On an objection to the idea of “white privilege”

The deal is reaching white people in sufficient numbers to get them to vote for the candidate who will (at least) de-escalate and (perhaps) ameliorate the structures of racist violence and racism in your country. How does the phrase “white privilege” sound, to them? What proportion will think, “ah, yes, I recognise that as a claim that sits best with a certain sort of metaphysics of the person”? As opposed to thinking: “they’re saying that I got it easy just because I’m white? That just shows how little they know me. I don’t got it easy at all” and taking their vote elsewhere.

As a concept “white privilege” is not only true, it’s the kind of thing that lots of regular people can wrap their heads around. But the phrasing is inept. “Privilege” connotes: wealth, ease, the Rockerfeller lifestyle. We need a better slogan.

As I read I was thinking of the post I’d write, but Adam Roberts already did. The concept is useful and on-target, the word is inept.

Everyone here seems to be in agreement so far. I’m actually interested to hear the case that use of this term in promotion of this concept will lead to a more just society. I’ll be honest that I do regard it as unlikely I’d find it persuasive, but I am actually really curious to see what form such an argument would take.

Several comments have claimed that “privilege” indicates something special and possessed by only a few. The existence of the word “underprivileged” to refer to the especially poor refutes that claim.

I’d maintain that “privilege” is a fair word to use to remind people who believe they got where they did by following rules, that something else was in play in the fact that those rules work for them.

In 1968, the Kerner Report said: “The press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective.” To me, that describes white privilege better than anything (I am an extremely pale-skinned mixed-race African-diaspora person who has reaped the life-long benefits of being subjected to racist abuse by both black and white people). It isn’t just that society confers favored status on some white people and leaves other white people behind (although it does), but that American (and probably British/European society) was constructed by & for white people, and that everyone else is still deliberately excluded from it — or, at least, excluded as much as white people can get away with before the Molotov cocktails start flying. A poor white girl living in a trailer park still sees other girls who look like her running corporations, wiggling in music videos, being a superhero, and running for President; she doesn’t know until she gets older that she’s oppressed by her lower-class status. A better-off black girl living in a $300K house in an affluent suburb has a different life experience, though — she doesn’t get the representative reification of her identity from the world around her, but she has (ostensibly) better economic prospects. The poor rural white girl still has identity-based privileges the middle-class black girl does not. The black girl (perhaps) has economic privileges the poor white girl does not. That’s not nothing, of course, but what good do slightly-better economic prospects do a black woman who gets pulled over by the wrong cop? The white girl in the trailer park will, demographically-speaking, grow up to vote for Trump, support Blue Lives Matter, and call the police on black people in the public pool. So… how much of that behavior are poc supposed to ignore, in order to foster class solidarity? I’m asking. I want somebody to tell me, plainly and without euphemizing, exactly how much racism I’m supposed to swallow from poor/uneducated white people in order to advance the glorious revolution? How hard do I have to pretend that they don’t derive reward, no matter how poor or sad they are, from their whiteness? I find this very annoying. The entire Trump Phenomenon is the result of uneducated/lower-class white people getting angry because their whiteness suddenly isn’t paying out the same dividends it paid their fathers and grandfathers. That’s it, full stop. If Trump supporters, basking in their obvious white privilege, actually cared about economic advancement, they’d have dumped Trump the minute he stuffed his cabinet with Goldman Sachs executives & failed to open even a single coal mine by the end of his first year in office. For that matter, racism simply wouldn’t exist, even as a reactionary phenomenon, if there weren’t still some benefit to being white even for poor people. Acknowledging that — the existence of privilege outside the accumulation of wealth — seems to make white leftists really uncomfortable, for some reason. White leftists are extremely willing, just in general, to overlook the obvious, unsightly historical residue of slavery and apartheid that blankets the entire nation like a haze of air pollution because it makes “organizing” more difficult for them. Why is that, I wonder. (A lie. I know why.)

The thing that splits the working class into factions is bigotry. Racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Not calling a spade a spade.

What Peter Dorman @5 said.
It’s a semantic point, but “privilege” is not the same as “comparative advantage”.
“Privilege” implies a system of rights where there is a normal level of rights, and someone has above this normal level of rights, whereas we want blacks to have the same “rights” that whites currently have, not whites to have less rights so we reach a balance that is at a lower level, so it is not whites who are privileged but blacks who are underprivileged.

Two unconnected postscripts to my comment above (the comment thread hadn’t refreshed when I wrote it).

First, strong agree with Peter Dorman and Adam Roberts: ‘privilege’ is not the right word for ‘exemption from being treated as less than a full human being’, a.k.a. ‘being treated as no less than a full human being’. We do, however, need a word for that, because (and here I veer back a little way towards agreeing with the OP) it clearly is a Thing, and a Thing which crops up in some surprising places, in an intersectional kind of way. Call it “human status privilege” (I’m still not happy with the p-word, but never mind). Sexism works similarly. My daughter got (quite mildly) harassed by a Big Issue seller when we were out one night – we heard “Nice hat!” as we passed, followed by “Hey! Hey, I like your HAT!” and “HEY! I SAID, NICE HAT!” Nothing really aggressive or degrading, just the kind of behaviour that has status markers all over it. That guy had no earthly privilege whatsoever, but he did have the human-status-privilege of being a man, and he used it. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that quite a lot of White people do something similar on a regular basis.

Second, also in reply to Peter Dorman: I really don’t think class is the right reference point here. Ever since Marx got together with Engels, it’s been a commonplace that social origin doesn’t entirely determine social being – the only left-wing organisation that judged all middle-class individuals on their background was the Khmer Rouge. Being a middle-class person doesn’t give you anything to atone or apologise for in the way that, in the WP framing, being White does.

