering them.
Tell me, how do we raise everyone else up without offending your sensibilities here. Do we give them white names and bootstraps and pretend everything is alright?
All I'm asking is dealing with your own biases and encouraging others to do the same to accomplish exactly what you claim should be done, that is what understanding privilege is for. I can tell you from significant personal experience that it's no where close yet. To the point I'm not entirely sure the mods would be happy with me telling the entire stories of things said to or about my wife in my presence. Someone from a better background, who is plenty good at her job with a solid education behind her who regularly has worse assumptions made about her than I do.
Who said stop them from talking? Your trying to claim I said something I didn’t, not a good way to start this eh?
I used to be left, until the far left pushed me towards the right, this is a pretty normal thing to happen, the spectrum shifted and my views were once considered quite leftist, now they are not and the ideals these people propose to support are far left.
Yes their language is harmful, so I stated what it was, and yes I will use it to describe it, freedom of speech and all that, don’t want them silenced and don’t want them to silence me, it’s called making people aware.... kind of surprised you don’t want that to happen? Oh sorry, that me being guilty of putting words in your mouth.... see how slippery that slope can be.
I will have to go back and read what you said, but if it follows the usual propaganda that has been debunked multiple times, then yes, I disregard it, I will now go and check what you said however just in case l made a mistake.
You again assume I’m riled up, I’m not, kind of in a blase mood right now to be honest.
As to the last part... I’m afraid you have failed in your reading comprehension, I even put a part in just for people like yourself
“Looking at both Sides it “seems” (as in I’m not certain for those of you who don’t understand the word)”
Which leads me to believe you utterly ignored the first premise of the whole post, essentially I haven’t made my mind up yet, I have been watching, reading and directly talking to people to see thier views and what I have posted is how it all comes across.
If you want to address my points and Change my mind, go ahead, several others in this thread have either failed with bad evidence or flatly refused to.
Formosa wrote: Who said stop them from talking? Your trying to claim I said something I didn’t, not a good way to start this eh?
You're saying we can let them speak for us. And given no one has exactly christened them the voice of the left I have the feeling you mean don't let them talk to you at all.
Yes their language is harmful, so I stated what it was, and yes I will use it to describe it, freedom of speech and all that, don’t want them silenced and don’t want them to silence me, it’s called making people aware.... kind of surprised you don’t want that to happen? Oh sorry, that me being guilty of putting words in your mouth.... see how slippery that slope can be.
Just spreading awareness of their toxicity, without for a second noticing you're using their same tactics.
I will have to go back and read what you said, but if it follows the usual propaganda that has been debunked multiple times, then yes, I disregard it, I will now go and check what you said however just in case l made a mistake.
More curious to your sources, you're saying things that are very much inline with some far right sources I'm long familiar. You pretty much sound like the content of r/tumblrInAction. Which is roughly a collection of the stupidiest children on tumblr who feel the need to be aggressively politically active in the dumbest ways.
You again assume I’m riled up, I’m not, kind of in a blase mood right now to be honest.
Yet you think these people are a threat to speech to the point I need to silence them so you don't mistake them for speaking for me. You might not be riled now, but they've certainly got you at some point.
As to the last part... I’m afraid you have failed in your reading comprehension, I even put a part in just for people like yourself
“Looking at both Sides it “seems” (as in I’m not certain for those of you who don’t understand the word)”
Which leads me to believe you utterly ignored the first premise of the whole post, essentially I haven’t made my mind up yet, I have been watching, reading and directly talking to people to see thier views and what I have posted is how it all comes across.
If you want to address my points and Change my mind, go ahead, several others in this thread have either failed with bad evidence or flatly refused to.
Here's the thing, you don't sound like you're on the fence, you sound like you're pretty heavily against anything that even sounds like social justice and you'd be far from the first person I've met who did so long before coming to me to 'change their mind'. Which generally means I run through the actual useful and productive ends of the topics which you then try and debunk with tumblr children and self righteous academics.
I'm talking to you right now, been talking in this thread for a good bit, no one else is talking for me. Don't sit there and tell me the far left is.
You meanwhile are throwing around Marxism like it means something in this context, presupposing that anyone making arguments against you is clearly just out to take out the legs of anyone above them, like half the rest of the thread that's clearly against the idea of white privilege even existing. Honestly I'm half expecting some Jordan Peterson quotes to pop out given the current vocabulary.
What you're trying to claim is the left's stance is really just the social media meanderings of children and loud fools which are paraded around by the right as if it's mainstream opinion so they can easily demonize anything left of Jim Crow. I get it, some of these people are fools, I spent hours arguing with idiots about these things years ago and I know exactly the kind of idiot that's been latched on to here. I once spent a number of days being told to check my privilege by an upper class white girl who took offense when I insisted she would have to do something to be considered and activist, because to her anything that might threaten daddy's public position(of extensive privilege) was not a risk she could take. But I was the white male, clearly I was in the wrong. Right? No, not at all, they're just morons who think they found the shiniest hammer in the tool box to beat people with.
Privilege isn't a bat I'm going to take to your knees, it's a way to for you to contextualize the differences in how people in society are treated. To observe and understand how other folks are treated and quite likely why. All to resolve your own biases as much as possible and work on those in others.
