In short, it wasn’t the privilege itself, but the “Check your Privilege to see if you’re a shitlord or not” mentality that has been spreading throughout the internet lately.
Thanks for the explanation, and I too have seen some of what you’re talking about. However, “white privilege” is just not that complicated, not as a term nor as a concept. In terms of everyday comprehension, t’s not, like, “hegemonic dominance of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that seeks to interpellate the subjected subjectivity of the always already ontologically unstable subject.” You know what I’m saying? 
In my experience, people who use and try to persuade others with the term white privilege are doing so because they seek to counteract the very real phenomenon that it describes, and because getting white people to see that phenomenon is a way of getting them to better see their own relative (and yes, relatively privileged) positions within an inequitable social order. In the hopes that they’ll go on to act better in the future. Yes, some students and other participants cynically do little more than parrot the terminology to get by, but many others incorporate it into a better understanding of how the world works, and into better forms of action, especially when encountering (excuse the terminology) their racialized Others.
Just because you associate the term with inbred academic politics does not mean that the term always lacks utility. Not even within the academic context, which does not, after all, exist in a vacuum.
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You don’t like Jews. Check.
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Exactly. Racism isn’t some historical thing, it is an ongoing thing that has been (possibly) worse historically. This whole thread is full of sanctimonious white dudes being pissy about that and that their personal troubles growing up aren’t valued or something.
For the record, I grew up on food stamps too. Cry me a f’ing river. I got my first tech job because I knew computers. Why? Because my white grandfather was an engineer who taught me things he knew and, later, paid my tuition in college. Talk about privilege.
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I’m out of likes for another 30 minutes, so a Gir gif will have to do.
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Like I was saying above, I remember identity politics arguments in the 90s, and they were often pretty bad, and tended towards denial of solidarity and a fracturing of movements that would sometimes become absurd even to the participants. Part of it was the emphatic insistence that it was impossible for anyone not in a particular identity group to understand the experience of that identity group.
However, as I recall, the student identity politics activists – most of them, anyway, who weren’t self-serving opportunists – were frustrated that the theories they were working with didn’t seem to allow for solidarity between groups that, intuitively, were obviously natural allies, and they recognized that they were looking at a dead end.
Today’s identity politics advocates are not pushing the same line as in the 90s. The current favored buzzword is “intersectionality” – which has a specific meaning that is interesting and useful, but it often gets used as a synonym for solidarity. This is a fundamentally different position – there’s an enormous difference between refusing to work with others, and offering to work with others under certain reasonable pre-conditions.
The big problem with arguments around “privilege” in the 90s wasn’t with the concept of privilege itself, but with the insistence that it was literally impossible for anyone in a privileged group to see past the limitations of a privileged point of view and to ally with others who might oppose the system that sustains those privileges.
That’s clearly not the assumption now. Quite the opposite, the demand is to recognize privilege in order to move past it. And that’s an eminently reasonable demand.
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How about, instead of throwing around accusations of being a white supremacist, you actually address something said there?
Such as that rather than being oppressed, Jewish Americans are not only not oppressed, they’re more privileged than almost all of us? They’re an American success story.
The entire reason I brought up changing the last name was that it was used as an example of how Jews were oppressed in America. They’re not the only people to change their names to assimilate. As unfair as it is, when a hiring manager is looking at resumes, and they see the names Dare Obsanjo, Luria Petrucci, and Ted Bundy, if they’re not familiar with the history behind those names, they’re probably going to latch on to ol’ Ted. It’s three syllables, it’s not “ethnic”, it’s the most “American” sounding, and it’s easy to pronounce.
Luria Petrucci is better known as Cali Lewis, tech journalist and former co-host of Call for Help.
Hell, to bring it back to Jewish names, Bob Dylan’s real name is Robert Zimmerman.
This was all in response to albill’s comment questioning whether Jewish people are really advantaged because a relative had to change his name, which you seem to agree is a non-issue so what, are you just arguing because you’re hoping to score points by painting me as a white supremacist? Look, I’m just trying to point out here that “I don’t have privilege because I had to change my name” doesn’t cut the mustard any more than “I don’t have privilege because I’m on food stamps” does.