I think what’s at issue here is precisely the distinction between, on one hand, the privileges of an exploiter class, in the Marxist framework (hence Adolph Reed’s argument that Whites qua Whites aren’t privileged) and, on the other, the human-status-privilege of individual members of a group constructed biopolitically as a superior caste.

DCA: the problem is that it is difficult to come up with a non-inept term that is just as concise. Something like “whites-only benefits from the social contract” is more accurate but won’t parse well in speeches. But even that is slightly misleading, since the side with capital can easily break that contract: working-class whites have not become better off over the past 30 years regard less of what one calls their relative race status.

I’ve generally felt that the “white privilege” talk is really helpful, because it seems like it makes clear that there are many different kinds of advantage and disadvantage that people can have, that layer on and interact with one another. Someone can have white privilege but lack wealth privilege, or vice versa, and can have male privilege in some contexts and lack female privilege in others.

But obviously, it seems that many people find this very hard to grasp, and seem to think that any talk of one kind of privilege must necessarily exclude the possibility of any other type of privilege. I don’t understand where this comes from, but if it happens with this terminology, then I don’t understand how any other terminology will do better at conveying this relatively simple point.

I think the objection is not just about the idea that whites have certain benefits other groups do not in Western nations – though of course not universally and in all contexts (e.g., essentially all elite universities practice affirmative action).

The objection is more about the source. Members of the social and cultural “elite” – whether white or not – lecturing people not in those groups about their privilege: is it any surprise this leads to pushback? There are many academics here. “Kids of academics and people in other elite professions” make up an enormous fraction of young professors. These same people believe that race is the critical source of privilege limiting diversity in their profession. It is mind-blowing to anyone not from that background.

As a piece of rhetoric white privilege seems to genuinely change the minds of educated white liberals, as many people in this thread have already attested. I definitely remember how eye opening it was to realise that totally mundane social transactions were actually very fraught for people from a different background from me, some of which I learnt from the white privilege literature. This seems like a really important educational task.

But it’s a political loser when it comes to convincing people outside of that bubble to get on board with a political programme. It feels like people who have quite a bit of economic, political and social capital are hoping to convince individuals who are are seriously disadvantaged to sign up to a narrative in which those disadvantaged individuals are themselves the villains. It’s not that I think it is impossible for that to work, it just feels like there has to be a better story to tell, if purely from a pragmatic perspective of making actual political gains.

@CB 19
“AFAICS, the claim that “privilege” in its noun and verb forms properly only ever refers to some formal exemption or immunity and never to merely comparative advantage is simply false.”

The problem is not about the “formal” part, the problem is about the implication about what the “normal” situation is.

Let’s say that “privilege” is a synonim for positive discrimination.

(a) We can say that blacks suffer from negative discrimination, or
(b) we can say that whites enjoy positive discrimination.

My point is that (a) is NOT the same than (b).

In (a), we assume a counterfactual where everyone is in a good situation, and we say that blacks are not in that situation;
In (b) we assume a counterfactual where everyone is in a bad situation, and we say that whites are not in that situation.

The counterfactual we use in the two cases is different, but the counterfactual represents, by implication, what we think as a just society, so the idea of a just society that we are projecting changes whether we use (a) or (b), and the actions we are willing to take to reach that just society also change.

If I take the merrian webster definition (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/privilege) I have as a first definition:
“a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor”
It is a problem if I’m implying that, for example, not being harassed by the police, or having a job, is a “special benefit”, because these two things are not special benefits, these are things that we expect everyone to have in a just society.

Something that I think gets missed in a lot of these conversations is that while a white person has white privilege depending on the specific circumstances of their life that privilege can be more or less relevant. To use an archaic privilege to avoid contentious issues, I may have the privilege to wear a sword in the king’s presence, but this matters little if I never meet the king nor own a sword. However, the fact that I never exercise this privilege does not mean that it does not exist nor that it is meaningful to others that possess this privilege and do exercise.

I think it’s really hard to argue that white privilege doesn’t exist in at least some domains and that these privileges are very important to at least some people some of the time. There’s a lot of room for debate about the exact extent of that domain and its relevance to any given current issue, but trying to argue it doesn’t exist at all would be like arguing a really poor medieval noble doesn’t have the privilege of wearing a sword in the king’s presence if he doesn’t own a sword (example is a bit stretched since this is a formal legal privilege rather than one without legal force). A privilege can exist independently of any given individual’s ability to exercise that privilege. A really poor person, from a family with a really poor reputation may feel like they do not have any privilege where they live because cops are always hassling him because of his parents and employers say they know that family and won’t have anything to do with him. However, if they found a way to leave that community and were able to hide their background they could just be another white person, even if their specific background disadvantaged them in the particular circumstances in which they lived leading to them not having the usual benefits of the privileges they possess.

I think that white privilege exists, in the sense that, as the OP notes, all other things being equal, being white confers advantages in white-dominated societies.

But this is a nicety that sidesteps the real problem with the concept, because, in most cases, all other things are NOT equal. Being white is not a trump card that beats all the other cards that you have been dealt. It’s intersections all the way down, and we shouldn’t only focus on “pet” intersections like race and gender. What matters to real people is their experience of their condition in society and their sense of their prospects in society. And these are determined by ALL of the characteristics that constitute them.

Imagine a 2o-year-old black woman who comes from a supportive, stable home whose parents worked as a clerks at the Post Office and who is now in nursing school, on her way to a secure, relatively well-paid job in a hospital. Imagine a 20-year-old white male whose mother was a drug addict who raised him with a series of abusive boyfriends, who has drug issues of his own, and who grew up in the “rust belt,” with out-dated ideas about what it means to be a man (nursing, a skilled area that is in high demand, is not on his radar). It is not at all obvious, between these two, who is the worse off, after you have totaled up all of the pluses and minuses.

