Again, White Privilege is not an indication that all white people had an easier life than someone else. It’s simply not. That’s just a lazy way to describe it which is why so many people on Facebook throw around memes that are blatantly disregarding what the definition actually means.
I’d say the lazy way is the frequent way. Which is why it’s bad messaging.
I think the problem is also the word privilege. I wonder if maybe the right word isn’t “rights”. Sometimes it is a right by law, sometimes by custom, and sometimes an assumed right. And, it is already a clearly racist term to claim it.
I also think sometimes the personal helps describe it more than statistics.
Having Cash while Hispanic can be as bad as Driving While Black.
Went to pick up a puppy a couple of states away, southern states. Through many back counties in the foothills and Appalachia. Hmmm. Seller does not want a personal check, as we’d be leaving with the puppy on a weekend. Fair enough.
Most white families would just go grab the cash, hit the car and go, no problem.
Not us, we paid for a cashier’s check, which the seller who worked at a bank was just as happy to have. So we paid more for that puppy, just to make sure we’d be able to show up later that day with the cash even if we’d been siphoned into some DUI check roadblock. Hispanic guy with cash is running drugs right? Not picking up a new family pet. They take it first, then you have to drive back to go to court to get it back. Hopefully they don’t take the car too.
Maybe phrase it as a negative?
Shit White People Don’t Have To Deal With?
This won’t work because there will always be that one guy everybody knows (or is) it happened to. And then you get to spend the rest of the time trying to convince them that doesn’t count.
I’ve never understood why it isn’t “advantages” as in “white advantages.” It’s simple and it means exactly what it’s supposed to. If you’re white in America, you have certain advantages others do not. That doesn’t mean it automatically negates your disadvantages (being poor, growing up without a father, being in coal mining country, etc) but it’s one advantage you have over a non-white person.
You’d have better luck getting through to folks by highlighting the shitty stuff other folks have to deal with, rather than taking about the “privilege” of not having to deal with it.
I think what really opened my eyes was when I finally started seeing video of how black folks were actually being treated by cops. I’m not “privileged” to not have to live in that kind of fear of cops, but it’s fucked up that someone does have to put up with it, and that’s a thing that I will work to stop.
This has been done, for years, decades even… Black Lives Matter, remember how well that was received? And they didn’t call it White privilege either, focused almost entirely on current events, shitty situations happening right now, life and death of the victims… and what happened, Blue Lives and All Lives because… they are not willing to hear. So let’s not spend another fifty years trying to pretzel words so they appear soft to a group that refuses to believe there are real hardships, unfair hardships, that certain groups face they don’t.
The definition just needs to be clearer, the request needs to be open, and when misinformation is spread, it needs to be corrected. Just because a black man gets pulled over in expensive car under the suspicion of being a thief or a drug dealer for no other reason than he’s black, and a person with a Hispanic appearance or name might be wrongly marked as illegal or someone doing something wrong because they deal with cash, again for no other reason than their name or appearance, does not mean that this guy who grew up on welfare cheese, and this guy who was raised by two parents who never passed junior high school and certainly didn’t go to college didn’t have some difficulties to over come too.
And one way to get the message across is to stop starving our social programs so it appears that we can only help one group at any given time. We are certainly capable of trying to address more than one group, more than one issue, at one time… but it’s in the interest of those in power to see everyone fight among each other for scraps and allow the belief that in the end, there can only be one that gets the mic.
Yes. And this is why upthread I was poking around the big picture stuff about this topic. Ultimately it’s all part of a system that benefits some at the expense of others, deliberately, intentionally, and repeatedly. Our social programs suck because people in power want them to suck. And in this country at least, power usually equals money.
I suppose that you can quibble with the phrasing in “institutional racism” too, if you want. But you get the same pushback there: “But, I’m not racist, so what does this have to do with me?”
Its as Nesrie describes with Black Lives Matter. You’re never going to find a phrasing that everybody accepts, much less that people who benefitting from the status quo will accept, so at a certain point you have to stop arguing semantics. Hell, these people turned “Justice” into a curse word (i.e. social justice), which is like their favorite thing when applied to criminals (read: minorities).
Seems apropos given the discussion.
Is there no white privilege in Europe?
Ask the Muslim slums in France; I suspect they have a vehement answer ;-)
(I’m being purposefully snarky here, but given all the weird associations between pale skin and purity/money/success the world over, it’s a complicated situation)
You being snarky about my sarcasm? Never.
You will be shocked to discover that there is, in fact, white privilege in Europe :)
I think it probably presents in different ways and maybe something interesting could come out of a discussion of that, I don’t feel like enough of an expert to be more specific though.
Europe did not have widespread chattel-slavery of Africans and African-descended persons (although there was some), but the countries in Europe participated in the slave trade, brutally maintained African colonies, and used African slave labor in New World colonies. So it’s not exactly the same as in the US, but there is still white privilege in Europe.
Europe is pretty racist though. I ca’n’t imagine it’s great. Hell, Steve Fucking Bannon was just over there cheering them on in their racism.
Historically, no, not in the same way as in the USA, though today, sure, in their own fashion.
Of course, you could argue the Europeans invented white privilege via colonialism, but the US was sort of unique in having from its inception a large number of non-whites as part of its broader society and culture, with both groups in close, even intimate, proximity to each other. Europe did not get large non-white populations AFAIK until perhaps the 20th century. The non-whites Europeans came into contact with were geographically remote, and the association was more along the lines of other/non-white/over there than here, where it was much more closely along purely racial lines, as everyone was all in the same place.
That’s not to say that there was no racism in Europe, far from it. Just that the particular situation that create white privilege as we know it is I would argue particularly American. Europeans grafted whatever racially based discrimination or privilege systems onto their existing class-based systems as needed, so you could say that today there certainly is a similar from of white privilege at work in Europe, but historically it isn’t the same nor is it as long-standing as ours.
White Privilege is not unique to the USA. Europe has it too.
That Eugene Gu MD guy is just about the epitome of everything the GOP hates.