Sometimes I actually dream about what I am going to get banned for…
Gratuitous non sequiturs?
Public emotional meltdowns involving work related issues?
Using the same rhetorical tropes a billion times?
…(ellipses ^64)…
Being a donkey?
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Oh, please don’t take my statement as negative criticism of the band–I’ve never heard their stuff before and frankly the stuff I heard was a little confusing. The coffee isn’t kicking in today, it appears.
Which is the same list of things I expect will get me fired at work. 
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Being self aware is a fucking pain in the keister. 
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Tell that to the Irish? Are you suggesting all racial minorities go form their own economies? Start making sense.
I should reject a job offer because I wasn’t hired solely on my merits?
isn’t that what white people feel blacks should do with Affirmative Action? feel shame for supposedly getting an advantage for something they didn’t earn by merit…
yet you don’t feel anything for any advantages you have
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Agreed! Except, of course, that one was a pretty big thing.
ETA: But then, it was only a big thing because that one gesture provoked such a big response from white people. Oops, you’re right after all! 
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Does the comic ask us to be aware that this shit happens, and that it shouldn’t be that’s way?
That’s not too hard.
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But making it personal is what shields you from change!
No, but it is white privilege. Which is a different concept than privilege.
The funny thing is, that when individuals take offense at the concept of white privilege because they don’t feel especially privileged, they’ve failed to take their place in society by asserting their individuality.
Yes, you may be in favor of equality, but as it has been rightly pointed out elsewhere:
Feeling bad as an individual does nothing, in fact it is counterproductive, it can only lead to either numbness or madness in its isolation, feeling bad as a society might actually effect change.
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No, because the idea of a “model minority” should more be more properly called “the model minority myth” –
“That a (White) conservative pundit [Bill O’Really] would use the Model Minority Myth to insinuate a Black cultural pathology is nothing new. The Model Minority Myth — which, let us remember, is a myth — was invented for this explicit purpose: its first appearance in the American political zeitgeist was in a 1960’s New York Times Magazine article (“Success story: Japanese American style”) as a reference to Japanese American immigrants who overcame discrimination through alleged “perseverance”, in stated contrast to African Americans who were focused on overcoming discrimination through political action (i.e. the Civil Rights Movement). In other words, the Model Minority Myth has always been a fiction invented by Whiteness and has always been used as a cudgel to denigrate, belittle, or dismiss African American efforts to agitate for political equality, while simultaneously appropriating and limiting the roles that Asian Americans can politically inhabit.”
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I don’t think you can take the order in which Webster lists definitions as definitive (so to speak) on which meaning is the primary one from a usage standpoint. My edition of this same distionary says “the order of of senses within an entry is historical.” and it “does not evaluate senses or set up a hierarchy of importance.” So the order of meaning has absolutely nothing to do with its primacy.
And is there anyone here who says that the idea of privilege has had an easy ride in popular culture? Or is the point of the cartoon precisely the opposite. That the word is met with misunderstanding and antagonism, thus necessitating the continual re-explaining in various media.
No complexity doesn’t mean something is bullshit. If a term is slippery and everyone seems to have their own working definition of it and yet it is insisted upon that we all accept it, then it is bullshit. Especially when there are already terms–like discrimination, racism, etc.–that ARE generally accepted, do make sense, do refer to specific practices that we all know about and whose connotations are less likely to piss people off and get them telling their self-justifying autobiographies.
No he was just being a tiresome jackass. Several things I’ve written should make it clear I consider racism to be an ongoing problem. I was specifically addressing the historical injustices highlighted in the comic. Those happened in the past, thus the past tense.
I agree that white-privilege-awareness can get solipsistically self-justifying and self-satisfied. And little more. Sara Ahmed (who in my estimation is a genius) wrote so well about that here:
Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism
You offer several reasons for your belief that the concept of white privilege should simply be ignored. Personally, I’d rather people talk about de facto white supremacy, but that seems even more inflammatory. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think white privilege doesn’t exist; it so obviously does.
A funny thing to me is how many of the same white people who repeat things like that quotation about how “the unexamined life is not worth living” suddenly hate to examine their own lives when the reality of racial privilege comes up. The sudden defensiveness is so interesting. And so revealing.
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That the current democracy represents the wishes of its people is very much up for debate. That systematic issues are addressable by legislature misses the point of how these things continue to happen despite most people’s good intentions.
While I think too many cops are too willing to use lethal force, that guys actions I don’t think it can be called “uncommon” in the least. Shooting someone in the back is like 1920s standard operating procedure. There have been lots of police shootings on tape and this one was so far out there the cop actually got fired. THEY FIRED HIM. That never happens.
Well, it depends on what you are trying to press on them in the examination. If you are going to try to tell white people that their grandfather getting a mortgage in 1950 was absolutely contingent upon some more deserving black family not getting theirs, then you will meet with hostility. First and foremost because that probably isn’t true. Rather than examining their own lives, they’d probably be more interested in figuring out why the obsession with dispensing white guilt? Why the willingness to distort history in order to enforce a very particular and peculiar way of figuring this problem? Why the fixation on enforcing the use of one single term? It’s an obvious power play, and it meets with hostility (what you like to call defensiveness) for very good reasons.
They are certainly unaddressable by the current majority, who openly admit that they have no intention of addressing them. But that might be because they only have to answer to < 18.2% of the voting-age public.
Is it a privilege to be able to understand white privilege?
If there is any truth to this:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
If poor white people have it bad, what is the motivation to fail to recognize that some people have it even worse?
Is it because:
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
Are people too wrapped up in their own problems to notice, much less care about whats going on in the world? Or is it that they know they have it bad and they suspect that if the playing field was level, they could have it worse?
Great, we have a baseline we can agree on.
Light is both a particle and a wave and depending on how you’re looking at it, the definition may change, and yet it is insisted upon that we all accept this property of light. So light is bullshit?
Global warming will make some regions of the globe cooler, so everyone has their own definition of what “warming” means and yet it is insisted upon that we accept that cooler spots are a phenomenon of the overall increase in temperature. So global warming is bullshit?
“Knocked” is a thing you can do to doors or heads or lovers or boots. So that word is bullshit?
These are all complex. None of them are bullshit. So use the same frame of mind to look at privilege.
Your decision of what is “bullshit” and what is not is wrong. So adjust it. Learn. Grow. Stop. Collaborate. Listen.
That last is very important. You do not seem to be doing that. You keep insisting that your definition is the one everyone must adhere to. When you were a child you learned that “blue” could mean more than one thing. You learned how to use the term. You did not quixotically insist that it must mean only one thing and that the world must conform to your expectations. Learn how to use this term, too. By listening.
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