Ok. Not an argument I am interested in making on someone else’s behalf. But the view is that there is a white culture, and minorities are affected.by it. Often enough, negatively.
I imagine the opposite. I would think the desperate would find a way and the rapists would just stay home and rape. But who knows.
But that’s not a position I’m staking out, really. Just thoughts in response to loppar.
Well, whoever says there is white culture is wrong. There isn’t even black culture.
And white privilege is a stupid and divisive term to describe what are simply racially biased behaviors and actions by individuals. If I get a job over a black person because I’m white, it isn’t about my privilege but the bigotry of the person who hired me. If I don’t get followed in a store by loss prevention it is a reflection of the prejudice of loss prevention. If I wasn’t born out of wedlock it isn’t because I am white but because my parents wanted to marry. If a black person was born out of wedlock it has nothing to do with me being white, or him being black (black people do marry) and everything to do with his parents choosing to not marry.
Then I would wonder why the rapists are coming here in the first place if they have that option.
Honestly, they’re really not. A member of a race (generic lazy usage here) is FAR more likely to be raped by another member. While is might sound scary to some whites (and african americans), there isn’t an epidemic of Mexican rapists going after our US born and bred lady folk.
Oh, trust me, I grew up white trailer trash. Broken home. Abuse. Drugs. Life-threatening condition. Wore what my father handed down and the church dropped off. Does the color of my skin carry some privilege? I myself won’t claim that it does not. In my estimation there IS a culture (needn’t call it white) in which it carries some benefit. But what about the black kid with the intact solidly upper middle-class home? The one whose parents pushed him from an early age and made sure he had access to whatever resources (tutors, computers, safety and order) he needed? The one who then won scholarships? There were actually a couple examples in my graduating class). I would say their :“privilege” far outweighed what privilege my skin color bestowed upon me.
I mean, look at the children of say Will Smith. They know privilege far beyond my own. Still, I don’t personally deny “white privilege.” It’s just that there are some very important circumstances when it comes down to talking individuals.
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It’s a divisive term to make people feel guilty about what they have. The claim is what they have was unearned. If I went to college and can help my kid prepare to go to college what should I do? Not help her with her homework because she didn’t earn that advantage that she will have over kids with uneducated parents? Should she feel guilty because her parents made the effort to help her with her education? Should she feel guilty because her parents are married? Because they moved from the ghetto to the suburbs so she could go to a better school and live in a safer and more civil environment?
Instead of focusing on the advantages that (some) white people have, the focus should be on what blacks (not all) lack and why. What the whole white privilege BS does is diminish the humanity of whites. If a white person had a horrible childhood it’s really not that bad because he’s white. Only a black person can truly know suffering. Well, maybe Obama’s kids might face racism in some form during their lives but I doubt they would want to trade places with some hillbillies or wish that there father had been a coal miner.
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Having said all that I still can’t deny that there are certain trends. All else being equal, I won’t deny: that blacks are sentenced more harshly. I do believe banks, insurance companies have, and still would, treat blacks differently. Security, differently. Police, differently. Prospective employers, differently. Enough to cause trends we have measured. But, I do hate how much weight is given to white privilege.
I am not talking about every instance or encounter, obviously. Don’t mean to offend any police officer. Just saying that it happens enough to cause different perceptions to develop in two (for example) different populations. I mean, if we could measure the average stress level of a white driver being pulled over by the police, compared to the average of black drivers…I am putting money on the black drivers being more stressed out.
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Of course that is all true, although the FBI has some interesting data regarding racial bias and policing. But I should not feel guilty about other peoples’ racism and bigotry. And if I knowingly benefit from it then I should speak out.
How much of that is due to media hype?
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I’m not against the words so much, but I do agree with the gist of what you’re saying. Yep, the Obama kids are far more privileged than anything my skin may or may not have afforded me.
Yep, yep. The more nuanced view, I can dig. And, that’s a level of poor that makes my child hood experiences feel rich. I was the stereotypical Floridian trailer dweller. Not the retired Northerner kind with the carefully manicured yards in a 55+ age gated community No, I was the poor Florida cracker kid running around with a mullet, wearing hand me down biker shirts and Walmart generic tennis shoes. The generic shoes with the numbering and lettering down the side instead of swoosh. Bobos, heh. But, I always had AC!
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It is still stupid to call these things privileges. If you are naturally smarter than someone else that isn’t a privilege. If someone is taller than I and is better at basketball, he does not have a privilege I don’t have. If someone lacks a physical or mental disability it doesn’t mean that they have a privilege over someone who was born with a disability.
What does unearned mean? It’s another stupid thing to say. Someone didn’t earn a higher IQ than someone else? What does that even mean? Earned or unearned don’t exist when it comes to genetics and nature. It’s just another way to say what people who talk like that really mean, which is, deserve.