And look up thread a bit, look at these responses, even if privilege isn't a thing, and simple inequality is it, what could I ever do to solve it that would be accepted by some of these guys? I'm not seeing anything, because anything allocated to a specific group is seen by them as taking away from themselves. They don't want to accept the idea of privilege because it would mean their idea of how to fix society favors them personally more than the sectors of society that need help. And if that's true, how does that make them look? I get it, no one wants to look like that, but I'm sitting over here and telling you I've watched this gak happen right in front of me because people are too stupid to realize the black woman with the same last name as me is my wife. Because I've quite freely shifted people's assumptions of my social status by conforming to their expectations. Privilege as a concept is absolutely a thing, I've engaged in it, taken advantage of it and understanding it in the sociological context helped me do so.
Even if it isn't something you like, it's a damn useful tool in understanding people in general. Just because you don't like the word don't try and ignore the reality of it.
Formosa wrote: From the research I’ve done (for myself) and looking at both sides it “seems” (as in I am not certain for those of you who don’t understand the word) like this is all the result of a wave of Marxism disguised as the left, modern feminism, social justice, intersectionality etc. Are all symptoms of the regressive (not progressive, there is nothing progressive about these people) left trying to divide people to gain power, socially and politically.
I have seen time and time again these same arguments put forward with little to no evidence, they use lies and obfuscation to push thier regressive agenda, claiming the usual “isms” to stop free speech, even going so far as to attack each other if they are not “left” enough.
This behaviour has led even moderate people like myself to become policital, to push back at the extreme leftists who are poisoning the communities we belong to, I was a lefty, quite far left, until these people came along, my ideals haven’t shifted much but because they are so extreme, I’m basically centre left in comparison.
The worst casualty of the whole social justice debacle is the people they claim to want to help, through their efforts at censorship they have hurt the freedom of speech, which in turn hurts people being able to talk about these issues, their attempts and success of de podiuming people they disagree with is just as bad.
Another fundamental problem they have is a lack of clear principles, they are such a disparate group held together by Marxism that they end up fighting amongst themselves as they don’t see others as “pure” enough for that cause, if you are black and disagree you are a “race traitor” if you are white you have “white privilege” etc. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous.
This kind of toxicity has spread through a lot of “geek” industries, comics, movies and is encroaching on tabletop gaming now, like most of the western world there has been a concerted push back against these people, the rise of the right is almost completely down to the rise of the far left, people are tired of rhetoric, they find the ideal laudable, who doesn’t want equality, but the people behind those ideals have poisoned the well, they are no longer trusted in what they say, thier actions too have led to a fall in trust.
So long as the left keeps letting these extremists speak for them, they will continue to lose ground to the right, sadly the far leftists usually lack the moral integrity to admit they are wrong and double down on thier brand of racism/sexism etc. Flying in the face of science, flying in the face of facts, they continue to ignore the proof they are provided or distort it to suit thier narrative. One of my favourite quotes from these people is
“I don’t care about your facts, it’s just your opinion”
Let that sink in, it’s pretty crazy on the face of it.
I don't think that you ever were a leftist at all. Nobody who was ever a communist, a socialist or an anarchist would use the term "Marxism" like you do here. Well, nobody who ever understood what being a leftist means would use the term "Marxism" like you do. So either you're lying about it or you never actually were a leftist due to not understanding it and/or hanging with a group of people who didn't understand it. The latter wouldn't be too unusual, unfortunately, because leftist organisations have been in a shoddy state for a while now.
I used to be left, until the far left pushed me towards the right, this is a pretty normal thing to happen, the spectrum shifted and my views were once considered quite leftist, now they are not and the ideals these people propose to support are far left.
.
The notion that the existence of leftists pushes "normal" people far right is a texbook example of neo-nazi propaganda, as explained here:
It's true that leftist and leftish circles have more than their share of abusers and careerists to toss out before they can really get anything done but that's not really what you're talking about. You claim there is a shadowy cabal manipulating people with "Marxism" in order to gain wealth and power and, well, it seems to me that you've got some "friends" that you should stop talking to.
Gonna number this as I’m using my phone and it takes a long time to do the quotes, so from top to bottom.
1: not letting them speak for us involves us speaking up for ourselves, not letting them drown us out with the usual rhetoric, either showing an alternate viewpoint or refuting thier claims.
2: this I’m afraid is a lie, I have not tried to stop you from speaking, I have not attempted to shout you down, I have not attempted to lie or distort the truth, I have not used their tactics, I have asked for proof, nothing more, and because of that I have been insulted several times, essentially accused of baiting, you yourself have tried to claim what I’m thinking or feeling.
3: you claim they are far right, well everything seems far right when you are so far left, but that’s an assumption I should not make, are you far left?
I don’t know what r/tumblr is, you will have to enlighten me, as for the rest of that, well you have just accused me of being like a stupid child, that undermines you and makes you guilty of something you have just accused me wrongly of, you are proving my point.
4: yet another assumption you have wrongly made and directly at odds with what I’ve said, I want them to speak freely, and yes I consider them a threat to free speech because they quantifiably are, de podiums, hate speech laws in U.K. (as a trained, but not practicing, solicitor, I can tell you that law is a mess), the list goes on, you are the one who is making that claim, not me, you have stated it twice now flatly ignoring what I have said, further undermining your point.
