I actually saw about 10 minutes of one my wife had to attend virtually. Bunch of garbage.
The rest I got from discussions with persons who had directly experienced the trainings.
Maybe. Certainly there’d be less conflict if they’d promoted the inequality as ‘bipoc challenges’ rather than ‘white priviledge’. Pretty easy to see how the term is going to be perceived as an attack on someone based on their colour. Because now the conversation isn’t ‘bipoc’s have additional challenges’, it’s ‘you have stuff that other people don’t’. Any anyone’s going to respond to that implication with ‘no I don’t’. And now we’re not even having the conversation we should be having, which isn’t ‘white people don’t have hurdles’.
The SOA pushing stuff out with some intention of racial diversity, and the LGBTQ actuarial group are the way to do things. Not this crabs in a bucket thing.
I think I agree with this sentence but what is “bipoc”? Is it an acronym where the last three letters are Persons Of Color?
If so, what are the first two letters?
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen it, but since it keeps coming up and I don’t know what it means it seems like I ought to ask.
BIPOC: Black, Indigenous, and People of Color
Are Black and Indigenous people not people of color?
Thanks for the explanation, but the acronym seems redundant.
I have struggled a bit with the phrase “white privilege”, in part because at first it seems unnecessarily inflammatory. Particularly in the US, privilege is something we think of as being possessed by snobby rich people born with silver spoons in their mouths, or aristocratic nobility who are proud of inheriting rather than earning their place in society.
But I think privilege is the right word for the message, as i understand it. “BIPOC challenges” frames the problem more as individual challenges faced by individual people. Privilege frames it as a society that tends to help certain people. And the argument is that the only way to continue making progress with racism is to view it in this second way. Maybe this claim is wrong. But if the claim is correct, then i think the message is probably the right one.
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That’s honestly not how I would view that phrase. I would view it as challenges that are at least commonly (if not universally) faced by POCs. I’m not seeing anything in that phrase that implies it is only a small subset of POCs that face these challenges.
And I think that framing it as extra challenges that POCs face that I do not is a more constructive way to frame the conversation.
I’ve accepted the term “white privilege”, but I really think it’s somewhat of a misnomer. I don’t have privileges that I’m entitled to because of my whiteness*, but I am able to exercise rights that we all should have because of my whiteness. The goal shouldn’t be to take anything away from me, but rather to bring POCs up to the point that they are on equal footing with me.
I think POC challenges would be much more readily accepted by many White people who do not feel that they are particularly privileged. It acknowledges that we all face challenges, sometimes substantial while still making it clear that there’s a set of challenges unique to POCs.
*Strictly speaking I am part Middle Eastern and part African, but my European genes have dominated in determining the color of my skin such that my appearance is that of a pasty White person, and I can easily enjoy the advantages that go along with that.
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I agree that it doesn’t imply it happens to only a small portion of people. My point is that it misses the special emphasis on the role the structure of society in creating these challenges. And without that emphasis, I think the tendency is to think of it in more traditional terms, ie not in terms of systemic racism.
I agree with this, and it’s another disadvantage of the word “privilege”. I wish there were a better word.
How about “BIPOC Societal Challenges”?
The goal is, I thought, to change people’s ideas about racism in society. I don’t think the term “White Privilege” does that, whether or not we accept the term as it’s defined (which requires a lot more words). It shuts the door in the very people who need to change their views, and who need the term defined for them. It allows racism to continue to exist and for people to complain about it.
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There is that. There also seems like there would be an implication in that sort of phrase that it is something POC have power to overcome on their own.
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This is reminding me of something my SiL said last summer (I started an AO thread about it). In the context of the BLM protests, she said something like, “You know who this is all going to hurt - white males”. Her example was something about scholarships (which the AO helped me research - white males are still doing just fine on schlarships - better than their numbers would indicate).
I didn’t have arguments ready, but as I’ve thought about it more, there are a few possible things she could have meant by the phrase (let’s use some metric - “g” for “good”:
- White Males will be worse off overall (fewer "g"s than they currently have). I don’t see this being the case
- White Males will be worse off in comparison to others (WMs have 5 "g"s today, BMs have 3 "g"s today. Next year, WMs have 6 "g"s and BM’s have 5 "g"s, so WMs have lost ground). This one is not only possible, but should be the goal
It seems like I came up with another, but I can’t remember. The basic issue is that my SIL seems to think that there are a fixed number of "g"s to go around. That’s also the basic issue around most people’s thoughts about “privilege”. You don’t actually have to give up your privilege in order for someone else to get more - unless you are in mindset #2.
The word might not be the best, but I haven’t heard a better one yet.
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You could tell her that WM’s are better off overall BECAUSE of 400 years (or millennia) of racism, and then ask her if she thinks that’s acceptable.
We just retain the not so overt policies that kick the can down the road like restrictions on housing densities in suburbs and new to 2021 all sorts of new rules that make simple things like voting more difficult for POC.
Which is kind of the point of CRT.
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Hiding in plain sight. The GOP has embraced white supremacy as a motivating factor for its base.
The legal institutional racism will be felt for generations. The social/cultural institutional racism from the past and still continuing and will be felt for generations until it is driven to the fringes of society. Your solutions push the onus of the correction (education, family planning, marriage) onto the individual at the bottom letting the owners/corporations/powerful off the hook for their bias.
Do you see a lot of overtly racist CEO these days? I don’t. I see a bunch of virtue signaling ones who are terrified of being labeled as racist. I see a lot of Diversity programs having been put in place. The powerful people who put the old racist policies in place are dead of old age.
The problems aren’t issues with skin color anymore. They are caused by poverty. The solutions need to be aimed at that. That means helping people change the behaviors that lead into poverty and making sure the opportunities are there for them to take advantage of. The taxes supporting anti-poverty programs come from owners/corporations/powerful. No one is getting off the hook.
This is just false. It’s something you desperately want to be true even though the evidence doesn’t support you at all.
https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5533&context=flr
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Yeah, I think it’s fair to say that a significant portion of issues faced by African Americans and Hispanics are related to class, and it’s certainly not wrong to try to address those through the lens of class. (For example, white kids scoring better than black kids on standardized tests is almost entirely an issue of class and when the kids are segmented by class the differences don’t completely disappear but they shrink by a lot.)
But they also face issues that are not related to class at all. LeBron James’s house being vandalized with racist graffiti certainly wasn’t because he’s poor… because he’s richer than probably everyone on this board.
Police brutality is far worse for blacks than whites even when segmented by income. The differences are undoubtedly smaller when you segment by income, but at every level they are still there.
Cops tail my husband for a few miles a couple of times a month because we live in a world where a black man driving a late model BMW constitutes probable cause. (Republican) Senator Tim Scott has written about this phenomenon too.
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Systemic racism can be present even when the individuals involved are not racist.
That’s why the people involved need to be aware of it and not hide behind “but I have black friends”.
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