That's why I really don't like the "white privilege". Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US yet they're being lumped with the rich white people as if they have the same privileges
When you're poor as fuck and having a shit life and everyone keeps telling you how privileged you are, you stop believing those people and turn to alternative sources for information
But they're not! At this point I think we should just scrap the word privilege and call it "shit I don't have to deal with because I'm X" since it's apparently too politically charged to have a discussion about it.
Just one example.
As a white person I have never in my life cared about getting a receipt from any store I shop at, have ever been accused of shoplifting, have never had the self-checkout person have even the slightest suspicion even when I was broke in college and ringing up way too many bananas, and when the sensor things beep the workers apologize and tell me to just go.
This is not the experience of black Americans where children have to be taught to always get and keep their receipts because they get stopped so frequently.
You can fix that by going into stores dressed as a homeless person or any other out-group that contain white people that the store owner/employees in-group has likely an negative emotional response to.
For maximal negative response, portrait yourself as a male with, low social economic status, different race, different biological markers, and signals of different cultural values. As per research this will likely result in activation of fear, disgust and low activation of empathy.
The OP's point holds true. Consider a clean and showered young male that is not dressed like a homeless person. This is generally quite achievable for most of the poor population.
This individual will experience problems if his skin is black that he wouldn't experience if his skin is white.
In most places in the US, the black guy with nice suit will be less likely to have that experience than a homeless looking white guy. But a black guy with a nice suit will experience it more than a white guy with a nice suit.
You're probably mostly concerned with the American experience, so this might be tangential to you.
I grew up as a white ex-pat in a Philippines. While I don't think I ever tried to abuse it, but I could definitely get away with a lot of things even if I dressed as a hobbo/gangster.
I'm merely talking about controlling for variables. If you keep the outfit the same and only change the skin color you'll see a difference. I have no idea which direction the change starts to lean when you change clothing, smell, age and or other factors all at the same time.
Am I missing something because I feel like we're agreeing? Because everything you mentioned are good examples of other forms of privilege, or I guess lack thereof.
I'm always so surprised in internet discussions that people will readily acknowledge lots of forms of privilege but then turn around and be like "white privilege" or "male privilege" -- naaah anything like that can be explained by these other 300 types of privilege. Like "black privilege" and "female privilege" exist too -- it's just a language for describing how the different facets of ourselves change how we're treated.
Privilege being the word for describing when that facet helps you not experience "worse than normal" treatment than people without it might -- contrasted with "advantage", when you get "better than normal" treatment for having it.
To me it is biology. A set of factors contribute to fear and disgust when people meet and an other set of factors trigger empathy and cooperation. We can use the word privilege to mean, in a given environment, having more triggers than someone else for the positive effects and less triggers for the negative effects. The resulting individual experience is the sum of interactions.
Some trait has stronger effect than others such as social economic status and kinship. Close to that comes gender, although sometimes it can also be the strongest factor. Research into this subject generally show a strong environmental aspect to this as well.
I would not use "white privilege" in an online discussion because it often than not lead the discussion away from the complexity of in-group and out-group interactions and into the realm of blame and over simplification. The most insightful thing anyone can really make about white privilege is that being rich, healthy, appeasing appearance, surrounded by a strong majority of in-group members (preferable kinship) that have similar cultural values, then being white is also a benefit as long as the other in-group members are also majority white.
> Like "black privilege" and "female privilege" exist too -- it's just a language for describing how the different facets of ourselves change how we're treated.
In my experience, a lot of people who use the word “privilege” will get very very very upset at that claim. To them, “privilege” is fundamentally connected to groups. It wouldn’t make sense for both male privilege and female privilege to exist; the whole point is that males are collectively privileged relative to females.
I think what you’re describing is a better fit for reality.
Sure, but that doesn't invalidate the racial part of it. Yes a white person who appears to be homeless or a meth addict will be looked at suspiciously. But a black person is much more likely to be profiled simply because of their skin color than a white person. That is white privilege.
White privilege doesn't mean all white people are born with trust funds from the left over plantation money.
Sure, but economically equivalent white and black people have different experiences. That's a privilege under the definition.
That more affluent-appearing black people are treated like less affluent looking white people isn't proof that white privilege doesn't exist. It's the opposite.
You're technically right, but the argument that "given otherwise identical circumstances, white people are less oppressed than black people" (or whatever) has the issues that a) "otherwise identical circumstances" almost never exist and b) this argument is often even being used when the otherwise circumstances are clearly not identical (I remember an online discussion where people were called out for criticising Beyoncé, who must have it really hard as a black woman - which, sure, she might have, but she's also crazy rich and a prominent media figure, so she also has privilege; and then again, even not having privilege doesn't mean you should be immune to criticism).