5: this one is a doozy, I am on the fence, I see a good message ruined by extremists with tacit support from the left wing media, this is worrisome, so even if it’s somthing I want to support, I cannot as they go too far, And as an intelligent free thinking adult I reserve the right to change my mind based on new information, like everyone should.
You again try to compare me to tumblr children and self righteous academics, sounds like you have made up your mind, did you not consider there may be a reason why I have yet to use the term SJW? It’s because it doesn’t aid discourse in anyway to insult your opponent, it undermines the argument and you have yet again undermined your own.
6: so the far left does not speak for you, but it’s clear you have heard thier message and agree with it at least in part, or am I wrong?
7: yep I’m directly stating that a lot of the far lefts ideals and politics come from Marxist ideals and politics, interesting you use the Jordan Peterson’s name here in a negative context, why is that?
8: funnily enough I’m not claiming that, however you do raise a good point, the far left does appear to be full of fools, but I don’t believe that appearance is true, or at least hope it’s not, the left needs to keep the right in check as much as the other way around and that means both need intelligent people.
9: it’s a way to contextualise something without using context, otherwise the term would not exist at all, at least in the context you all are using it in, because it is almost universally prefixed with “white” or “Male” but in all fairness... not always.
10: see here your talking about social engineering (correct me if I’m wrong), the issue is that you claim that white privilege is a thing and it needs to be tackled, how? What would you do, if we say it is real for arguments sake, then in order to give to one, you must take from another, how would you make sure that your social engineering actually sticks?
Seen as you mentioned your wife, I’m half Singaporean/welsh, does that change anything at all, no, pennies to pounds you all assumed that because of My country and what I have written I was white....
Formosa wrote: From the research I’ve done (for myself) and looking at both sides it “seems” (as in I am not certain for those of you who don’t understand the word) like this is all the result of a wave of Marxism disguised as the left, modern feminism, social justice, intersectionality etc. Are all symptoms of the regressive (not progressive, there is nothing progressive about these people) left trying to divide people to gain power, socially and politically.
I have seen time and time again these same arguments put forward with little to no evidence, they use lies and obfuscation to push thier regressive agenda, claiming the usual “isms” to stop free speech, even going so far as to attack each other if they are not “left” enough.
This behaviour has led even moderate people like myself to become policital, to push back at the extreme leftists who are poisoning the communities we belong to, I was a lefty, quite far left, until these people came along, my ideals haven’t shifted much but because they are so extreme, I’m basically centre left in comparison.
The worst casualty of the whole social justice debacle is the people they claim to want to help, through their efforts at censorship they have hurt the freedom of speech, which in turn hurts people being able to talk about these issues, their attempts and success of de podiuming people they disagree with is just as bad.
Another fundamental problem they have is a lack of clear principles, they are such a disparate group held together by Marxism that they end up fighting amongst themselves as they don’t see others as “pure” enough for that cause, if you are black and disagree you are a “race traitor” if you are white you have “white privilege” etc. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous.
This kind of toxicity has spread through a lot of “geek” industries, comics, movies and is encroaching on tabletop gaming now, like most of the western world there has been a concerted push back against these people, the rise of the right is almost completely down to the rise of the far left, people are tired of rhetoric, they find the ideal laudable, who doesn’t want equality, but the people behind those ideals have poisoned the well, they are no longer trusted in what they say, thier actions too have led to a fall in trust.
So long as the left keeps letting these extremists speak for them, they will continue to lose ground to the right, sadly the far leftists usually lack the moral integrity to admit they are wrong and double down on thier brand of racism/sexism etc. Flying in the face of science, flying in the face of facts, they continue to ignore the proof they are provided or distort it to suit thier narrative. One of my favourite quotes from these people is
“I don’t care about your facts, it’s just your opinion”
Let that sink in, it’s pretty crazy on the face of it.
I don't think that you ever were a leftist at all. Nobody who was ever a communist, a socialist or an anarchist would use the term "Marxism" like you do here. Well, nobody who ever understood what being a leftist means would use the term "Marxism" like you do. So either you're lying about it or you never actually were a leftist due to not understanding it and/or hanging with a group of people who didn't understand it. The latter wouldn't be too unusual, unfortunately, because leftist organisations have been in a shoddy state for a while now.
Exactly. The way he is using 'Marxism', is 'cultural Marxism', aka an 'ideology' that was invented by the Nazi propaganda machine back in the Weimar Republic as a strawman to attack their leftist opponents. It has nothing to do with actual Marxism, there is no such thing as 'cultural Marxism' (actually there is, but it refers to something completely different). Actual Marxism is quite different from what you seem to believe it to be. (hint: if it is not about class struggle and dialectical materialism, it is not actually Marxism). Marxists not do not occupy themselves much with issues such as gender or racial discrimination, since they believe those to be mere symptoms of the larger class struggle. In particular, they view race along with nationalism as being a construct created by the bourgeois to keep the proletariat of different nations and ethnicities dividend and fighting one another instead of the international bourgeois. This is why people who are preoccupied with the fight against racism often get angry at Marxists, since they believe that Marxism downplays the issue of race and the importance of discrimination.