Telling that young man that he enjoys white privilege because, all other things equal, he’s ahead of someone who is black, seems totally beside the point, however true it might be in fact. And therefore it is extremely counter-productive to progressive causes, to building solidarity. It is like telling a desperately poor person to cheer up because, “on average,” incomes in the US are $60,000 per year. Yeah . . . great.

and about:
”White Privilege” –
as I always had it – and I still have it –
even now always traveling with (coloured) friends who don’t have it –
WE can’t think of any better expression –
or
Wait?
Perhaps the way the ”Darkest One” in our group always expresses it when he always introduces himself as:
”The Token Negro” – WE only hang out with – in order to signalize that we are ”Liberals” and then everybody points to the girl in our group – who looks ”the Whitest” – but actually has a ”Black” Mother – and we explain – that – as white as she might look alike – she actually is ”the Darkest”!

I’ll have another go at this.

Privilege is by definition something that not everyone can have.

If you say that the random white dude is privileged, you are saying that, in a just society, a random black dude should never ever be in the same position in which the random white dude is now, because privileges by definition cannot be extended to everyone.

I wonder if it might be helpful to look at a specific example of white privilege. I think Chris has done an excellent job of breaking down the big picture, and I still see a number of comments whose ideas of what white privilege is and how it is used really clash with my understanding of the term and its use.

All of us (except Chris, sorry Chris!) have the ability to walk away from this comment thread whenever we feel like, with no consequences. This is a privilege. It’s granted to us by Chris and the other contributors, in that they allow us to post pseudonymously. Note that it’s relative. I know I get anxious when I post things online that I care about, so when I say “no consequences”, it’s accurate but not necessarily precise. Similarly, I’m not arguing Chris would suffer significant harm from, say, not approving comments over the weekend, but I hope we would agree that there’s a qualitative difference between the consequences he would face and the roughly no consequences we would face.

I mention this particular privilege because it’s a parallel to the first aspect of White Privilege that I learned about: White folks can walk away from conversations about race in a way that non-White folks can’t. Again, we’re going for accurate, not precise. Don’t quibble. And I don’t mean a White person can walk away from a particular conversation and a Black person can’t (although that can be true too!). I mean that when a Black (or Amerindian, or Jewish, or…) person walks away from the conversation, they often run into another within a day, or even within an hour.

This is a privilege. It’s granted to me by society, wherein people tend not to commit racist micro- and macro-aggressions against me or engage me in conversations about race. I would love for everyone to have the ability to walk away and not have to deal with (waves arms generally) all this for a while. As an aside, if you didn’t understand “safe spaces” before, hopefully now you do. They’re a direct and targeted attempt to take a privilege that is afforded to White people all the time, and grant that privilege to others in a minimally invasive way. If I can’t get everyone the privilege to walk away right now, and I can’t, then we’re looking at harm reduction and at steps along a path toward the long term goal.

Let’s pause and take stock. We have a specific example of White Privilege. We still need to talk about the utility of the term “White Privilege” in this context. To do that, I want to ask: (1) Who is using the term, and when? (2) Who is their audience? (3) What is the impact?

In my experience the term White Privilege is used by non-saboteurs in three ways. First, it is used by those without the privilege in question as a shorthand. “Check your privilege.” “Your White Privilege is showing.” Second, it is used by White allies to indicate awareness of a particular privilege. Third, it is used in public by people of color to flag a topic as an instance of White Privilege.

In the first case, the audience is an ally (ostensibly) and the goal is to get the ally to be a better ally with minimal investment from the speaker. It is not a Black person’s job to help me be less racist, for example. It is my job, and they’ve graciously consented to let me know I just did a racism so I can do better next time. Given how this interaction works, it almost does not matter at all what the phrase used is. It’s a safeword. (Safephrase?)

If, again for example, a Black person wanted to, they could say something like “Please stop asking my opinion about the latest police shooting. I know you only asked me once this week but you’re the fifth person to ask me about it today and I’d really rather not talk about it. Again. You have the White Privilege to walk away from this conversation. I don’t. Please stop making my day worse.” But at that point they might as well have just had the conversation they were trying to avoid.

Note that I said the phrase used “almost” does not matter. Not knowing about a particular form of White Privilege is… also a form of White Privilege. (Not knowing about White Privilege in general is also a form of White Privilege.) So it’s useful to have a phrase that makes some sense. I’m open to the idea of using other terms here, but since I do know about White Privilege it’s a perfectly viable term to use with me in this situation, and I imagine this is the case for most of us.

In the second case, the audience is likely either other allies or a person of color. I’ve used the term in this way to indicate when I’m about to do or say something that I know exploits my White Privilege, but which I think is necessary to do anyway. e.g. “I know it’s my White Privilege that I haven’t noticed this issue until now. I’m really sorry, I’m trying to catch up, and I’m stuck. Can you…” In this case the exact term matters even less. I have the White Privilege to only enter these conversations when I feel like it, so it’s really not that much of a problem if someone responds “Your what?” and I have to give the long form explanation.

In the third case, I would say that a good deal of framing is going on, but not very much persuading. A conversation that goes “Hey, you’re being racist. Please stop.” works much better on someone who does less racism than on someone who does more racism. Technically the audience is the (quite racist) public, but I would argue the real audience is other people of color. For them, an instance of White Privilege got called out, called bad, and they didn’t have to do it! I’ve had a number of people tell me it feels extra good when a White person does the calling out. I’m sure opinions vary but I’ve heard that particular one often enough to share it. In the case of this particular example of White Privilege, you can imagine why not having to be the one to say it might be particularly nice.

To sum up:
If you think we should stop saying White Privilege because it won’t “convince” people, you missed the boat. That’s just not what the term is for.
If you think we should stop saying White Privilege because it isn’t the “correct” term, you missed the boat. It does the job, and it’s far more important that we use the same term than that we use a precisely correct one.