I don't question the notion of privilege as much as how often it's applied to shut down dissenting opinion.
Privilege isn't a binary thing. You aren't privileged or not. Many people have some forms of privilege and not others.
An affluent white woman and a homeless black man have very different life experiences, each has privileges that the other doesn't.
Fighting about which is more privileged is silly (even if it may seem obvious to you). What's ultimately important is to understand situations in which those privileges will affect the experiences of those people.
As for Beyonce, that's so vague that I can't know. If she was describing the challenges of being black in the recording industry, then yes using her success to claim she can't understand the challenges she's had to overcome is ridiculous. But in other contexts, that she's affluent is relevant.
I don't disagree with you. Understanding privilege is important. But you may not have witnessed the ridiculous discussions that I have sometimes seen.
The context was that people were complaining about her sexualised persona and what kind of image that projects onto young women. I don't necessarily agree with that criticism (I think it's kinda complex, but I also don't think that sex or being sexual is "wrong" or anything), but I thought that the criticism of "she's a black woman, so if she wants to be sexual, that's her way of reasserting her black femininity and may not be criticised" is frankly ridiculous, when she's clearly benefiting financially so well from it.
> Fighting about which is more privileged is silly
And yet that seems to be the game people have to play in order for their statements to have any currency.
I even know people who had to take an "oppression index" in college to see who in the class had the least privilege. Interestingly, the person who had the least privilege was also the most ideologically opposed to the concept, for what it's worth.
> I'm sorry if I don't put much trust in third hand stories like this, it's easy for them to be blown out of proportion.
Fair enough, but consider the new SAT "Adversity" score[1]. Is that not essentially the same thing, but on a larger scale? It's still reducing the "vector" that oppression is supposed to be (from an intersectionality perspective) to a "scalar" value that is useful for sorting people into a hierarchy.
With regard to my first point, consider the NYT opinion piece arguing against the Adversity score[2]. The author spends the first two paragraphs establishing his own adversity/lack of privilege before he begins to actually make an argument. I don't think there's anything wrong with him doing so, and I think it's rhetorically effective, but do you think his opinion would be given a platform if he did not have that adversity score?
> My experiences, as a cis-het-white-affluent person would disagree. ;)
Perhaps because you benefit from (in Paul Graham's words) "orthodox privilege"? That is, your ideas are not questioned on the basis of your identity because they are the "right" opinions[3]. For someone to question the orthodoxy, they must first establish their own adversity or risk being discounted (or worse).
> Fair enough, but consider the new SAT "Adversity" score[1]. Is that not essentially the same thing, but on a larger scale? It's still reducing the "vector" that oppression is supposed to be (from an intersectionality perspective) to a "scalar" value that is useful for sorting people into a hierarchy.
I don't know that the SAT adversity score claims to be an explicit demarcation of privilege. It wouldn't, for example, encode racial privilege since none of the signifiers are the test takers race. Some may be racially correlated, but I think we've already established that those are different. As far as I can tell it really only applies at the granularity of a high school and not a particular student (although I may very well be mistaken here, it's hard to tell).
But this is mostly moot since the Adversity Score plan was withdrawn[1].
> but do you think his opinion would be given a platform if he did not have that adversity score?
Broadly, yes[1]. Worth noting that Williams is and has been a staff writer at the NYT for quite some time, he was also the author (like the actual author, not just a signatory) of the Harper's letter that's been in the news. He's got quite the platform, even when it comes to non-race related things.
> Perhaps because you benefit from (in Paul Graham's words) "orthodox privilege"? That is, your ideas are not questioned on the basis of your identity because they are the "right" opinions[3]. For someone to question the orthodoxy, they must first establish their own adversity or risk being discounted (or worse).
That's a bit of a catch-22 now isn't it. My opinions will be discounted due to my privilege, but if they aren't, that's also due to my privilege. But I also don't think this is true: there's all kinds of things that I do question with my more progressive friends. But they're usually around economic policy, or procedures (I'm pragmatic, many people I know are not, so there's ongoing debate I see about reformist vs. revolutionary action with regard to the issue du jour).
Being a reformist as opposed to a revolutionary is absolutely impacted by my privileges, and I recognize that. I'm much more comfortable with the world the way things are than some of my "colleagues" in this context, so reformism is safer to me. But some people aren't treated as well by the system today, so they are much more willing to throw the whole thing out, deal with the chaos for a while, and build something new from the ashes.