I any case, the fact that you have such a warped view of what 'left' and 'Marxism' actually are, and the fact that this warped view corresponds exactly to the views mistakenly held by the right, tells me you have never been a leftist at all. If you had been, you would have known what Marxism was. Please Formosa, don't fall for the old Nazi lies re-packaged and parroted by the (alt-)right, you are better than that. You are almost literally spouting Nazi propaganda.
Formosa wrote: From the research I’ve done (for myself) and looking at both sides it “seems” (as in I am not certain for those of you who don’t understand the word) like this is all the result of a wave of Marxism disguised as the left, modern feminism, social justice, intersectionality etc. Are all symptoms of the regressive (not progressive, there is nothing progressive about these people) left trying to divide people to gain power, socially and politically.
I have seen time and time again these same arguments put forward with little to no evidence, they use lies and obfuscation to push thier regressive agenda, claiming the usual “isms” to stop free speech, even going so far as to attack each other if they are not “left” enough.
This behaviour has led even moderate people like myself to become policital, to push back at the extreme leftists who are poisoning the communities we belong to, I was a lefty, quite far left, until these people came along, my ideals haven’t shifted much but because they are so extreme, I’m basically centre left in comparison.
The worst casualty of the whole social justice debacle is the people they claim to want to help, through their efforts at censorship they have hurt the freedom of speech, which in turn hurts people being able to talk about these issues, their attempts and success of de podiuming people they disagree with is just as bad.
Another fundamental problem they have is a lack of clear principles, they are such a disparate group held together by Marxism that they end up fighting amongst themselves as they don’t see others as “pure” enough for that cause, if you are black and disagree you are a “race traitor” if you are white you have “white privilege” etc. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous.
This kind of toxicity has spread through a lot of “geek” industries, comics, movies and is encroaching on tabletop gaming now, like most of the western world there has been a concerted push back against these people, the rise of the right is almost completely down to the rise of the far left, people are tired of rhetoric, they find the ideal laudable, who doesn’t want equality, but the people behind those ideals have poisoned the well, they are no longer trusted in what they say, thier actions too have led to a fall in trust.
So long as the left keeps letting these extremists speak for them, they will continue to lose ground to the right, sadly the far leftists usually lack the moral integrity to admit they are wrong and double down on thier brand of racism/sexism etc. Flying in the face of science, flying in the face of facts, they continue to ignore the proof they are provided or distort it to suit thier narrative. One of my favourite quotes from these people is
“I don’t care about your facts, it’s just your opinion”
Let that sink in, it’s pretty crazy on the face of it.
I don't think that you ever were a leftist at all. Nobody who was ever a communist, a socialist or an anarchist would use the term "Marxism" like you do here. Well, nobody who ever understood what being a leftist means would use the term "Marxism" like you do. So either you're lying about it or you never actually were a leftist due to not understanding it and/or hanging with a group of people who didn't understand it. The latter wouldn't be too unusual, unfortunately, because leftist organisations have been in a shoddy state for a while now.
I used to be left, until the far left pushed me towards the right, this is a pretty normal thing to happen, the spectrum shifted and my views were once considered quite leftist, now they are not and the ideals these people propose to support are far left.
.
The notion that the existence of leftists pushes "normal" people far right is a texbook example of neo-nazi propaganda, as explained here:
It's true that leftist and leftish circles have more than their share of abusers and careerists to toss out before they can really get anything done but that's not really what you're talking about. You claim there is a shadowy cabal manipulating people with "Marxism" in order to gain wealth and power and, well, it seems to me that you've got some "friends" that you should stop talking to.
Thank you for so efficiently proving my point.
Ladies and gentlement because I don’t agree I am a nazi.
Formosa wrote: From the research I’ve done (for myself) and looking at both sides it “seems” (as in I am not certain for those of you who don’t understand the word) like this is all the result of a wave of Marxism disguised as the left, modern feminism, social justice, intersectionality etc. Are all symptoms of the regressive (not progressive, there is nothing progressive about these people) left trying to divide people to gain power, socially and politically.
I have seen time and time again these same arguments put forward with little to no evidence, they use lies and obfuscation to push thier regressive agenda, claiming the usual “isms” to stop free speech, even going so far as to attack each other if they are not “left” enough.
This behaviour has led even moderate people like myself to become policital, to push back at the extreme leftists who are poisoning the communities we belong to, I was a lefty, quite far left, until these people came along, my ideals haven’t shifted much but because they are so extreme, I’m basically centre left in comparison.
The worst casualty of the whole social justice debacle is the people they claim to want to help, through their efforts at censorship they have hurt the freedom of speech, which in turn hurts people being able to talk about these issues, their attempts and success of de podiuming people they disagree with is just as bad.
Another fundamental problem they have is a lack of clear principles, they are such a disparate group held together by Marxism that they end up fighting amongst themselves as they don’t see others as “pure” enough for that cause, if you are black and disagree you are a “race traitor” if you are white you have “white privilege” etc. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous.
This kind of toxicity has spread through a lot of “geek” industries, comics, movies and is encroaching on tabletop gaming now, like most of the western world there has been a concerted push back against these people, the rise of the right is almost completely down to the rise of the far left, people are tired of rhetoric, they find the ideal laudable, who doesn’t want equality, but the people behind those ideals have poisoned the well, they are no longer trusted in what they say, thier actions too have led to a fall in trust.
