Hmm, but doesn’t “support our families” imply deepening the privilege of an already privileged family? It seems like part of the mission (and the Gates Foundation is a good example) is to reach outside the zone of family.
As with all things involving money, power, and privilege, probably the most practical thing to do is write a check. Just make sure you write it to the right organizations.
I was on a job site (telco related) in Waco in the early 90s and one of the middle-aged telco guys I worked with there (maybe 40s at most?) described seeing a lynching as a kid. He wasn’t happy about it.
So, yeah. Texas.
I think the important point is that there are many different kinds of privilege. You can have white privilege, and male privilege, and class privilege, and neurotypical privilege. Depending on the situation, it’s possible for a black woman from a well-supported and well-educated background to have privilege over a white man who grew up poor, malnourished, and uneducated. That doesn’t disprove the existence of white male privilege.
I agree that making out “privilege” to be solely a racial thing is dramatically missing the point. Everyone has some degree of privilege. It’s just that some people benefit from their privilege a lot more than others.
It’s interesting to read this, instead of watching it:
Sorry I’m being so negative. I’m a bummer, I don’t know, I shouldn’t be. I’m a very lucky guy. I got a lot going from me. I’m healthy, I’m relatively young. I’m white; which thank God for that shit, boy. That is a huge leg up, are you kidding me? I love being white I really do. Seriously, if you’re not white you’re missing out because this shit is thoroughly good. Let me be clear by the way, I’m not saying that white people are better. I’m saying that being white is clearly better, who could even argue? If it was an option I would reup ever year. “Oh yeah I’ll take white again absolutely, I’ve been enjoying that, I’ll stick with white thank you.” Here’s how great it is to be white, I could get in a time machine and go to any time and it would be fuckin’ awesome when I get there. That is exclusively a white privilege. Black people can’t fuck with time machines. A black guy in a time machine is like, “hey anything before 1980, no thank you, I don’t wanna go.” But I can go to any time. The year 2, I don’t even know what was happening then but I know when I get there, “welcome, we have a table right here for you sir.” “thank you, it’s lovely here in the year 2.” I can go to any time in the past, I don’t want to go to the future and find out what happens to white people because we’re going to pay hard for this shit, you gotta know that. we’re not just gonna fall from number 1 to 2. They’re going to hold us down and fuck us in the ass forever, and we totally deserve it, but for now, “wheeeee!” If you’re white and you don’t admit that it’s great, you’re an asshole. It is great and, I’m a man! How many advantages can one person have? I’m a white man, you can’t even hurt my feelings. What can you really call a white man that really digs deep? “Hey cracker.” “oh, ruined my day. Boy, you shouldn’t have called me a cracker, bringing me back to owning land and people. What a drag.”
–Louis CK
It really depends. My brother is a bipolar schizophrenic with intense hallucination problems, my father has been in and out of jail a dozen times and has cancer, and my mother has been unemployed as a minimum wage photographer for years. So I help where I can.
Like I have alluded to, privilege doesn’t mean ‘you win’. It means your chances of winning are higher.
Edit
And really what I mean by Support your family is breaking the chain of generational poverty, in both generational directions. A better off grand parent will be better to a young child than a stressed, bitter one (up to that magical number of what, $70k a year?).
And raising kids with attention, love, and meaning is what levels the privilege field.
The problem with the complaint that the expression “white privilege” is incendiary, is that it’s already an effort to express a concept in language less likely to be considered incendiary: why do white people support structural racism, express racist beliefs, all while believing they’re not racist?
The nature of a structural problem – racism, sexism, etc. – is that it requires radical change to address, and radical change is painful, and frightening in the absence of material evidence of it actually happening.
No simple change in wording will solve that problem.
Ow! A great point! Infuriatingly PoV-changing. Thank you.
To me, “White Privilege” is a separate discussion, unrelated to my earlier comments, the comic, or the OP. I’ve far more privileges than that (health, nationality, gender, accent, education, sexuality, language, etc… one lucky bastard, eh?), and singling any one out makes little sense.
If you do want to talk about “what it means to be white”, I’m OK with that, but I’d rather chew the meat off the easier topic first: whether “privilege” is a poor term to describe all of these many extreme advantages.
