And if you were black…
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I’ll bite.
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Examine the shock of your own fantastically improbable birth.
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Contemplate the grief of your existence and others (that is the step many of us are talking about, right?)
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Rail against your fate (which is where others here are at)
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Be maudlin (I roll crits on this all the time)
And so on.
Tactical solutions?
When hiring for positions don’t implement quotas on hiring, but implement quotas on ranges of resumes. Hiring should be a meritocracy but you need an accurate data set to start with.
Work with and mentor children. Let’s transfer this privilege.
Get out and mingle. Other people have inadvertantly elevated me, and I have done the same.
But we have to talk about it.
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You know, I never said that jews aren’t white or don’t benefit from white priivilege… but let me point out to you a couple of things about JON STEWART - misspelling his name is kind of dickish and meant to show mastery over him, btw - don’t think I didn’t notice that bullshit move. You again reveal your lack of respect for people in doing such things. You don’t have to like him, or think he’s funny, or smart, but how about you treat people with basic human respect and get their names right.
First, he came to success not on his Jewishness, but by denying that Jewishness. Stewart is a rather anglo name, no? I mean there was a whole English dynasty of Stewarts (Scottish, but they were on the English throne). Second, he plays up his Jewish heritage as a FUCKING JOKE half the time. He constantly makes fun of eating bacon, and celebrating passover. I’m not even sure if he practices and I think his wife catholic? He is legally Jon Stewart, btw, so that is his REAL NAME. It’s no longer Leibovitz.
This happens to be part of my ancestory, btw, so I’m not sure you should be lecturing me on the famine. My family is western irish, the region hardest hit by the English occupation and genocide known as a “famine”. My family came over during the lesser famine. They came into better conditions and have flourished as a result. They pushed for whiteness along with other Irish immigrants where they were not permitted it in their own homes. It’s a diaspora because of English
violence against them. It was in their homeland where the experienced the most discrimination and racism. They met some here, but not a fucking genocide. Unlike Native Americans. Unlike African Americans.
If they do not acknowledge or embrace their lakota heritage, they embrace whiteness as a privilege. Which is what millions of people did before them. I dont’ blame them for that. Assimilating has its privileges. That’s the whole point.
Once again, they left horrible situations - they were literally ethnically cleansed from their homes, within my lifetime. I have students who are here because their parents fled (in the last few semesters, a Bosniak student and a Bosnian Serb student). But I’d suspect that many have merged into the category of whiteness. You’d have to ask them if they feel “white” or not - but I’d suspect that both groups embrace a European heritage, especially Bosniaks. But keep in mind that much of the animosity towards Muslims in Europe are AFFECTING BOSNIAKS AND ALBANIANS, and they are considered foreign by many Europeans, despite being themselves European.
Here is the thing you dont’ seem to be getting. One can change ones name, religion, identity, in order to better fit in. There also seems to be a greater acceptance of people with “foreign sounding” names in the US in recent years, but also a greater emphasis on keeping one’s heritage (though this was probably true of older immigrants in the 19th and early 20th, as communities often kept their names, religion, and identities too, and lived within ethnic communitites in urban environments, really only “assimilating” in the 3rd generation or so). But if one has black skin, you can’t change that. You can’t assimilate that away. It’s a physical marker of difference that can’t be changed or ignored. Hence, white privilege.
I believe I posted some books so I’d recommend you go read some.
ETA: there is lots of talk about the new antisemitism lately, which has come to be defined as and conflated with criticism of the occupation. In truth, the many supportive right wing Christian Americans (and Europeans) are just as antisemitic, because they want a Jewish homeland in order to get the Jews out of their countries (and so Jesus can kill them or convert them when he comes back).
Hannah Arendt discussed this in her classic Origins of Totalitarianism. Making broad sweeping generalizations about a group of people perceived to hold similar characteristics is in fact stereotyping them. The fact that we consider Jews to be a “race” is just weird and shows how much of a throw back our thinking on Jews actually is. Also, you can expand the definition of antisemitism to include being anti-arab, because Arabic is also a semetic language. Your insistence on including Jon Stewart in the category of Jew is an example. Is he Jewish, if he never goes to temple, doesn’t celebrate the high holy holidays, and the like? Was marx a Jew, despite the fact that his father was a convert and he was raised a protestant? What about the Jews and Muslims who converted after the reconquista? Etc.
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Stereotypes only work when people buy into them, and assume them in their daily interactions. This results in a Catch-22 with most people who know better, but can’t figure out how to function socially without sharing assumptions which they know are untrue, or unjust. Sometimes I think it takes some effort and resolve to break the cycle. It’s not easy to stop acknowledging dubious social “realities” and commit to moving past them. It’s also crucial to know that the stereotypes are still “real” for other people if you do move past them, they don’t suddenly disappear.
For example, many on the BBS here are so cosmopolitan as to find it completely uncontroversial to simply ask a person what gender they identify with, and refer to them accordingly. If somebody gets it wrong, they can be reminded and we all move on. It can be a bit embarrassing at times, but it’s easy enough to understand and make accommodations for.