So long as the left keeps letting these extremists speak for them, they will continue to lose ground to the right, sadly the far leftists usually lack the moral integrity to admit they are wrong and double down on thier brand of racism/sexism etc. Flying in the face of science, flying in the face of facts, they continue to ignore the proof they are provided or distort it to suit thier narrative. One of my favourite quotes from these people is
“I don’t care about your facts, it’s just your opinion”
Let that sink in, it’s pretty crazy on the face of it.
I don't think that you ever were a leftist at all. Nobody who was ever a communist, a socialist or an anarchist would use the term "Marxism" like you do here. Well, nobody who ever understood what being a leftist means would use the term "Marxism" like you do. So either you're lying about it or you never actually were a leftist due to not understanding it and/or hanging with a group of people who didn't understand it. The latter wouldn't be too unusual, unfortunately, because leftist organisations have been in a shoddy state for a while now.
Exactly. The way he is using 'Marxism', is 'cultural Marxism', aka an 'ideology' that was invented by the Nazi propaganda machine back in the Weimar Republic as a strawman to attack their leftist opponents. It has nothing to do with actual Marxism, there is no such thing as 'cultural Marxism' (actually there is, but it refers to something completely different). Actual Marxism is quite different from what you seem to believe it to be. (hint: if it is not about class struggle and dialectical materialism, it is not actually Marxism). Marxists not do not occupy themselves much with issues such as gender or racial discrimination, since they believe those to be mere symptoms of the larger class struggle. In particular, they view race along with nationalism as being a construct created by the bourgeois to keep the proletariat of different nations and ethnicities dividend and fighting one another instead of the international bourgeois. This is why people who are preoccupied with the fight against racism often get angry at Marxists, since they believe that Marxism downplays the issue of race and the importance of discrimination.
I any case, the fact that you have such a warped view of what 'left' and 'Marxism' actually are, and the fact that this warped view corresponds exactly to the views mistakenly held by the right, tells me you have never been a leftist at all. If you had been, you would have known what Marxism was.
Please Formosa, don't fall for the old Nazi lies re-packaged and parroted by the (alt-)right, you are better than that. You are almost literally spouting Nazi propaganda.
Wow A two for one
You guys are great, so again I’m a nazi because I disagree with your world view, this is awesome, I have never been proven correct so quickly.
Perhaps a miscommunication between the left pushed me right leading to the left pushing people right is bunkum used by neo nazi's, but nowhere in that is the implication that you are a nazi, unless you yourself are pushing the theory of the left made me right as proscribed by neo nazis?
Followed by an explanation of how cultural marxism was a term used by the actual Nazi's.
The only thing attributed to you was perhaps you were never as leftist as you thought you were and are using the left pushed me out of the left into the right as an excuse to attack the left, while you don't seem to be coming back left with anything the further right does (like run protestors over). Yet 'white privelage' pushes you right. Curious.
Comparing my ideals with that of a nazi, alt right, etc.
That is the same as calling me nazi, the insinuation is very clear, and ironically precisely the kind of behaviour I was describing.
I have tried to be clear, I have tried to listen and have now been insulted multiple times, as far as I’m concerned you have all completely undermined your positions and proved quite clearly what I have been saying.
You guys are great, so again I’m a nazi because I disagree with your world view, this is awesome, I have never been proven correct so quickly.
This is yet more of the evasive, dishonest tactics that the article I linked to details. None of us here have claimed that you are a nazi because you "disagree with our world view", we think that the way you use terms and the arguments you raise are incongruent with leftist ideologies which lead us to believe that you have never been a leftist.
Formosa wrote: From the research I’ve done (for myself) and looking at both sides it “seems” (as in I am not certain for those of you who don’t understand the word) like this is all the result of a wave of Marxism disguised as the left, modern feminism, social justice, intersectionality etc. Are all symptoms of the regressive (not progressive, there is nothing progressive about these people) left trying to divide people to gain power, socially and politically.
I have seen time and time again these same arguments put forward with little to no evidence, they use lies and obfuscation to push thier regressive agenda, claiming the usual “isms” to stop free speech, even going so far as to attack each other if they are not “left” enough.
This behaviour has led even moderate people like myself to become policital, to push back at the extreme leftists who are poisoning the communities we belong to, I was a lefty, quite far left, until these people came along, my ideals haven’t shifted much but because they are so extreme, I’m basically centre left in comparison.
The worst casualty of the whole social justice debacle is the people they claim to want to help, through their efforts at censorship they have hurt the freedom of speech, which in turn hurts people being able to talk about these issues, their attempts and success of de podiuming people they disagree with is just as bad.
Another fundamental problem they have is a lack of clear principles, they are such a disparate group held together by Marxism that they end up fighting amongst themselves as they don’t see others as “pure” enough for that cause, if you are black and disagree you are a “race traitor” if you are white you have “white privilege” etc. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous.
This kind of toxicity has spread through a lot of “geek” industries, comics, movies and is encroaching on tabletop gaming now, like most of the western world there has been a concerted push back against these people, the rise of the right is almost completely down to the rise of the far left, people are tired of rhetoric, they find the ideal laudable, who doesn’t want equality, but the people behind those ideals have poisoned the well, they are no longer trusted in what they say, thier actions too have led to a fall in trust.
