How can you say I have privilege? MY FOOT HURTS!
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OK, so I lucked out on starting gold and gear at the creation screen and didnât get to take advantage of the multipliers there, but the intrinsic bonuses like +5 Save Vs. Cop and positive encounter reactions are really useful.
Suggest re-balancing the game by bringing other players up to spec rather than nerfing âWhite Dudeâ character class.
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How about instead of âwhite privilege,â we use the also-relevant âwhite supremacyâ?
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Absolutely. If this topic interests you any further, Richard Dyer is all over it, and the same thing in movies, in his magnificent book, simply entitled White.
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Well that depends, do you want to make change happen or continue to have arguments because people have a knee jerk response to essentially being called racist?
I, for one, would like to focus on change. But you know, thatâs just me.
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No, thatâs too extreme; âwhite privilegeâ is too subtle. We need a term that tells them that the entire nation was founded by elites on stolen land and everyone whoâs not White-Cis-High Class-Male (or have a blood connection to one) were always repressed from the dawn of time, but at the same time doesnât call them racist bigots for being a tool for said elites.
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You view the worlds in paler shades of a more vibrant color.
The people that had slaves benefited. In a competitive world Holding others back benefits those who donât get held back.
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We canât just ignore the past and present and expect change. As long as weâre not willing to accept that, weâll get nowhere.
Take a relationship. If one of the partners screw up, have a one night stand, can you actually get past it without actually admitting the wrong doing?
You deserve a beer for that comment! Cheers!
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Yes of course you can. Peace treaties are signed all the time without either side admitting wrong doing because the present and future are more important than assigning blame for the past. Plus is it super impractical to actually get every white person in a privileged position to accept blame.
Hell, when we talk about assigning collective blame, admitting youâre group is wrong is the the exception rather than the rule.
Youâre essentially saying youâd rather complain and hold a grudge than move forward.
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If being black is a detriment, and being white spares you from that, then itâs better to be white than it is to be black.
Thereâs your proof.
If you still object and the basis of this objection is that white people arenât put ahead of black people, then what are you really saying?
Isnât it enough that black people get discriminated for white people to be unfairly ahead in the game?
In other words, do you fear that giving black people equal treatment will somehow put white people at a disadvantage?
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You may be sick of that line of reasoning, but it really isnât mine. I donât think poor and working class whites are unable to process and understand complicated ideas.
I just think people understand their world through the prism of their own experience. So if nothing in thier life feels like a âprivilegeâ, (A word most often used in lectures from middle school principles while explaining why students have to earn his trust to go to the bathroom or do anything enjoyable) They inevitably wonât really feel resonance with the description of how society has done them a huge favor by not treating them as badly as it does racial minorities. I also think it puts a frame of, âgiving something upâ to the ending of racism, which is a really bad frame if you want to actually get people to support something that more than likely would make their lives better. If anything I think the failure to understand in this conversation is on folks like you, not on working class folks that generally just want a fair system where they can earn a living and build a life. If anything they need people to stop trying to convince them the economy is a zero sum game where they better step on the neck of the guy next to them to get ahead.
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One of the things Iâve found most aggravating about this discussion is the insistence that this whole idea is some airy-fairy product of the ivory tower, that elitists are using to castigate working class white men. What Iâve seen is that I was hearing these arguments about white privilege, for years, from activists who were people of color, many of whom were from working class or poor backgrounds. By the way, last I checked, more than half of people in the US had at least two years of college education, so itâs fallacious to insist that everything coming from college students is coming from the upper middle class.
The crux of the problem is that privileged groups have a bunch of advantages, of which theyâre not even aware. The lack of awareness is one of the key elements being criticized. The problem it leads to is that people bearing privileges, perceiving those privileges as natural, and assuming everyoneâs got them â and then castigating people without those privileges for their perverse failure to make use of the privileges they donât have. âLet them eat cakeâ, or finger-wagging about diet and nutrition without reference to the problem of food deserts. If you assume that everyone naturally has access to something youâve got privileged access to, then when non-privileged people demand access to that to which theyâve been denied access, it may sound like theyâre making some absurd demand, or demanding some sort of unfair advantage.
Itâs a valid point that generally, these issues of privilege take the form of some unfair distribution of resources, or that one group is singled out for abuse, and the proper demand is that everyone have equal access to the resources or for the abuse to end. But itâs a pre-condition, to recognize how the unfairness is actually structured, before it can be contested.
One reason to point out that the language of âprivilegeâ makes sense is to bear in mind that weâre talking about social and material structures that have been built up over time. Some people got access to them as they were built up, and some have never had access to them. Sidewalks get to seem pretty natural, but theyâre constructed, and if you donât have sidewalks, it looks like others have been given something you havenât. Because thatâs the case â even if everyone deserves a lot more than just sidewalks.
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The comic is an example of a far more effective way to educate and inform.
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Well, yeah, the comic is great. Did you think I was arguing against it?
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Thatâs not the point. There are people who canât even accept the reality of race in America. Black people have been writing and talking about what it means to be black in American society for centuries at this point. And weâre still at a point where if a black person says âyou know, slavery, that was a thing, and jim crow was a thing, and there are still issues that need to be addressed in regards to racial inequalityâ, some white dude has to jump up and say âWELL IâM NOT A RACIST AND I DIDNâT DO IT, SO SHUT UP AND STOP TALKING ABOUT IT ALREADYâ⌠Itâs like they dontâ want to even think about the fact that racism still exists and we still need to address it at more than an individual level.
itâs not about accepting blame, because much of this hovers above our individual lives. When there are people who canât even accept that there is a problem, THAT is a problem. They think that slavery wasnât so bad. They think that jim crow wasnât so bad. They think that black men getting shot is their own damn fault. They refuse to see that the society, that they didnât build, gives them some privileges. Itâs not having every white person show up and be like, âahhhh sorry we enslaved yaâllâ, itâs about being able to recognize that racism still exists at the systemic level. Period.
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Well you keep on working towards the goal of getting everyone to want to talk about how there is racism all the time instead of figuring out practical ways of effecting systematic change. Iâm sure that will happen right after half the planet acknowledges their people have been systematically slaughtering mine for the last few thousand years.
I on the other hand will support anyone who wants to focus on convincing those in power and the young like every other successful movement in history.
(feel free to apologize for your peopleâs actions against mine and the thousands of years of racism weâve faced at the hands of you and your ancestors if you like. might as well get the ball rolling.)
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But you canât do that when they donât even think thereâs a problem!
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I donât understand why random ignorant people not thinking there is a problem affects my ability to get intelligent people in power to act. Hell in this country, all it takes it money to get people to act.
It kind of seems like you guys are creating a barrier where one doesnât exist. Women didnât wait until they got every single man in America to agree they were equal before they pushed for the right to vote. They pushed for the right to vote in spite of half the country thinking they should be seen and not heard.
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