From what I’m reading, “white privilege” seems to be generating some reflection among the white PMC – they’re starting to talk the talk, but as to walking the walk, that’s a more fraught topic. That’s because walking the walk has some up-front costs, at least as it’s being presented in the MSM and liberal blogosphere (i.e. as a zero-sum game; personally, I’m not sure that’s the appropriate presentation).

Yes, “white privilege” exists, in the form of structural/systemic racism – Blacks are 2.8 times more likely to be shot/killed by police than whites; Blacks are 3x more likely to die of COVID-19; Black women are 3x more likely to die in childbirth (discounting SES disparities); Blacks are 3x more likely to undergo diabetes-related limb amputations, and so on and so on. Today I read/commented on the environmental racism still playing out (specifically, in Richmond, VA) in consequence of the HOLC’s redlining “project” in the 1930s – that is, 90 years on. The life expectancy of Blacks in Richmond’s Black neighborhood of Gilmin is 63; that in the middle-class white neighborhood of Westover Hills is 83.

The problem seems to me to be that “race” and “class” overlap in complex ways. While Blacks tend to be poorer than whites, largely due to the (systemic) inability to amass generational wealth through home ownership (racial covenants, redlining), there is a white underclass whose economic interests intersect with those of many/most Blacks – and that class is growing in this time of pandemic. It’s this white underclass which has been more or less abandoned by the Democratic Party (cf. Thomas Frank, “Listen, Liberal”) and which has abandoned its traditional political home.

For this SES group, the term “white privilege” is either essentially meaningless (think: former industrial workers in the Rust Belt, permanently unemployed coal miners in Appalachia) or their last bastion of “dignity, respect”. In both cases, many former Democratic voters shifted to Republican.

I think the term “structural/systemic racism” is in some ways more appropriate here – it absolves white liberals of personal guilt (which can lead to resentment, and only rarely to remediation-directed actions), while stressing the responsibility of multiple systems (environment, housing, health care, education, justice) in fostering the current situation.

Highly recommended for a brief overview/empathic-dispassionate summary of where the U.S. is at this moment: https://twitter.com/i/status/1298983030116110338

I also agree that Callum @22 hits an essential point. White privilege exists but it’s often presented in an adversarial manner to people with fewer advantages than the presenter. A student at an elite school condescendingly lecturing someone who works a crappy job for low pay is not a pretty sight.

If I am talking with you, what I try to do is this (I fail sometimes, but this is what I try to do): I try to use language which will help me convey my meaning to you, and I try to avoid language which will hinder me from conveying my meaning to you.

I will use slang if I think it will help convey my meaning; I will avoid slang if I think it will hinder me from conveying my meaning. I will use scientific terms if I think it will help convey my meaning; I will avoid scientific terms if I think they will hinder me from conveying my meaning.

So I will use the term ‘white privilege’ if I think it will help convey my meaning; I will avoid using the term ‘white privilege’ if I think it will hinder me from conveying my meaning.

Do you behave differently?

Agree with Callum. I’m not asking anyone to excuse anyone else’s racism–the question is, does the word “privilege” get in the way of explaining the concept to people who haven’t encountered or thought of it before? The connotations of “privileged” do make it harder to assimilate, I think, than (say) “benefit” (as in “the benefits of being white”), and aids those who want to make such bad-faith arguments as “How can you say this poor white kid is privileged?”

For me, the WP concept is “If you woke up tomorrow and everything was the same but your skin color wasn’t white, you’d find things changing for you, and not for the better”. A true racist would say that this is the way things should be–it would be a price you’d pay for society to be able to put people in their proper place. The goal is to get through to everyone else who might, when they understand it, say “Oh, I see–I guess I do benefit, and that’s not how things should be”. The p-word is just a name for something, and names aren’t fundamental.

Cedric Johnson, a professor of Poli Sci and Afro-American Studies at U. of IL Chicago, did systematic study of incarceration rates, which I the U.S. are extremely high. Everybody knows that incarceration rates for blacks and other such minorities are much higher than for whites, with blacks accounting for 1/3 of prisoners, while just 13% of the U.S. population. Yet if you strip away classifications of race/ethnicity and substitute markers of class, income wealth, education levels, most, though not all of the disparity disappears. The remaning residual was due to disparities in sentencing, such that a white convicted of strong armed robbery, mugging, a low level felony, might get 1 year, wereas a black might get 15 months, (Another similar academic did an independent study which got the same result. though I don’t recall his name or university). IOW it’s poverty, not race, that’s being punished and poor whites can have it almost as bad as blacks.

Disentangling race from class in U.S. social stratification is tricky, because historically they are so closely entwined, but it helps to examine actual ascertainable fact rather than relying on easy assumption, anecdote and having the “correct” attitude. And why speak of “white skin privilege” rather than black disadvantage and deprivation, which are functionally equivalent predicates. other than for merely rhetorical reasons? Not all whites are the same, nor blacks. nor any other demographic category, and as a general rule, empirical variation within a given category is likely to be greater than generic differences between such imposed categories. Further, why oppose whiteness, which is just as much an historically generated socio-cultural artifact and not an ahistorical constant, as blackness or any other racial construct, -( since race does not exist, is not an underlying biological real, as opposed to various ethnicities, which exist because people have bred with each other across generations and centuries),- to “people of color”, a nonsensical demographic category? Other than not having lily white skin, such might have nothing in common. In the U.S. median current $ household income is $60,000. For Hispanics it’s $44,000 and for blacks it’s $39,000. But for Asians it’s $80,000. But “Asian” is the most incoherent category of them all; a Palestinian Arab and Filipino and a Korean are all Asians by virtue of having derived from that vast populous continent, but otherwise have nothing in common historically or culturally.