That's clearly worse for me, but probably gets them to where they're more equal faster. Interestingly, I'm not even sure which of those two opinions would be considered orthodoxy among progressive circles. But I don't think people discount my opinions on the subject because I have some privileges. In some cases I think they're actually valued more.
> As a white person I have never in my life cared about getting a receipt from any store I shop at
I agree with your meaning overall, but this is not a great example. I'm a white dude, and I worry about getting receipts any time I am going to one store after buying from another (while walking). I'm hyper-aware in stores of whether it would appear to an observer that I was shoplifting, having been accused of such more than once when young, so I take visible steps like tying off the bags I'm carrying from the previous store, consider whether the store I'm entering is likely to sell items I have in the bag I'm carrying, and so on.
I believed this for years, and in spite of all the stuff going on now, I think it still holds true.
And the trouble is, saying that "It's about class, not race" is considered problematic in recent books like White Fragility. So this opinion, which can be debated and talked about and discussed in debt, is now considered wrong, taboo and even a 'dog whistle' to say you're actually racist.
And I want to acknowledge that there is a difference in lived experience. A poor white person may not get followed around in a store by security like a non-poor black person. There are some things we have difficulty understanding because we don't have the lived experience.
But we're in danger of closing off the conversation before we even get to the topic of those lived experiences, and we're told that if we can't have those lived experiences, our opinions are also invalid.
There are two issues. First, I don't think it's one or the other: race privilege exists, and class privilege exists too.
Second there are actual dog-whistles disguised as reasonable viewpoints, and it's incredibly hard to distinguish them. Suppose you're talking to a random person, with no context on who they are, probably on a site where a comment took five minutes to write and doesn't fully develop the ideas. First time you find that, you might think it's just someone with a different opinion. But as time goes on and you notice that certain arguments are used not to promote debate but to derail conversations, you get suspicious and start seeing everything as dog-whistles.
In other words, public debate is degraded by people that don't present arguments honestly and by people who are either way too worried or not worried at all about those dishonest people
You are starting to get to the root of it. For years, people with liberal or progressive viewpoints tried to have good-faith discussions and debates with conservatives only to get back absolute garbage. Arguments like:
"If you let gay people marry, what's next allowing adults to marry children?"
or
"You never complain when black people kill each other, so you are just pretending to care about police brutality"
These are undeniably bad faith arguments - all strawmen, slippery slopes, and other ugly rhetorical devices. In most cases this was all you would get back in return for trying to have a good faith debate with conservatives.
So yes, after a while, we started to assume that people who disagreed with us were acting in bad faith and were essentially trolls.
This is extremely unfortunate. It is harmful to the discourse. It casts a wide net that catches the honestly curious or unorthodox thinkers (people that I may think are incorrect but arguing from a position of good faith). But, it has also been extremely effective. In one generation, the relatively brutal tactics have helped us make real progress on gay rights and drug-decriminalization in the United States.
Cancellation tactics work as an effective tool for combating bad faith arguments and trolls, so until conservatives want to come to the table for real discussion and debate, that is how things will continue to be. I look forward to a time when this is not necessary.
To be clear though, the well of intellectual discourse was poisoned long ago by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Sean Hannity, et al, and a million internet trolls. The only part of this they don't like is that now they are losing the horrible game they invented.
Yeah, this. I would go further back to when Christians got co-opted into politics in a big way in the 80's.
As far as the current "cancel culture" goes I was thinking about this the other day and I think that it's not that people don't want to hear counter-arguments, it's that we don't want to hear them again, after they have been put down so many times.
The "what about black-on-black crime?" question is one of my pet peeves: someone always has to trot out that undead zombie chestnut. Enough already.
(edit: while i was typing the above somebody has already trotted out the dead horse and started beating it in a sib comment.)
Why are those “garbage”? It’s true that gay rights have led towards the push for other things like trans rights. And it’s true that liberal media will run front page stories on (relatively rare) police brutality against black people but don’t run stories on (relatively common) black on black violence.
> It’s true that gay rights have led towards the push for other things like trans rights
I fail to see the equivalence between trans rights and "adults marrying children"-rights. What you're saying is closer to "it's true that abolishing slavery has led towards the push for other things like voting rights for everyone". Which is technically true but is also the way things should be going in order to have a more just society.
> And it’s true that liberal media will run front page stories on (relatively rare) police brutality against black people but don’t run stories on (relatively common) black on black violence.