Yeah, I keep forgetting how his career has been so much more stellar than Charlie’s.
Let’s also stop for a moment and ask a few questions here, while we’re on Hollywood.
What’s Robert de Nero most famous for?
How about Al Pacino?
James Gandolfini?
How many people are familiar with Luisa Veronica Ciccone?
What’s the first thing you think of when you look at this picture?
But I’ll be sure my wife she needs to tell her students how much privilege they have, as she helps hand them extra snacks before the weekend so that they’ll actually have something to eat when they’re not in school…
When did we forget about the wide gulf between the rich and the rest of us, and when did it go from being “we are the 99%” to being all about making white people feel guilty? This thing of painting “not getting the shit beat out of you by the cops” as a privilege gets ignored by conservatives, is eaten up by affluent liberals who don’t seem to be willing to give up that privilege, just tell other people to “check” it, and is insulting to people who have a hard time seeing anything advantageous about their paycheck-to-paycheck lives.
I liked it for you.
@echines has a complex about the word “privilege” and refuses to let the conversation actually address the issues arising around the oppression of blacks until his issues with the use of this word are addressed.
Basically, classic derailing.
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Wow. I thought his post raised a lot of good points and showed how this world isn’t black and white. This world is more complicated than a snarky comic can boil it down to.
To dismiss it with a hand waving “You don’t like Jews.” I find very disingenuous. (Nor did I find anything he said suggesting this.)
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Disagree with albull, and he’ll diagnose your moral and cognitive failings. He does this for free.
Dude, if you hadn’t gone off a totally off-topic, anti-semetic rant, I probably wouldn’t have brought up storm front. To think that Jewish Americans are the most privileged group in American is absurd on its face.
How about YOU address the topic of the thread, which is white privilege. And yes, some Jews have benefited from white privilege too, but that is a relatively recent phenomenon, in part driven by the fact that American, Russian, and European GIs happened to stumble upon one of the worst mass homicides in modern history at the end of WW2. Seeing heaps of bodies piled up makes you stop and think a bit, I’d imagine. Nor does it really extend to those who embrace a more traditional Jewish life. There are trade offs demanded in assimilating to whiteness. Sure, you can get your bar mitzvah, but god forbid you wear traditional orthodox clothing. It is any wonder that so many orthodox actually support settlement building in Israel?
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So you and your father, both American born Irish with no accent, benefited from being “white” in no way and your circumstances would be exactly the same if you’d had black skin, sounded black, and lived in a black neighborhood? No differences at all in your experience of America? Because, if there would be any difference simply caused by a change in being identified as “white” or not, that would be a benefit…
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We didn’t pay him. He was paid for by company.
My point still stands and it’s not that someone had it worse or that others hardship discounts anyone elses. My point is the cartoon makes it look like people benefited from racism. Which is VERY different from saying people were damaged by racism.
Advice by white man about how people, especially minorities and women, should talk about privilege duly mansplained and noted.
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And when he was in need, your family didn’t see the need to help him out? Why is that?
People have benefited from racism. There are vast amounts of literature on this very topic. It’s a provable, historical fact. See for example, in addition to the book I already posted:
I highly recommend you engage this literature a bit deeper rather than just assume because you or your family didn’t feel you’ve benefited from racism, that it’s nonsense.
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Racism is institutionalized by viewpoints from high ranking corporate elites, to stereotype brought on through entertainment. Whites cis straight males were always at the top because the founders of the United States were believed to be cis white males. Hence All white males benefits from that historical fact, which promotes racial thoughts; Therefore they’re all benefits from racism/classism/sexism because they’re not being judge/called out for not fitting that IDEAL IMAGE BROUGHT ON BY THE ELITES.
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Uhm I’d say prove being white is a benefit. I can say being black is a detriment. Sure, but proving the converse is much harder. Especially when Asians do quite well in our economy.