What I do is extend this courtesy to other arbitrary social classes. Instead of assuming people’s race, sex, etc - why not simply ask them? It might be surprising to some that these factors are often not even particularly relevant to anything. And it can become more obvious to people that they assume too much about each other. If you are curious about somebody - ask who they are. If you are not interested in them - than who they are isn’t your concern. The problematic practice to be left behind is ascribing classes, of telling people who they are because we imagine it fits our models of the world.
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When people tell me they disagree with the terminology used to describe a situation and base their denial on refusing to address the phenomenon in question because they find the label “white privilege” offensive, and then go on to explain what they think it means, you can be sure that their hang-up on the word privilege is in service of protecting themselves against change.
There have been some people who have disagreed with the term without denying there is something to it. The people who get offended and deny there is any privilege to being white are not being scared away from the conversation, their views have not been polarized, they’ve sunk back in to privilege to defend their perceived self worth.
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Unsuccesful troll is unsuccesful.
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Wouldn’t that depend upon precisely “what they think it means”? If it doesn’t, isn’t that basically the same as saying that it doesn’t matter what they think it means? I am not sure if this sounds like that start of any sort of productive conversation.
Voltaire said: “If you wish to discuss a subject with me, define your terms.” To paraphrase Voltaire the semanticists say: “If you wish to discuss a subject, describe that which your terms signify.” By “signify” they mean represent; and they imply or refer to a certain context of situation.
By “it”, do you mean to the term privilege? Or do you mean the social phenomenon you are using it to refer to?
This is what I hate about this recurring discussion, “privilege” keeps being defined tautologically. Most of the participants seem to be so attached to framing their problem this way that they are willing to shout down those who feel that what is being put forth might be an inaccurate description. People seem eager to conflate the term with the phenomenon, and since people in either main “camp” are both doing this, the overall effect is extremely messy.
Yet, most of the discussion about to what extent the term may or not be appropriate seems to be concerned mostly with trying to avoid being confrontational, or saving people from embarrassment! I should probably let it go. To some of us, it is merely an egregiously irksome instance of “I do not think it means what you think it means”.
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Jumping in late to say: I wrote a response to this “what can I do?” question a while back.
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Quite the opposite – I think the word leads people down the path of argument and playing privilege bingo rather than actually discussing specific things we can do to make things more fair for everyone.
The entire path of human history is the story of having no control over where, when, and how you are born into systemic and brutal inequity. Per the original comic, that’s not an interesting or useful observation. What are we going to do about it – now that’s interesting.
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Doesn’t discussing how to address inequity require an acknowledgement and understanding of where that inequity comes from?
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Yes! That is precisely the challenge, and why it keeps being an problematic issue for “privilege” discussions.
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Nobody said that.
Tempest said “I’m not reading straight white cis male authors for one year.” The outrage machine whipped it up into “she’s TELLING YOU what to read FOREVER!”
(On Month 2 of the Tempest challenge. Reading great stuff, some of which was already on my “to be read” shelf, some of which was not. The Gaiman and VandeMeer and etc. on the “to be read” shelf will still be there next March.)
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10% of the population is hardly “a handful” - 10% of the general population is said to be gay; is that so insignificant that we should stop worrying about what they think?
(N.B. using “they” not as an intentional distancing mechanism, but because I am not gay, and don’t think @albill is.)
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Nah, I’m a straight white male working in tech. Talk about the easy setting of life.
I’m saying that we shouldn’t cater our arguments to winning over “dudes who want to argue on the Internet” as they aren’t ever going to be allies here, are personally affronted by the idea of privilege, and just looking for a fight. We should be going after the “non-asshole, undecided but basically decent human beings” contingent, who just haven’t really reflected on it or, shock of shocks, don’t actually know anyone who isn’t white so the issues around race just aren’t part of their daily lives.
I know people in the midwest (among other places) that are all “I think there is a black guy at my work somewhere” and that’s their entire experience of non-white folks outside of popular media. These are the same folks that often were very anti-gay marriage until gay folks made it clear that they were everywhere and, yeah, you actually do know gay people. At that point, a lot of folks mellowed out. Suddenly, it was about whether their cousin Bob could get married, etc.
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If you are completely unwilling to engage in the meta-discussion about the phenomena which folks are using “white privilege” to signify and your only engagement in an ongoing argument about the use of those two words (or just “privilege”) and keep insisting we debate that term, rather than the actual issue, yeah, people are going to shout folks down and assume a lack of intellectual honesty or integrity from those folks. “Oh, I’d love to discuss this thing but first we must argue about how I don’t like this term and solve my (white) issues with it before I’m willing to discuss the actual problems around racism.” Uhm, no.
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Only if that’s where those folks already want to go instead of dealing with the actual topic.
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That’s a big “if”, because that’s not at all what I am saying. I am only responding to the torrent of posts about how people who don’t agree with the term are complicit with the phenomena.
And conveniently, people ignore where I did above engage in discussing the phenomena, and how I personally address it in daily life. Because those who aren’t arguing for or against the use of the term seemed to be asking: “Yeah, but what can we actually do about it.” It’s probably another unpopular opinion that people will complain about also.
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“You’re” confusing how people use the word “you” again. I wasn’t talking about “you” personally.
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