I have a graduate degree. My wife is a science teacher. My wife can help our daughter with her science homework. I can help my daughter with other subjects. She takes French for example. I know French, because I made the effort to learn it based on my personal desire to learn it, not because of white privilege. We even hired a tutor to help her with math in spite of not being wealthy. She takes guitar lessons which we pay for. My daughter will be taking AP courses soon. Did she earn this advantage (or privilege) that her parents can give her over kids whose parents lack the ability and/or desire to give? Did she earn having parents whose values taught them that having kids brings with it the obligation to do whatever they can to help them succeed in life? Does she DESERVE to have parents who are willing to go without certain things so she can have more? And when all is said and done, should she feel guilty about it?
And do I and my wife do these things because we are white? My parents did not go to college. My father was an immigrant who didn’t speak English, grew up in the middle of a war, started to work a job outside of the family farm at the age of 14 and who only had an 8th grade education. My mother died when I was 6. So when I help my daughter it isn’t like I’m engaging in some learned “white” behavior. I’m doing for her what wasn’t done for me, and one reason why is exactly because it wasn’t done for me. I can look back and see how kids born into certain circumstances had certain advantages over me. Rather than rage about it I choose to follow their example and do those things for my kid. So am I giving her unearned white privileges? I didn’t earn the things that allow me to help her? My wife isn’t white and came here from a very poor country that makes any American ghetto look like paradise. When she helps our daughter is she giving her some unearned privilege?
Yeah, the people who bring up white privilege can say they don’t want white people to feel guilty. The people who bring up a “nuanced” privilege can say they don’t want people to feel guilty. If that were truly the case then they wouldn’t define these things as privileges and tell others that they didn’t earn (deserve) them. It’s Marxist influenced thinking meant to create division, envy and a victim mentality. When you have a victim you have a villain, someone to blame. This creates conflict, not consolation and conciliation.
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You should post like this more.
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Actually, something akin to “white privilege” does exist on a global level but it has nothing to do with the distorted concept pushed by the SJWs and postmodernists.
Due to a combination of geographical, environmental, societal and historical factors, people deemed “white” are on average better off than those deemed “black”. It’s better to be an US redneck or a dweller of a Moldovan village than it is to live in northern Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo or in the Central African Republic. Of course, it’s the average and doesn’t take millions and millions of poor whites and affluent blacks in many countries.
But the currently popular dichotomy between “bad” oppressive whites and “good” oppressed blacks is, like racism, a fairly recent phenomenon. Reading Ancient Greek or Roman texts it’s impossible to pigeonhole any of their contemporaries into the modern categories of race. It seems that most of the people, from Persia to Spain were on a brownish spectrum, with only outliers (black Nubians and blonde barbarians from the north) deserving a mention for their freakishness.
Also, if you change the Western centric optics, things change and wreak havoc with the common perception of the oppressed/oppressor dynamic and skin color. For example, a significant part of the population of modern day Turkey are descendants of slaves, which is clearly visible in their physical appearance, like this guy, a famous Turkish actor:
You see, while you guys were beginning to clamor for independence from the Crown, Muslim slavers were still occasionally raiding southern Ireland and England for slaves, not to mention the Slavs from the northern shores of the Black Sea. There were hundreds of thousands of Christian slaves in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, including the infamous Barbary pirates.
Persians were obsessed with blonde, blue eyed men and were paying exorbitant sums for such slaves to North Africans, and having a harem of them was considered a status symbol.
That’s why such race-based generalizations don’t work where white is “bad”. Yes, that what we would call white me created world empires (American, British, Spanish, Portuguese…) and left a mixed legacy that included oppression and destruction, but so have others, non-white people.
If there wasn’t some freak coincidences, including he Mongol razing of Baghdad and fabulously rich Central Asian cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand, a bunch of impoverished countries on the western end of the known world would never had a chance to create empires out of scratch.
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All good and interesting points. That said, if one is talking specifically about American society, ‘changing the optics’ would serve only to obfuscate the issues.
It’s better to be black in America than live in the Congo. Which brings up the question, do American blacks have privilege when compared to blacks in some African nations? Do they have privilege over people in some Latin and South American countries who are black, white, indigenous or any combination of the three? In other words, does the average black American have any advantages (or privilege) over the average Mexican, Brazilian or Colombian?
So is there American privilege and/or Western privilege? Are we really going to point at a successful black person in America, someone whose ancestors were slaves, who went through Jim Crow, redlining, white flight, etc., who were not well educated and never earned much money in spite of working very hard; are we going to tell that person that he has some sort of unearned privilege when compared to blacks in Africa?
Are we going to point the finger of unearned privilege at someone whose parents legally or illegally entered this nation from Mexico, worked for low wages, could not speak English, had no education, etc., but managed to raise their kids in such a way that they either learned a trade and from there started their own business or went to college and became a doctor or lawyer? An outcome that was less likely had his parents stayed in Mexico.
People throw out the word unearned as if no one paid a price for those advantages.
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Only if there are political gains to be made from doing so, and I can’t think of any.
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Looking at global statistics, yes. If you have internet, clean running water, a dwelling made of durable materials and a bathroom just for you and your family, you’re technically very privileged just by the location of your birth.