When you say “many don’t”, I read it as assuming “everyone important doesn’t”, while I suspect that even if ranklers are the minority, they’d be the most likely to be able to make significant differences through changing their own behavior.
I’ve no idea how to find out which of us is right!
I couldn’t relate to this, so I honestly don’t think that’s it. These things you think people don’t get, to me seem both intellectually and emotionally obvious to any sane and rational person from an early age, and something that we all think deeply and long about. We’d hardly be having this discussion if that weren’t the case!
I actually really like that. It seems the obvious choice now you say it, but I’d not thought it.
Huh, wait up there. Lemme try something. Smoothest to rankliest:
British Advantage.
British Privilege.
Advantage.
Unearned advantage.
Undeserved advantage.
Privilege.
Unearned privilege.
Undeserved privilege.
White Advantage.
White Privilege.
OK! Bit of a shock to me, likely no surprise to you. Revising my thoughts based on that ranking!
Firstly, “British ~” acts as a mental smoother. I’m fine if it’s an advantage based on nationality/culture. I’m strongly pro-immigration, I’m happy about sharing that type of privilege, and it’s one that can’t be taken from me.
But I put the “White ~” items last, so apparently I have a stick up my ass about being defined by skin color. Well, who wouldn’t? But it’s not a fear response, I don’t think - “white” can’t be taken from me, but I don’t know how to share this privilege with others, which sucks. And then, all my life I’ve been taught it’s Not OK to call out on the basis of color, and that culture is the thing that matters. Perhaps this is an EU/US difference: colored friends who’ve been to the EU have remarked with wonder that their American accent was what everyone noticed and remarked on, rather than their skin color. Culture, not hue.
But for the rest, I think maybe the rankle is, as you say, a defensive/protective thing. The ranklier a term is in that list, the more that, to my ear, it implies removing the advantage, making life worse for me: the smoother it is to me, the more it implies instead helping to lift others up to the same level, making life better for them. Can advantages be shared, and privileges not? Apparently so, to my ur-brain.
But because @daneel put that spanner in my works by pointing out how the discomfort may be an important part of the process… I’m honestly not sure any more that it’s a problem.
I think that “privilege” as a term has achieved such traction exactly because it’s toothy. I hate it. It derails or just ends good discussions… but it makes a point, the point is important, and it’s hard to argue against.
Darn you, @daneel 
Are… Are you a Bear!? 
Keep in mind that white privilege in the united states was a legal construct until 1964. Equal employment was passed in 1972. And an amendment to the civil rights act was only just passed in 1991.
We are talking about 400 years of legal, institutionalized white male privilege. It is gonna take less than 25 years to dismantle.
And while I understand you are, err, British(I think?) Almost 40% of British citizens admit to racial prejudice.
So yeah, it is uncomfortable. But it is also true.
It’s threads like this that make me wonder what @TobinL would have to say, you know, comics and all.
Heh - no, not ursine, the other ur- http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ur- 
And yes, the UK was already becoming quite a horrible place when I left several years ago, the media becoming so very racist and nationalistic that it made the US’ deep south seem positively egalitarian. I’d hoped that getting the LibDems in would help, but we all know how that turned out.
I suspect everyone is racially prejudiced, that it cannot be completely excised from our minds, and that the best approach is to be as consciously aware of our biases as we can be, so we can compensate.
The best strategy is to never know a person’s culture, gender, etc. Text helps with that, though I fight hard not to feel prejudiced at those who write “poorly” (eg most British kids). Second best is to know them as people, so the bias is overwhelmed with personal knowledge, and I can think of them as people instead of cyphers.
One of the things I struggle with, is… other than compensate for my own biases, what can/should I do about it? I do let my representatives know how I’d like them to vote, though as a non-citizen, I can’t vote myself yet. But too few topics come up to make a reasonable dent in the privilege problem: they just don’t talk about this stuff much, and when they do, it’s usually to try to ram through some BS law to extend the privilege, rather than reduce the gap.
So, I don’t know what to do to address the problem of privilege-imbalance, and that’s another rankle: just by existing, I use my privileges and perpetuate the problem, but can’t see how to help fix it.
You’re another rich white guy like me, right? You have money? Use it for good.
Totes. You are a good person.