So long as the left keeps letting these extremists speak for them, they will continue to lose ground to the right, sadly the far leftists usually lack the moral integrity to admit they are wrong and double down on thier brand of racism/sexism etc. Flying in the face of science, flying in the face of facts, they continue to ignore the proof they are provided or distort it to suit thier narrative. One of my favourite quotes from these people is
“I don’t care about your facts, it’s just your opinion”
Let that sink in, it’s pretty crazy on the face of it.
I don't think that you ever were a leftist at all. Nobody who was ever a communist, a socialist or an anarchist would use the term "Marxism" like you do here. Well, nobody who ever understood what being a leftist means would use the term "Marxism" like you do. So either you're lying about it or you never actually were a leftist due to not understanding it and/or hanging with a group of people who didn't understand it. The latter wouldn't be too unusual, unfortunately, because leftist organisations have been in a shoddy state for a while now.
Exactly. The way he is using 'Marxism', is 'cultural Marxism', aka an 'ideology' that was invented by the Nazi propaganda machine back in the Weimar Republic as a strawman to attack their leftist opponents. It has nothing to do with actual Marxism, there is no such thing as 'cultural Marxism' (actually there is, but it refers to something completely different). Actual Marxism is quite different from what you seem to believe it to be. (hint: if it is not about class struggle and dialectical materialism, it is not actually Marxism). Marxists not do not occupy themselves much with issues such as gender or racial discrimination, since they believe those to be mere symptoms of the larger class struggle. In particular, they view race along with nationalism as being a construct created by the bourgeois to keep the proletariat of different nations and ethnicities dividend and fighting one another instead of the international bourgeois. This is why people who are preoccupied with the fight against racism often get angry at Marxists, since they believe that Marxism downplays the issue of race and the importance of discrimination.
I any case, the fact that you have such a warped view of what 'left' and 'Marxism' actually are, and the fact that this warped view corresponds exactly to the views mistakenly held by the right, tells me you have never been a leftist at all. If you had been, you would have known what Marxism was.
Please Formosa, don't fall for the old Nazi lies re-packaged and parroted by the (alt-)right, you are better than that. You are almost literally spouting Nazi propaganda.
Wow A two for one
You guys are great, so again I’m a nazi because I disagree with your world view, this is awesome, I have never been proven correct so quickly.
No, you didn't read! There was nothing in that post about conflicting worldviews, and I did not call you a Nazi, I just said you are repeating actual Nazi ideology. I don't know you well enough to be able to say whether you believe in Nazi ideology so much you'd qualify as a Nazi, therefore I will not call you one. Most people who repeat Nazi ideology are not in fact aware that what they are saying were originally Nazi viewpoints, since extreme-right groups often disguise and repackage these ideas without mentioning their origin.
I just want to make you aware of the fact that some things you appear to believe in are in fact lies invented by the vilest kind of people that ever walked the earth, in the hope you will look into it and recognise the lies for what they are.
Formosa wrote: Comparing my ideals with that of a nazi, alt right, etc.
That is the same as calling me nazi, the insinuation is very clear, and ironically precisely the kind of behaviour I was describing.
I have tried to be clear, I have tried to listen and have now been insulted multiple times, as far as I’m concerned you have all completely undermined your positions and proved quite clearly what I have been saying.
You share ideological positions with the far right in your hatred of feminism, anti-racism and social justice writ large and your placement of blame for these things on "Marxism" peddled by a shadowy cabal through elite universities. If you think that pointing out that what you say and how you argue is like the far right is an insult to you then what you should do is simply stop arguing far right points in a way very particular to the far right.
1. Parrot right wing talking points and throw in meaningless bait like social justice and marxism.
2. Get pointed out that doesn't make sense.
3. Pretend you're being called a Nazi.
4. ????
5. Declare yourself the thread winner.
You guys are great, so again I’m a nazi because I disagree with your world view, this is awesome, I have never been proven correct so quickly.
This is yet more of the evasive, dishonest tactics that the article I linked to details. None of us here have claimed that you are a nazi because you "disagree with our world view", we think that the way you use terms and the arguments you raise are incongruent with leftist ideologies which lead us to believe that you have never been a leftist.
Yet more insults, claiming dishonesty and going back to a clearly biased article, you made the comparison, you made the insult, if it was not intended then perhaps you should be more careful with your terminology rather than comparing mine to neo nazi propaganda.
You guys are great, so again I’m a nazi because I disagree with your world view, this is awesome, I have never been proven correct so quickly.
This is yet more of the evasive, dishonest tactics that the article I linked to details. None of us here have claimed that you are a nazi because you "disagree with our world view", we think that the way you use terms and the arguments you raise are incongruent with leftist ideologies which lead us to believe that you have never been a leftist.
Yet more insults, claiming dishonesty and going back to a clearly biased article, you made the comparison, you made the insult, if it was not intended then perhaps you should be more careful with your terminology rather than comparing mine to neo nazi propaganda.
You wrote this, of your own volition:
Formosa wrote: From the research I’ve done (for myself) and looking at both sides it “seems” (as in I am not certain for those of you who don’t understand the word) like this is all the result of a wave of Marxism disguised as the left, modern feminism, social justice, intersectionality etc. Are all symptoms of the regressive (not progressive, there is nothing progressive about these people) left trying to divide people to gain power, socially and politically. .