One is a crime committed by law enforcement. The other is just regular crime. You figure out which one is more newsworthy or in the public interest (not that most media care about the latter).
Also if "all lives matter" we shouldn't be talking about "black-on-black" or "x-on-y" crimes. Crimes are crimes and the skin color of the perpetrator or victim is irrelevant (unless it's specifically a hate crime, for which there are legal definitions).
Wait, you’re giving your opinion as if it’s fact. Some people disagree that trans rights will make society better.
And if what you’re saying is true, that these stories are only notable because they involve police brutality, why don’t we get front page news articles when a black cop shoots a black guy? You’re blind if you don’t see that news publishers have an agenda.
News publishers do have an agenda, but it doesn't go too far beyond "get clicks, make money". They publish whatever kinds of stories will get traffic from their readers. And they know the preconceived notions and biases of their readers. News publishing is a tough business these days unfortunately. There are news orgs that do good investigative journalism and uncover important stories but even they need money to survive.
I will assume good faith and bite, even though I am skeptical.
Because murder for money, passion, etc. is unfortunately extremely common in the US, but abuse of power by civil servants is much more newsworthy, and honestly more disturbing.
If the head of the FBI was caught taking bribes from drug dealers, wouldn't that be far more newsworthy than a common drug bust? Of course it would be. Abuse of government power is a real threat to civil society.
But it was never just about “abuse of power”, the narrative was that “black people are being killed unjustly by police officers”. From the beginning a motto of the protests was “black lives matter”.
Facts can be maliciously used to derail conversations and debates on purpose, or be used without proper context to push a certain view. Not everything is black or white.
> Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US...
Poor whites are still more privileged via historicity of assets vs comparable poor blacks, and they are more likely to capture gains from federal assistance programs. They are also far less likely to be imprisoned for drugs or other judicial hurts.
When there was an opioid crisis the nation responded with sympathy and urgency. When we had weed, we decided to have a war against drug users and send black and latino people to jail en masse, and there they sit still.
Does anyone remember the term "super-predator"? That's not an allusion to poor people in general, but rather a reference for black people.
> Poor whites are still more privileged via historicity of assets
At the point you reach “poor”, the assets are gone, so this doesn’t work.
> When there was an opioid crisis the nation responded with sympathy and urgency. When we had weed, we decided to have a war against drug users and send black and latino people to jail en masse, and there they sit still.
The opioid epidemic was never solved, let alone “urgently”. I remember it emerging as a campaign issue in 2016. 2019 had a record high number of deaths by opioid overdose and it looks like things are going up as well. The US government reports that “fentanyl trafficking offenders have increased by 3,940.9% since fiscal year 2015.” ( https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/fentanyl-trafficki... ) so it doesn’t seem like they’re taking a hands-off enforcement approach either.
To some degree there is a difference, but that’s because we already tried the War on Drugs and learned from our mistakes.
> Does anyone remember the term "super-predator"? That's not an allusion to poor people in general, but rather a reference for black people.
Like everything, it’s more complicated than that.
Here’s Mother Jones on “superpredators”: ( https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/very-brief-hi... ). The term refers to a criminological observation that many violent juvenile criminals fit a specific type that is particularly dangerous and untreatable. It turns out that the cause for this was childhood lead exposure and that the super predator theory was out of date already by the time it was developed.
It also turns out that childhood lead exposure disproportionately affected black children.
The Clinton-era crime bills that led to mass incarceration also had a fair amount of support among black leaders. One reason for this was that crime was much higher in the early 90’s, and black people were disproportionately the victims of that crime. Cracking down on crime (including drugs) was seen as a benefit to the black community rather than a detriment. ( https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/04/09/473648819... )
It's an "all other things being equal" sort of thing, unless you're actually having a discussion that acknowledges intersectionality.
To use your example, if you're poor as fuck, is it worse if you're white or if you're not? For many, it's worse if you're not white - and that's white privilege.
"white privilege" does not mean "if you're white you have no problems", it means "you less frequently encounter obstacles that were erected because of the color of your skin".
I think a problem with this line of thinking is if treats people like averages (stereotypical) -but people are not the average. People don’t see the nuance. So it’s kind of like the other side of the coin of traditional stereotyping.
So on the one hand we’re saying let’s not stereotype people, but in the other hand let’s stereotype a subset of people.
Stereotyping is when you say that "people of a group all (do|are) X". The concept of "white privilege" is describing how society treats people; it's not describing how those people are. It's saying "people of a group all encounter X". That's a very different thing.
again. Stereotyping is when you say this is how a person is. Describing white privilege is describing how a person is treated by society. They're different.