Well, and also, don’t be an asshole / racist / sexist / bigot. But I figure most people here have that sufficiently covered.
except for you, yeah you right there, I’m talking to you
Yes, the revolution will be unconfortable.
No, “privilege” and “advantage” aren’t the best words, because so often these are things everyone should have, such as not getting jailed for driving while black/walking while trans/etc., rather than the things no one should have. To me, “privilege” and “advantage” emphasize the idea that we’re getting these things at someone else’s expense while “basic rights which everyone should have but some are denied” emphasizes the idea that everyone could have these things.
How can we measure the rents that cishet abled white people get against the costs of oppression?
You see the dimensions of the problem. So does Jeff @codinghorror.
If people of goodwill refuse to shape their message for effectiveness, and insist that certain terms have objective moral truth regardless of how they are visibly hurting their own cause, they might want to take notice that influential white supremacists are not making the same mistake.
Choosing to call some advantage “white privilege” (even though it’s something that not all whites have, and some non-whites clearly do have, and it’s always part of a morass of interrelated issues anyway) is sacrificing one’s ability to speak credibly to all audiences in order to achieve nothing more than solidarity with a group of other people who have made the same self-sabotaging choice. It’s a shibboleth. People are taking a phrase that was used in a very readable essay as part of a well-worked out metaphorical framing and stripping it of that surrounding, and using it publicly as though it were appropriate outside of that specific context. It isn’t. Yet they steadfastly refuse to see how damaging to them this choice is, and will often rhetorically attack and literally curse at anyone who points it out.
If I may venture briefly into actual linguistics and cognitive science: “Surface frames are associated with phrases like “war on terror” that both activate and depend critically on deep frames. These are the most basic frames that constitute a moral worldview or a political philosophy. Deep frames define one’s overall “common sense.” Without deep frames there is nothing for surface frames to hang onto. Slogans do not make sense without the appropriate deep frames in place.” (Emphasis mine, excerpt from Lakoff, Thinking Points, p. 29)
It seems to me that if a person enjoys seeing racial prejudice on the rise, as @japhroaig pointed out, then it’s perfectly all right to pay no attention to how a message is received. But keep in mind that one of the huge advantages that the neo-conservative right wing has over today’s liberal left is that they understand that it’s better to talk to people in their own language, like Bill Clinton did back in the day, and not call them idiots or bad people for refusing to adopt an etiolated in-group neuro-linguistic program.
@milliefink, as a phrase I much prefer “de facto white supremacy” to “white privilege”. I would think my preference would be obvious (but maybe I’m the one projecting my cognitive model now). “Structural racism” is preferable, too. You can go places from there, it’s not a dead end.
I like talk that leads people (including me) to both self-discovery and to new viewpoints on the world, if I possibly can, rather than language that only “preaches to the choir”.
I disagree. I think that economic surveys and models have conclusively proven the existence of privilege based on historical and generational bias. And speaking about bias, or skews, or Buffs doesn’t reduce ones credibility. The terms certainly are charged, but isn’t that the point of charged rhetoric?
“Structural racism” is a phrase that is absolutely closer to the specific problem. But I still support the term White Privilege since 60% of Structural Racism is in benefit of white folks.
(btw @Medievalist , i don’t enjoy seeing racial prejudice on the rise. quite the opposite actually. can one be horrified by what he observes, point it out, and not be said to be Enjoying it?)
Such an advantage wouldn’t fall under “white privilege”, though. Perhaps " class privilege", although I don’t know what you’re specifically thinking about. Intersectionality!
I always thought the term “white privilege” made us white people angry because it covers action and inaction. There’s no getting around it for the many people living the dream, part of that dream being that they get to believe they are beyond the issues it puts forth because they aren’t overtly or even consciously racists/bigots etc.
The term white privilege brings all that crashing down & it makes them angry. Get them to examine why they are angry & Bob’s your uncle.
It might help, but people do tend to project a lot. Just trawl through a few threads on the bbs, and you’ll find people making huge assumptions about colour, gender and so on, with no evidence to back it up, because we’re all just strings of text and avatars.
Good question. “What is to be done?” is the question that so many people never actually get around to- as if arguing on the internet is going to solve any of our problems. (Yes I am aware of the irony of this comment), that said, I’m fairly sure the answers involve:
