Yes, I’m sure the daughters of the most visible black man in America (and possibly the most powerful) would rather be black than paraplegic.
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That’s not my belief. I don’t believe that, and I don’t frame my beliefs in that paradigm. But you’re not really hearing what I am saying because you are translating it into the white privilege metaphor that I don’t use. My beliefs can’t be made to fit into that framing without misrepresentation. It’s too broken to serve for that. You’ll be forced to dumb down what I tried to say, and here you’re only addressing what you’ve introduced in the process, not what I mean to convey.
I agree that people who enjoy rights and benefits that others do not can be called privileged. I do not agree that it makes sense to rhetorically leap into a 100% racist labeling of the highly privileged classes, who currently have members from all races, or of the less privileged classes, who also have members from all races. That’s just wrong, and people taking up that mindset will hurt my efforts to build a just and better world.
The comic “Bob and Race” has illustrative power and could possibly do great good. It shows exactly what Bob is doing wrong and how he could gain understanding that would let him do better. In contrast, the WP paradigm elides important distinctions and divides people. It’s bad and harmful; words have power. If I can convince even one person to give this rhetoric up, I think I will have helped make the world a better place.
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Levity. Plus on topic and on point.
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I hope you’ll forgive my confusion, then, because earlier you said this:
I’ve tried to show you how whites did, in fact benefit from inequity. They became property owners while blacks were unable to do so. That materially benefited them beyond just the acquisition of that property.
I spoke directly to the words you put on the page.
Who, besides the people who seem to have a problem with the term “privileged” are making this rhetorical leap? Perhaps this is my personal bias, but I’m not seeing it. Can you provide examples? It certainly doesn’t seem implied in the definitions provided.
You’re years too late for that. Even this comic is from 2008, for crying out loud. You’re at risk of becoming Don Quixote tilting at the windmill of terminology.
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But if you’re going to be a paraplegic you’re statistically better off if you’re a white paraplegic.
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What? That’s like saying that bridges or highways built in the 1930s are still in use today. Sheer lunacy!
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So to summarize: racism exists, classism exists, people are generally unaware of what racism and classism other groups face or how it affects multiple generations, there is always someone more oppressed than you and the there would be a lot less arguments if the term ‘white privilege’ was replaced with something better.
Ok, good work people. So how do we fix it?
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So, you had a black, underpaid driver, paid-for by a company… And you’ve never benefitted from racism every in your life.
Okay, I think I’m following you here.
The question is, are you following you here?
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It’s inscrutable, is what it is.
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Not without slapping his hands over his eyes and signing very loudly, "LALALALALAL! DON’T SEE ANY RACISM HERE, NOPE! AMERICA IS FINE, THANK YOU! LALALALALALA
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Here’s something I read recently, that I thought was a fairly clear example of a form of white privilege, of which I hadn’t been aware until I read it: the challenges of photographing black people.
Teaching The Camera to See My Skin
Most of us, most of the time, lean towards thinking of photographs as objective and unbiased, but they aren’t. The technology of photography, of film and photo processing labs, is optimized for the display of light-colored skins. The author talks about the techniques she’s learned to work around this problem, as a professional photographer.
The upshot is that taking casual snapshots of family, and having them look moderately good, is significantly easier for white people than for black people.
This doesn’t mean that white people should feel ashamed of themselves for using cameras. It’s that the point of view of white people is privileged over that of non-white people, that non-white people face a difficulty of which white people are unaware, that is a result of a history of bias in favor of white people. It’s that what looks like a level playing field isn’t actually a level playing field at all.
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Arguing! About the same things! With extra denial! Obviously.
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I’m reminded of a similar distinction, to do with handicaps.
People with handicaps have stated that they aren’t defined solely by that, so it’s not appropriate to call them “handicapped” as their identity. They are people, just like everyone else, who happen to have handicaps.
No one is calling all white people privileged. They’re people, who happened to have a special privilege due to being white. Some have been affected more by this than others. But all of them have many other aspects to their identity as well. It’s not WHO they are, it’s just one part.
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I am reminded of the Better off Ted episode “Racial Sensitivity”.
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McWhorter asks an important question:
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I didn’t realize that was something I’d seen until I looked it up on IMDB. Yes, relevant.
I appreciate your willingness to engage, but it’s really hard to reply to that construct. I can do it readily in raw HTML but discourse is all mousey and stuff. Bear with me, and I’ll show you an example of something.
OK. Point out the problems if I bungled the editing. I added highlighting and put some additional text insertions in square brackets, but otherwise it should be what we posted.
Given what I was trying to say, you’ve basically asked me when I stopped beating my wife, although hopefully not intentionally. Please re-read the above as many times as it takes, if you haven’t already seen it.
The WP meme and paradigm produce this exact problem all the time. It’s the functional effect of that mode of thought - to elide important distinctions, setting people against each other unnecessarily. Note how we both liked the comic, but I can easily talk about it in a way that offends nobody but racists (it’s true I can’t talk about WP without offending, but I can talk about the comic) while people who insist on dragging out the false equivalencies inherent in the WP dialog simply can’t. For some of them, that’s exactly why they like it - they want to yell at people on the Internet and call them racists, so the WP meme is deeply satisfying.
Inequity for one group is not the same as privilege for another group, and the distribution of privilege and inequity in the world is not infallibly defined by skin color, and it’s harmful to think that way. “White Privilege,” as a phrase, enshrines and promotes this harmful mode of thought. I think that mode actively interfered with mutual understanding in the exchange we both quoted above.
Yeah, I know. I have a fatal weakness for doomed causes and I’m always trying to help out the underdog. It’ll kill me eventually, but not tonight! Tonight I will put down the lance and go have dinner with the family.
G’night everyone!
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You actually got me curious enough to look up what the hell you were talking about. Guess I have a new series to start reading.
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OK, one last. Then I’m out, I promise.
Holy carp, Aloisius, how did I miss your post? I’ve been looking for someone to say that for months now!
We fix it by affirmative action in education and jobs that is 100% based on need and not on skin color or ancestry. We stop giving the richest people in America senior citizen discounts and give them to poor younger people who exemplify traits that we want to encourage instead. We stop spending our money to give rich people better schools, better roads, better access to safe food and clean water and put our tax dollars to work in the most ignorant, destitute communities of the American South. We don’t tell the impoverished descendants of white sharecroppers they aren’t eligible for the same benefits as the impoverished descendents of black slaves, we tell them that we’ll give all their children the ability to have a better life if they’ll sit down peaceably together in the best damn schools our money can buy. Nobody will care that the majority of people who will benefit will be people of color if we work to bring every single person we can up out of poverty and ignorance. And most of all, we look at what works - like Wangari Maathi’s environmental activism to fight poverty, and the Heifer Project, and distributed clean power production - and stop funding things that don’t, like “zero tolerance” and the various forms of anti-drug and anti-weapon fanaticism.
But we have to stand together, even that idiot kid in the pickup with the loser flag, or the political class will just throw us more poisoned bread and circuses, and continue the increasing consolidation of wealth.
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Boy am I sick of this line of reasoning. You need to stop underestimating poor working class Whites. Stop insulting their intelligence. Stop assuming that they can’t absorb information like the rest of us. Stop pretending that they belong in some weird intellectual bubble where they deserve some patronizing form of protection.
It’s incredibly appalling how quickly people move to this argument, which essentially boils down to: They’re poor and they don’t know shit. Working class Whites are very capable of understanding privilege holistically because chances are, their parents and their parents parents were never well off. Working class Whites are also capable of understanding racism. They’re also individuals, I think it’s okay to stop lumping them together like some dumb slathering herd.
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