Society isn’t homogeneous. How I’m treated in my neighborhood isn’t the same as another one or another country. Yes, on average, if you belong to certain group and display certain signifiers (positive or negative) those will elicit certain responses —but they’re not universal. If you’re a middle class kid (on average) and you go to an ethnic business (that’s outside your ethnicity) that hires people of lesser means and you apply for a job, you’re likely to lose out to someone of the same stratum as the rest of the employees (they may think you’re out of place, you wouldn’t take it serious, you’d want more money, who knows...)
No one said this scenario was racist. What I’m saying is outside you social circle whatever cachet you think you carry due to whatever membership you have falls off.
There are plenty of kinds of privilege. Being white means that when you're pulled over (if you manage to afford a car), you know it's not because you're white. Being white means that when you turn on the TV, you mostly see folks of your race represented. Being white means being told that throughout history, your race is what made the modern world what it is. Being white means being able to always find the company of people of your race [1]. Being white means that when you write good school essays, you're not continually asked who wrote them for you. Being white means that BLM protests can be the first time you understand how Black people are treated.
There are similarly privileges from being born in the US, from being straight, from being male, from being able-bodied and from being cis-gendered.
Being poor doesn't eliminate those and is still disenfranchising, but not having the above privileges _and_ being poor is even worse.
Agree that lumping people into buckets isn't helpful. But I think the idea behind privilege is that if you're poor and white you on average have a different experience than being poor and black (namely not having to deal with as much racism) even though you both still have to deal with poverty and other biases/stereotypes.
On some statistical measure, sure, but on an individual level it alienates everyone who clearly has an objectively awful or even subpar life despite being held responsible for privilege they clearly don't hold.
Regardless of whether one judges this individual should be held responsible for this privilege or not, the alienation means that those who don't fit stereotypes are excluded.
Colin Quinn had a bit about a poor white plumber literally eating shit while being told to "acknowledge your privelage".
I agree that group categorizations aren't going to be universally relevant at the individual level. It is challenging to talk about larger trends without using group identities though unfortunately.
I agree that poor white people should not have their problems dismissed. However, there are some differences between poor white people and poor black people. For one, there's a lot more poor black people per population. The average black family has a tenth of the wealth of the average white family.
Second, poor black people face large amounts of racism, both systematic and personal. They live in particularly poor neighborhoods due to redlining. They face significantly harder times getting hired for jobs. They encounter police brutality.
Again, the solution is not to dismiss the problems of poor white people. However it's also important to acknowledge that at a macro level, poor black people need more help to counter systematic effects.
Imagine we have two countries. Both have poor people, but one country has an average household wealth that is a tenth of the other country's. One country was brutally colonized, had its citizens enslaved for hundreds of years, faced segregation for a 100 years after that, and only passed significant civil rights legislature in the last 70 years.
The other country had full rights for all men for 150 years, then full rights for all citizens for 100 years after that. The other country reaped the rewards of its colonized counterpart. It grew wealthy on it. Yes, there are poor people in the country, but its citizens have never been enslaved. They have never been made to be second class citizens. They have never lived under fear of lynching and false conviction.
At a personal and present level, there is not a gigantic difference from a poor white family and a poor black family. But that ignores the larger context of history and of quantity.
I don't have a problem with the term itself. I do think that if you are white, college-educated, and urban you are an exceptionally poor candidate to discuss it or indeed use it with the rural white poor. There's a little bit too much just-world-fallacy subtext about why you, who are white, are doing so much better economically than they, who are also white, and why they ought to submit to your moral guidance.
Honestly, trying to get the message out via local religious leadership is probably the best bet.
> That's why I really don't like the "white privilege". Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US
No, they aren't. Particularly, they aren't as fucked as equally poor members of a number of other races, for a whole variety of reasons (direct racism is one of them, but not the only one.)
Conversely, even rich members of other races face disadvantages relative to rich Whites because of their race.
It's true that wealth is itself a form of privilege, and poor whites, while they may participate in White privilege, don't participate in the privilege of wealth.
The problem is when a stupid college kid from an elite institution without significant life experience tells you about privilege and is trying to educate you. Even with mostly leftist views I would fully support the redneck uprising that comes after and you don't need to be a psychologist to understand the reaction. I doubt there is any deeper truth about racism to be learned here...
When you're poor as fuck and having a shit life and everyone keeps telling you how privileged you are, you stop believing those people and turn to alternative sources for information