Which is word for word the way that the neo-nazi movement understands leftism, and not in any way, shape or form the way that someone who holds communist, socialist or anarchist convictions would describe it.
Additionally, you see fit to dismiss an article on how neo-nazis infiltrate nerd spaces as "biased". Why is that?
Rosebuddy wrote: we think that the way you use terms and the arguments you raise are incongruent with leftist ideologies which lead us to believe that you have never been a leftist.
I see this thread has moved from discussion to purity testing... I think I'll stop reading here.
It is what happens when Rosebuddy enters the fray.
But to be honest, Formosa, you haven't show your best picture here. "All what you are saying is BS. Change my mind!" is not the best way to enter a thread.
Rosebuddy wrote: we think that the way you use terms and the arguments you raise are incongruent with leftist ideologies which lead us to believe that you have never been a leftist.
I see this thread has moved from discussion to purity testing... I think I'll stop reading here.
I think you misunderstand what he wrote because it is pulled out of context. There is no purity testing or whatever. Formosa claimed to have been a leftist but then in his further argument went on to display a very bad understanding of leftist ideas, causing people to doubt his claim that he had once held leftist ideas. Basically, it is like saying you speak fluent German, but then proceed to absolutely mangle a German phrase, leading people to doubt whether you actually speak German at all. I don't see how that is 'purity testing'.
If I pretended to be from San Fransisco it wouldn't be purity testing when people start pointing out that I don't know anything about the city's geography, climate, demographics or politics.
Rosebuddy wrote: we think that the way you use terms and the arguments you raise are incongruent with leftist ideologies which lead us to believe that you have never been a leftist.
I see this thread has moved from discussion to purity testing... I think I'll stop reading here.
I think you misunderstand what he wrote because it is pulled out of context. There is no purity testing or whatever. Formosa claimed to have been a leftist but then in his further argument went on to display a very bad understanding of leftist ideas, causing people to doubt his claim that he had once held leftist ideas.
Basically, it is like saying you speak fluent German, but then proceed to absolutely mangle a German phrase, leading people to doubt whether you actually speak German at all. I don't see how that is 'purity testing'.
You mean, Formosa went on to explain what is wrong with modern far leftist ideology and blamed it on Marxism.
Formosa still holds leftist ideas, “purity” testing is spot on what you are trying and failing to do, you believe leftism is x, and only x, when in fact it covers a wide range of things.
Also you then tried to compare Formosa’s ideology to naziism, in a condescending manner.
Ironically your every post is proving my point.
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Galas wrote: It is what happens when Rosebuddy enters the fray.
But to be honest, Formosa, you haven't show your best picture here. "All what you are saying is BS. Change my mind!" is not the best way to enter a thread.
I should have phrased it better then galas.
How does this sound.
“I think you are fundamentally wrong, I think your views are dangerous and cause the very issues you claim to want to resolve”
“If you wish to prove me wrong you must use clear evidence in an unbiased a manner as possible, use facts and data to support your argument, first however you must prove your original premise”
In this case “white privilege”
So far all we have had is one study (thanks pol) that does not show white privilege, opinions, feelings and anecdotes, I’m yet to be convinced that it’s real.
Using terms like 'Purity testing' and 'Marxism' to try and handwave away that you employ right wing talking points does not help the fact that you try to convince others you're a leftist.
And as pointed out believing in Cultural Marxism as in your description, which is nothing more than a ridiculous conspiracy pushed by the far right, doesn't really help when Cultural Marxism in that context is just playing right wing identity politics. But keep claiming people call you Nazi like it means something, instead of learning what academic Cultural Marxism in the sense of the Frankfurt School meaning is and seeing it has zero to do with how you're using it and zero meaning in the context we're discussing.
All I've gathered that the fringe left has more weight than the fringe right on the political scale, which ironically is a right wing faux worry point "the fringe left are asking you to have some empathy, hide yo kids from universities".
Rosebuddy wrote: we think that the way you use terms and the arguments you raise are incongruent with leftist ideologies which lead us to believe that you have never been a leftist.
I see this thread has moved from discussion to purity testing... I think I'll stop reading here.
I think you misunderstand what he wrote because it is pulled out of context. There is no purity testing or whatever. Formosa claimed to have been a leftist but then in his further argument went on to display a very bad understanding of leftist ideas, causing people to doubt his claim that he had once held leftist ideas.
Basically, it is like saying you speak fluent German, but then proceed to absolutely mangle a German phrase, leading people to doubt whether you actually speak German at all. I don't see how that is 'purity testing'.
You mean, Formosa went on to explain what is wrong with modern far leftist ideology and blamed it on Marxism.
Unjustly so, and when this was pointed out Formosa incorrectly accused people, including Iron_Captain, of calling him a Nazi.
Formosa wrote: Formosa still holds leftist ideas, “purity” testing is spot on what you are trying and failing to do, you believe leftism is x, and only x, when in fact it covers a wide range of things.
It is evident that Formosa holds neither social liberal nor Marxist ideas, and seeing as it is these (very different) philosophies and the many diverse movements born from them that are normally referred to as 'the left', it makes Iron_Captain question what kind of leftist ideas Formosa then does hold.
Formosa wrote: Also you then tried to compare Formosa’s ideology to naziism, in a condescending manner.
Iron_Captain never compared Formosa's ideology to nazism, Iron_Captain pointed out that Formosa's comment about Marxism was inspired by Nazi propaganda. Iron_Captain does not think Formosa is a Nazi, nor does Iron_Captain believe Formosa holds Nazi sympathies. Iron_Captain believes Formosa was simply unaware of the dark origin of his comment and wanted to inform him of such.
Iron_Captain questions why Iron_Captain and Formosa have started referring to themselves in the third person.
Disciple of Fate wrote: Using terms like 'Purity testing' and 'Marxism' to try and handwave away that you employ right wing talking points does not help the fact that you try to convince others you're a leftist.
And as pointed out believing in Cultural Marxism as in your description, which is nothing more than a ridiculous conspiracy pushed by the far right, doesn't really help when Cultural Marxism in that context is just playing right wing identity politics. But keep claiming people call you Nazi like it means something, instead of learning what academic Cultural Marxism in the sense of the Frankfurt School meaning is and seeing it has zero to do with how you're using it and zero meaning in the context we're discussing.
See you can’t help yourself can you
I didn’t bring up the purity test, I just agreed with it, yet another failure of comprehension for you.
And right wing identity politics oh that’s a good one....
This is making me wonder though, are you ignorant of what has been happening in he states and U.K. for the last 8/9 years or because you choose no to see the failings in your own movement?
Mozzyfuzzy wrote: All I've gathered that the fringe left has more weight than the fringe right on the political scale.
Not sure if you're being serious or sarcastic here.
From what Formosa has said, serious, when you believe what the fringe left makes you more central, while the fringe right does it's thing, then either the fringe left has more weight or I'll probably be accused of being condescending.
Disciple of Fate wrote: Using terms like 'Purity testing' and 'Marxism' to try and handwave away that you employ right wing talking points does not help the fact that you try to convince others you're a leftist.
And as pointed out believing in Cultural Marxism as in your description, which is nothing more than a ridiculous conspiracy pushed by the far right, doesn't really help when Cultural Marxism in that context is just playing right wing identity politics. But keep claiming people call you Nazi like it means something, instead of learning what academic Cultural Marxism in the sense of the Frankfurt School meaning is and seeing it has zero to do with how you're using it and zero meaning in the context we're discussing.
See you can’t help yourself can you
I didn’t bring up the purity test, I just agreed with it, yet another failure of comprehension for you.
And right wing identity politics oh that’s a good one....
This is making me wonder though, are you ignorant of what has been happening in he states and U.K. for the last 8/9 years or because you choose no to see the failings in your own movement?
Did you actually read what was written or are you determined to interpret everything as calling you some degree of right wing?
Just people once again explaining where your talking points are from. Interestingly enough used to make people worry more about the fringe left than is actually worthwhile.
Disciple of Fate wrote: Using terms like 'Purity testing' and 'Marxism' to try and handwave away that you employ right wing talking points does not help the fact that you try to convince others you're a leftist.
And as pointed out believing in Cultural Marxism as in your description, which is nothing more than a ridiculous conspiracy pushed by the far right, doesn't really help when Cultural Marxism in that context is just playing right wing identity politics. But keep claiming people call you Nazi like it means something, instead of learning what academic Cultural Marxism in the sense of the Frankfurt School meaning is and seeing it has zero to do with how you're using it and zero meaning in the context we're discussing.
See you can’t help yourself can you
I didn’t bring up the purity test, I just agreed with it, yet another failure of comprehension for you.
And right wing identity politics oh that’s a good one....
This is making me wonder though, are you ignorant of what has been happening in he states and U.K. for the last 8/9 years or because you choose no to see the failings in your own movement?
No, you didn't bring up purity testing, but you said it was spot on. Saying purity testing is what it is is nothing more than handwaving critique away, you agreed to the use of the term to handwave. I don't know why that is so hard to understand when you keep trying to insist others don't comprehend the topic.
Seriously, you don't believe in right wing identity politics but you believe in Cultural Marxism? The pinnacle of (far)right identity politics? Granted most have dropped the pretense and now just refer to it as 'white genocide' instead of the euphemistic Cultural Marxism.
And its been happening far longer in more than just the UK and the US than the last decade. I remember the 90's when 'Cultural Marxism is destroying American/Western culture' was nothing more than a badly veiled attempt to say 'giving gay people rights will destroy the fabric of Western society!'
Mozzyfuzzy wrote: All I've gathered that the fringe left has more weight than the fringe right on the political scale.
Not sure if you're being serious or sarcastic here.
From what Formosa has said, serious, when you believe what the fringe left makes you more central, while the fringe right does it's thing, then either the fringe left has more weight or I'll probably be accused of being condescending.
Oh...I thought you were talking for yourself not trying to put what Formosa was saying in other words. That's why I was confused as the fringe right currently holds the White house and Congress. Saying that the fringe left holds any sort of political power is quite ridiculous.
Politics discussion on Dakka belongs only in the US Politics thread. Since we've started discussing politics, I'll lock this one and any political conversations can continue over there...
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