I think this is because we tend to think of privilege in absolute terms. We are privileged or not.
Then to call a poor white person privileged seems to ignore various other unfair hierarchies in our society such as the privilege of wealth.
In some respects it may have been easier to recognize and name white privilege in the jim crow south when the hierarchy of race was clearly more important than the hierarchy of wealth, such as the saying that poorest white man was still above every black man.
This also brings attention to the perversity that being lower in other kinds of privilege often does not make people more open to racial equality, and in fact can do the opposite. Perhaps if this were not true, then a coalition between poor whites and minorities to bring equality to everybody, and that focused much more on wealth than race, would be more successful.
I have a problem with them. But “white normal” is worse, imo.
I agree with you about the former. But the latter is a better reason why “white experience is normative” is problematic than it is an argument for using “normal”.
I think that’s a sound idea. I just think you are “othering” the “not normal”, and the way your suggested language would be used would serve to reinforce existing discrepancies rather than help address them.
“Normative” might be a little better & work for things like race or handedness, where the world seems geared toward one for no good reason, but it doesn’t really address situations where there are just different privileges, like male privilege & female privilege. Neither is necessarily normative.
That’s an overly simplistic view, IMO. I think the term “privilege” isn’t offensive… it’s just inaccurate. The fact that I don’t have obstacles that I’m not supposed to have isn’t really privilege in the traditional sense of the word.
The problem isn’t that I’m NOT getting shot by police. It’s that African-Americans ARE.
It focuses on the wrong thing. What needs fixing isn’t MY day-to-day experience (except for male privilege)… it’s the day-to-day experience of others that needs to change so that they’re not living in fear of things that I don’t need to live in fear of.
I think though, that most white people don’t need to worry about being shot by police. That is white privilege.
Not having to worry about where your next meal is coming from or how you will pay your bills—that is wealth or class privilege.
I’ve been reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson and she explains that Caste privilege (which in the US is determined by race) is different than class privilege.
I agree.
I also think that using the words or phrases in a different way from the norm (“privilege,” “Black Lives Matter” (“too” or “also” not included for the critical emphasis that “your” (white) life matters is a given in society, while “my” (black) life does not) leads to a halt in the conversation.
Also, my new response to, “Well, ALL lives matter” is “Maybe to you, but not to everyone. And since not everyone believes that, THAT is the issue. THAT is why the BLM movement exists. Do you understand?”
A lot of the privilege is 0-sum though. So a scholarship not granted to a black kid is a privilege granted to the receiving white kid, all else equal, same for jobs, or cop arrests (since limited resources and you can’t arrest everyone that’s breaking the law), etc.
I think most of it isn’t. We can all be respected enough that the plumber listens to us. (I know a lot of women who get useless responses, from plumbers, etc., and then when their husbands use the exact same words, the plumber believes it.) We can all be trusted enough to not be shot by the police when opening a glove box to get the registration. We can all be seen as potential colleagues, and not assumed to be the help. We can all be heard in meetings. We can all be credited for our ideas.
I think the scholarships are a fringe case that gets a lot of press because it upsets people. And if you actually look at admissions, stuff like alumni parents and being good at an expensive sport or instrument dominate race-influenced stuff.
I believe you that you are not afraid of losing white privilege.
But I think description you gave is completely consistent with privilege.
As a tongue-in-cheek example, consider Mary Antoinette, who i think exemplifies wealth privilege as much as anyone. You could imagine her making the same sort of protest after being told the peasants couldn’t eat cake instead of bread: that it’s not her privilege because she doesn’t worry about starving to death, and it’s their day-today experience that needs fixing, not hers, etc.
Exactly. If Starbucks didn’t kick out a black patron while he waited for his friend that wouldn’t hurt me in the slightest.
If cops thought first and shot second, that would probably HELP me as I’d pay less taxes to fund wrongful death suits, and/or the taxes that I pay that fund police would be spent more productively.
Well “let them eat cake” is an example of being clueless, I think. And yeah, the solution isn’t to starve Marie Antoinette… it’s to ensure that the peasants have enough to eat.
Now in that example perhaps giving the peasants more would mean that Marie Antoinette had less. But the overwhelming majority of this stuff is not a zero sum game.
And one could even argue that by having happier subjects, the cost of protecting her would decrease, which would benefit her as well.
fwiw, “let them eat cake” appears to be apocryphal.
But it’s an extreme example of how privilege works – those who have privilege are blind to the trials others experience. to a large degree, cluelessness is the usual result of privilege.
While the Bible might be some kind of history book (would be nice to have dates attached, like a REAL history book), it’s also filled with a bullshitload of fiction. And not the “And some believe…” kind of stuff you read in, say a Hamilton biography. It’s more like, “You WILL believe or you’ll go to HELL, and no it doesn’t have to be proven!!” kind of bullshit.
And yes, so does the NT.
I think the interesting point is that looking for systemic racism makes us ask some very interesting questions. Normatively, it makes us wonder about whether adam and eve should be portrayed as white.
positively, it makes us want to study whether the creationism and white supremacy movements have strengthened each other.
i think this is a good thing.
But there is a temptation towards reductionism, where everything becomes about systemic racism. That article seems to at least partially succumb to that temptation, although i wonder if the author wasn’t trying to be provocative. Creationism becomes really about systemic racism rather than religion.
FWIW, I don’t think creationism and racism are too tightly linked. However if you go back to the early arguments against evolution a lot of then do seem to revolve around some racist anti-black tropes including the “We’ll I’ll be monkey’s Uncle” and the imagery surrounding it. There were a lot of white who wanted no part f blacks in their family tree no matter how long ago that might have been.
“It’s time that we see the development of discriminatory technological products as an intentional act done by the largely white, male executives of Silicon Valley to uphold the systems of racism, misogyny, ability, class and other axis of oppression that privilege their interests and create extraordinary profits for their companies. And though these technologies are made to appear benevolent and harmless, they are instead emblematic of what Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the author of Race After Technology , terms “The New Jim Code“: new technologies that reproduce existing inequities while appearing more progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era.”
I have a lot of sympathy for the claim that:
“ It’s time for us to reject the narrative that Big Tech sells—that incidents of algorithmic bias are a result of using unintentionally biased training data or unconscious bias. Instead, we should view these companies in the same way that we view education and the criminal justice system: as institutions that uphold and reinforce structural inequities regardless of good intentions or behaviors of the individuals within those organizations.”
But to me that is different from the earlier quote that this behavior is intentional.
I’ve heard that systemic racism is not about intent. But this seems a difficult prescription to follow in practice.
Either people reject the intent, and the guilt that seems to come with it, and thus reject systemic racism.
Or they embrace the intent along with systemic racism, at least partially.
I don’t think that biased systems are necessarily the result of intentional racism.
The article is written by a PhD candidate, hoping to finish in 2022. Maybe I should discount it because the author isn’t a recognized leader in this field. Or, maybe I should take it seriously because this is the standard required for PhD level work.