It’s really not hard to figure why identity politics/political correctness ideology is so popular with neo-liberal corporate Dembots, the NYT and PMC liberals. It’s easily manipulated, fragments the population and allows for endless attitudinizing to no real practical effect. One can feel ever so comfortably “guilty”, without actually doing anything or relinquishing one’s actual relative privileges: pious fraud. But most of all it serves to obfuscate the role of class in social stratification and the building of commonalities and solidarities among the broad working class. Since the interests of the PMC are diametrically opposed to the working class. Property values must be maintained!

@Chris Bertram: Two thoughts spring to mind:

1) You’ve come up with a quite good construction of “white privilege”, as evinced by the general consensus that the thing you’re describing does, indeed, exist. But it’s not obvious to me that the thing that you have carefully constructed/described is what most people have in mind when they hear/use the phrase. How do I “check my privilege” if my privilege is simply an immutable metaphysical status adhering to my person?

2) The question of whether white privilege exists seems less important than what possession of that privilege entails. Person X has white privilege, therefore…? What moral obligations accrue to a person because of their white privilege? How should these obligations be reflected in their behavior? An so on. I expect that the CT commentariat will diverge more widely on these questions than they do on the basic question of whether privilege exists.

At work, but I want to type something out quickly because I think it’s an important debate. I think there are two fundamental problems with the term privilege.

If we believe the Marxist theory of racism, any apparent “privileges” enjoyed by white workers are actually ultimately to their detriment, as the race system serves to make all workers worse off by dividing them. White workers then would, in the long run, be better off if they didn’t have these “privileges”. It’s odd to describe something you would ultimately be better off without as a “privilege” (and it divides workers further against each other). Thus we shouldn’t use the term.
A lot of what gets described as white privilege is something that everyone should have. Being less likely to be shot by the cops is not a privilege- rather the lack of this quality is oppression. Not being even more oppressed isn’t a privilege, it’s a basic expectation we should all demand. Speaking as if not being oppressed is privilege lowers our expectations in an unhealthy way.

The above objection isn’t purely semantic or hypothetical. I once got into an argument with someone about whether a particular white juvenile offender should be tried as an adult. They argued that in arguing I they should not be I was advancing white privilege, because a black child in a similar circumstance would surely be tried as an adult. My response was that yes that was probably true, and the solution was to demand no child be prosecuted as an adult. They’d basically internalized the narrative of privilege in such a way that made them disposed to try to level down, instead of up.

There’s about 100 million Americans who simultaneously have male privilege, white privilege, straight privilege, and cis privilege. How do you recommend that they change their behaviour? If you think that a group of 100 million is too heterogenous to give general advice, maybe “privilege” is a bad way of looking at it.

@GG How do I “check my privilege” if my privilege is simply an immutable metaphysical status adhering to my person?

To oversimplify–informed by Chris Bertram’s analysis which seems to roughly fit what is intended by the original McIntosh paper– the ‘privilege’ is the absence of stigma, othering, or a lesser, demeaned ‘dishonored’ status.

It could seem a little odd to call this ‘privilege’ since we think of that as something conferred to people because they deserve exceptional treatment and most of the benefits McIntosh is describing should be conferred to everyone. But that may be the point. If, in many social contexts, white people can assume they are entitled to or deserving of certain treatment but people who aren’t white can’t assume it (e.g., relative absence of suspicion directed at oneself) then it seems reasonable to conclude that being white does confer a ‘privilege’ a bit like being a member of a club.The problem is that everyone has to use the club facilities since we’re talking about how a person is treated as they interact with other people while living their life.

The many accounts and videos of Black Americans having their IDs checked or worse while trying to gain entrance to their own apartment buildings or study at their university would be an example. Being white generally grants a person a less suspect status, and the default for white people is that they will not be questioned or suspected while trying to go home or use the library, etc. simply for being white.

The McIntosh paper (which someone calls ‘sloppy’ above, without elaborating) lists 50 different cultural, social, and interpersonal benefits white people have that people who have a stigmatized racial status relative to white people in a racist society do not have. It doesn’t disprove McIntosh’s point that this can change or vary by context in some cases.

It’s never described as racism. It’s very clearly an effect of racism. It’s not about an ‘immutable metaphysical status’ if that’s supposed to be a mysterious quality over and above what you look like. It is focussed on very specific and concrete burdens for people whose racial identity carries stigma in the United States. (Some of these could also apply to Europe as well.)

The point of the paper is to make the benefits of European ancestry and light skin more concrete and specific for white people so that they can more clearly see the burden of being denied those as one tries to go about one’s life.

McIntosh worries that the term privilege is not apt

“For this reason, the word “privilege” now seems to me misleading. We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to over empower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one’s race or sex.”

It’s not meant to define racism either socially or psychologically. It presupposes racism exists and then considers the effects of racial identity on interpersonal interaction and the person’s relative or lesser ease at achieving goals that require help, cooperation, resources, etc. in a social world shaped by racism.

Malik’s quick dismissal of it without trying to understand what is meant by it seems to assume we couldn’t interrogate the complexity of racism from more than one angle. (Of course ‘racism’ has several different meanings.)

So you ‘check your privilege’ by not leveraging or assuming the higher status you have as a white person in contexts where being white is likely to be an advantage. For example, you try to keep your social power in check so that other people who aren’t white can operate as equals in the interpersonal context you are both in.

E.g.,–you could do this by not assuming something that is easy for you as a white person is equally easy for a person who isn’t white and thereby scoff at their reluctance to do it. Or you could decide not to doubt a Black person’s claim to being mistreated simply because you don’t generally experience random cruelty or pettiness or injustice of the type they’re describing, etc.

The term ‘check’ could mean both ‘keep your privilege in check’ or reflect/ ‘check on’ advantages you may have that another person may lack in a racist society.

One moral obligation that comes to mind is the obligation to treat other people as equals. You cannot adequately do this unless you are aware of aspects of the situation that impede their full equality.

An interesting bit about McIntosh’s paper is that it is so clearly focused on how one is seen or treated and less on internal beliefs in people’s heads. But part of the burden comes from being treated this way so frequently and having to account for the interpersonal risks to one’s own interests in such a wide variety of social contexts. People who aren’t white have to continually watch what they’re doing to avoid the various pitfalls they present.

One reason the term has migrated so much could be that people are less careful about the use of terms in feminist texts. Nobody is upbraided for misapplying ‘privilege’ or ‘intersectionality’ in the way they are scolded for misapplying terms from the Frankfurt school. But it could also be that many people find these terms useful and so their definitions migrate as they find their way into the popular lexicon.

I agree that we should try to be precise with language. But if you really want to restrict the term privilege to its technical meaning, you basically have to stop using it outside of history books. It’s a mystery to me how one can object to the term White privilege but not Class privilege. See my earlier comment.

As an aside, if you want to quibble, the term discrimination strictly speaking is neutral. Of course we generally use it to convey a different meaning. Underprivileged is arguably a better term.

Finally: where does this claim come from that it’s mainly upper class whites who „lecture“ poor whites on WP? Sounds like fake news to me.

MisterMr

I am a little confused. Taking a fairly standard definition of privilege:

“a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.”

I don´t see anything in there that require one to remove privileges from people to achieve equality. I would agree that a privilege cannot be extended to all people and remain a privilege. But an alternative interpretation is that once one extends a privilege to all people, it ceases to be a privilege. Which is surely the desired outcome?

In short, if whatever benefits of being white exist were to be extended to all people, regardless of ethnicity, it would be true that there would be no White Privilege. It would not be true that White Privilege did not exist before, nor would it be true that the only way to deal with White Privilege is to “level down” – one could “level up” as well.

Bob @ 28

” What matters to real people is their experience of their condition in society and their sense of their prospects in society. And these are determined by ALL of the characteristics that constitute them.”

Or, to put it another way, is there really a majority of people discussing WP who do not recognise intersectionality?

@60 “Finally: where does this claim come from that it’s mainly upper class whites who „lecture“ poor whites on WP? Sounds like fake news to me.”

The obvious example would be Robin DiAngelo, a well remunerated free lance consultant with hit book lecturing wage labourers to watch out for their privilege. Hard to ascertain how representative those interactions are of overall discourse, but I don’t think it’s fake news.

@63 I think you are right that not everyone sets up those who benefit from WP as villains (although many do). But the way I’ve heard WP used implies that you have things that you are not entitled to. I’m fine with that because my life is not chiefly characterised by precariousness and want. I’m saying that for many people, for whom life is pretty hard, the very small amount of well being they’ve scraped together is going to be something they really value. The semantics of privilege are going to tell them that you take that for granted, because the essential feature of their existence is in fact one of being seriously under privileged. As a piece of political rhetoric this looks to me to be a bit of an own goal.

I would also add that, as a black person, I have found WP useful in both talking to white people, and in talking to other black people. It’s not that we needed a new or better way to talk about racism — but it is a useful concretization (as is the “knapsack” simile) of the flip side of many of our experiences. That is – recognizing the many ways that even when we have multiple other privileges–economic stability, higher education, for instance–there are certain things we still must be aware of, fear, and endure…

Yeah, we didn’t need WP to express these ideas, but it certainly felt and feels validating to have the flip side of our experience expressed and acknowledged. Even if only/primarily acknowledged by well-meaning white liberals. Even if that acknowledgment it is vastly insufficient by itself. But to have a break in the gaslighting of color-blindness, a break from the protestations that only/primarily individual “merit” matters (and the meritocracy myth is a whole ‘nother ball of wax of course) and to have (some) white people (sometimes) finally see that yes, in some ways you do always have it better — from being more easily able to avoid “macroaggressions” like being killed by the police to microaggressions like being reliably condescended to by peers of a different race (or asked for help in tackling racism by members of the majority benefitting from it)… yes, we did not need WP, but I think it has benefitted understanding, discourse, and solidarity amongst black people. So… maybe that ain’t nothing to sneeze at.

In the US, there is clearly ‘white privilege’ and it seems wrong to me to suggest that isn’t a useful concept for both creating an “ah-ha” moment for certain non-activist or non-aware whites while at the same time being something of a dog-whistle for those who would push back against the concept in its entirety.

That said, if ‘whiteness’ was the sole basis on which privilege was bestowed – how to account for discrimination and stratification in societies (say Asian, Indian, Middle-eastern) where racial homogeneity is much higher so some different factor has to be used to create out-groups.

It seems like humans as a species are prone to a certain amount of discrimination in their cultures and if something easy to identify like Race isn’t available they are more than happy to choose religion, sex, geography or some other readily available discriminator from which to construct privilege. White privilege is likely a ‘thing’ in somewhat heterogeneous cultures, but it can’t be the only thing.

Ended up more or less by accident doing a master degree in something similar to what might be called intercultural communication in and US/UK, albeit with a bit more of a business administration slant in Germany.

Students were mainly lots of women with about as much personal affiliation to all things foreign as myself. The mixture of gender and parents privileged educational background meant they were all speaking pretty much like a news anchors. So were the Profs. That was the only social context i ever encountered in Bavaria where my dialect, tuned down among other things by my parents strategic efforts towards that goal in an effort to make upward mobility easier, was among the strongest. The predictable classroom discussion: Is speaking dialect racist? A clear consensus towards yes emerged. I decided it was wiser to remain silent. Nothing to win pointing out how that really was the privileged punching against the lower social classes and men who on average speak a much stronger accent under the pretense of anti racism. Any topicts touching feminst issues in some way were definitly no jokeing matter either.

My point aside the hilarosity? Betting pennies to dollars this dynamic plays out in a a much more very quintox way in US elite school humanities. The general quintoxic us discourse and the much stronger role of selective schools in class reproduction there will make sure of it.

Okay, just glancing above apparently others have made that point, so if you bother to put my post up just consider it another data point about how some people react. I think there obviously is such a thing as “ white privilege”, but I can also see why lower income whites would deeply resent being lectured by people whose lives are vastly more privileged and comfortable than theirs. I am, btw, in the privileged category. I am going through some health issues, but have decent health insurance and whatever else happens it won’t seriously effect my financial future. Others with my problem might just have to take their chances with the medical condition.

@mjc 67-68
Well said.

@notGoodenough 61-64
You seem to have a pretty good handle on the concept, at least to me.

@GG 46

“How do I “check my privilege” if my privilege is simply an immutable metaphysical status adhering to my person?”

Leaving aside that White Privilege is a function of our society and we can change society through mass movements…

You cannot individually make your White Privilege go away. You can (and must) take it into account when deciding where and how you allocate your efforts. One aspect of White Privilege is that cops are less likely to shoot you, so when you go to a protest–you go to protests, right?–you stand in the part of the crowd closest to the police so they’re less likely to be violent. Another aspect of White Privilege is that when a White person and a BIPOC person both speak up, the news will tend to feature only the White person’s words, so you take steps to lift up BIPOC voices. That might mean shutting up even when you have something to say. That might mean referring a reporter to a colleague even though you’d like to get credit for some work you were involved in. The list goes on.

@MrMister 51

One group (including me) who dislikes the use of the term “white privilege” on the ground that semantically it implies a sort of levelling down of rights, and would rather use terms such as “racism”, “oppression”, “discrimination” etc.;

The other group seems to believe that the first group is sort negating the existence of said racism, oppression, discrimination, whatever, because they don’t like the term “white privilege”.

Well, I’m definitely not in the first group, and I’m not in the second group either. So what now? Making a (justified, I think) assumption that you are White, I think you would currently benefit from checking your White Privilege. Your argument has been that (a) the term is inaccurate, and (b) it’s not useful.

To the point that the term is inaccurate, let me bluntly state: You aren’t being as objective as you think you are. Plenty of people in this thread have agreed with you that the term “privilege” implies a leveling down of rights… and plenty of people have disagreed. Every term, especially terms for complex or sensitive concepts, can be nitpicked. You say you’d rather use terms such as “racism”, “oppression”, and “discrimination”, I can immediately see how all of these terms would be more prone to getting nitpicked than “privilege”, and I’m shocked that you can’t. All three terms you suggest include an element of intent. When I say you have “White Privilege”, that’s a thing that’s granted to you without your consent. When I say you’re “doing racism”, that has additional implications.

To the point that the term is not useful, let me bluntly state: Not every term has to be useful to you. It’s useful to me. It’s useful to a number of other people who have spoken up in this thread. One element of White Privilege is the ingrained belief that you are the default, that if something isn’t good for you, then it isn’t good period. Fight that.

notGoodenough @ 69 I don’t have a good answer for this. I think it’s a balancing act of education, being compassionate and realistic about how privileged the lives of others actually are, and trying to reach desirable political outcomes.

mjc @67&68 ” yes, we did not need WP, but I think it has benefitted understanding, discourse, and solidarity amongst black people. So… maybe that ain’t nothing to sneeze at.” Yup yup yup. Thanks.

MisterMr @ 71

Fair enough – how use the word and the connotations it brings to your mind are your own, and to be honest I am not really interested in getting involved in conversations about conveying tone. To offer my perspective (which I don’t posit as one people should necessarily share, but merely as a potential answer to your question):

“But as the word “privilege” has, to my ears, an unmistakable negative connotation, I don’t understand why people would use this word (as opposed to racism, discrimination, whatever) if they were not using the term in the sense I use it.”

To me, privilege has the connotation of “someone who has advantages that others do not”, so “White Privilege” (with no context) conveys the general idea of “White People having advantages other (i.e. non-White) people do not”. Racism and discrimination, to me, are active-sounding things – if you say “the problem is racism” (with no context), I would think of oppression being carried out actively against someone (which is not really the concept trying to be conveyed). Of course, I don’t think using terms people don’t know without explanation is a good idea anyway, so if I were in the position of trying to explain White Privilege to someone who hadn’t come across it before (thankfully very unlikely as I am not the best person for that role!) I would probably start by trying to explain the concept before mentioning the label.

However, once you’ve found the best word or phrase to pithily convey the understanding of this concept in a way which will convince people who have not come across it before or do not agree that it is a problem – and also does not offend them in the way the use of “privilege” would – just let me know and I’ll use that instead. Otherwise (and this is just a personal opinion, of course) I am more interested in the idea than the label put on it.

Engels 65, collum 66: You guys are precious. I’m questioning the claim that it’s „mainly upper class whites“ who use the concept of WP and you respond by giving two individual examples. I won’t even try to verify your examples because it is beside the point. My impression is that many people, of different skin color, gender, and SES, are talking about WP. That some of them are upper class whites is irrelevant, unless you can show that this is overwhelmingly the case.

I can hardly resist pointing out the irony that our friend identifying McIntosh as „upper class“ uses the name of the capitalist coauthor of the Communist Manifesto as pseudonym. Dare I mention that Marx too was from a bourgeois background and received an elite education, perhaps comparable in background to McIntosh?

Moreover you both haven’t addressed the other side, the claim that it’s poor people in particular being “lectured” by upper class on WP. I don’t think there is any evidence for that.

MisterMr 71 one more quibble. I agree that the term privilege nowadays often has a negative connotation but that was not so in the original meaning of the term. Moreover, even today, there is a positive use of the term in the expression “it was a privilege to work with you” or similar.

Tm @82 “Finally: where does this claim come from that it’s mainly upper class whites who „lecture“ poor whites on WP?”

You originally made this claim so I’m not inclined to try and defend it, I was just giving you an example of it happening.

As I said in my original comment, there are contexts where WP is a useful piece of rhetoric/analysis. I’m pointing to an important case where I think it is not.

The Scalzi essay is an excellent example of the kind of thing that people who dislike the misuse of the phrase white privilege object to.

In it, ‘straight white male’ isn’t merely a lower difficulty setting, it has to be the lowest. Which is singular, there can be only one lowest setting. So logically everyone who is white and male must be on it. If a senator’s son is fortunate, so must be a farmer’s, or a meth addict’s.

When this is pointed out, he doubles down; class is merely something that happens ‘within the game’, whereas whiteness is outside it. This corresponds pretty precisely to the problematic interpretation of the phrase; whiteness is an immutable metaphysical status, a thing you really are, not a description that currently happens to be accurate.

Go down that path, and the DNA which determines race cannot be a mere biochemical molecule, but must be something like a magical biopower that expresses your life essence, and probably gives you more hit points. The thing that some Nazi’s called ‘vril’, taking the name from an earlier sci fi author.

The thing is, once you start to dabble in inherently right-wing narratives like that, you are playing a game that is likely to be won by those who have the money, experience and lack of scruples that makes them good at it.

Someone up-thread asked how much should racists be pandered to. Perhaps a better question would be how can we more successfully avoid subtly reinforcing white supremacist narratives?

@79

I think if Scalzi had instead said straight white men play Twitter on the easiest setting, it would have been better. He was addressing online crowds anyway. To think of online debate as a game, especially one that his readers were playing right now, makes sense. There is no question that some people receive a handicap in that setting.

In a broader sense, what does it mean? Does it mean white men have an obligation to ease the game for their colleagues who aren’t white or aren’t male? Or does it mean there’s a reason outside themselves that they succeeded and those other people didn’t, and they can sleep well at night without giving it another thought? Does it mean they’re probably less skilled than their colleagues, because they were less tested, or does it mean they’re probably less neurotic than they are, because they met with less irrational opposition?

In the US in the post-WWII years, many people gave a leg up to white men, particularly, from the working classes. There were opportunities that lingered on, in some way, into probably the 90s. Some of them expanded their scope and some didn’t. Some found it impossible to find the right sort of people to help anymore and diminished to invisibility. Most adult men are old enough to have benefited from that situation to some degree or other. Most men who did benefit from it seem to assume it still exists.

On one side of this issue, I observe some commenters testifying to their own personal experience of how the term ‘white privilege’ can be useful, which is absolutely 100% of all the justification it needs.

On the other side of the issue, I observe other commenter speculating about how use of the term could generate a backlash, but failing to testify that they have witnessed any such thing.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I speculate a lot. I love speculation. But I could not love speculation half so much loved I not evidence more.

Betting pennies to dollars this dynamic plays out in a a much more very quintox way in US elite school humanities.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=quintox&t=h_&ia=web

Sorry, I got nothing.

@TM
”there is nowadays quite progressive folk culture”,

which made me think – how precise the expression –
”White Privilege” truly is –
as I had ”the privilege” as a blond-blue eyed – dialect speaking German-American
to be the first member of my family – proudly telling everybody that I’m actually partly American Indian while my American grandmother – who really looked ”American Indian” – never ever had that –
”Privilege”.
And as I once told you guys to really look at: What’s ”trending” – WE lately went to two weddings -(in Germany and the UK) – where nearly everybody expressed utmost relief -that – with each time – one of the weddingpartners being NOT white – and having more and more of these type of weddings – with the ultimate outcome that there will b NO FBW’s -(Full Bloodied Whites) – anymore –
”White Privilege” will come to
a natural –

END!

if one considers this from an intersectional perspective, WP does not have to be the only “modifier” – there can be others (which may or may not be more or less significant), such as sex, gender, sexuality, class, length of time family is established in country, etc

Ime the beauty of this stuff—as the latest mutation of American class denialism—is that while in theory it can include class (as “another form of privilege”) in practice it never does.

Callum 84: Whatever your objection to this DiAngelo guy is – you haven’t done much to explain it – it does not in any way address my comment that you claim to be responding to.

I don’t know DiAngelo and his book but generally speaking, people are not forced to buy and read books. It is also generally the case that successful book authors tend to be relatively well off and it is likely that they are better off than many though not all of their readers. Is that enough to disqualify an author from writing about White Privilege? If so, I hope you understand we are facing a logical problem here. As soon as an author writing about WP finds a wide audience, perhaps because he or she is a good and thoughtful writer, that person can be discredited as “too privileged”. Or to put it differently, the people whose articles and blog posts and books about WP are widely known and discussed are almost by definition prominent authors and therefore probably in some way privileged, otherwise we wouldn’t know and discuss them. But it simply doesn’t follow that only prominent, privileged people are talking and writing about WP. (notgoodenough has already made a similar point).

I agree with pretty much everything Peter Dorman said. McIntosh’s “invisible knapsack” is more of a grab bag and I’m not comfortable with the role well-meaning white liberal academic types have played in promoting it. There’s something a little too churchy about being born with original privilege and having to confess and atone for it. Especially since the preferred form of atonement seems to be getting preachy about it.

My main problem with the “privilege” framing is the sort of motte-and-bailey relationship it has with white supremacy (or “chauvinism,’ “exceptionalism,” “imperialism,’ whatever you prefer). All of those harsher terms refer to active processes (sometimes called the “possessive investment in whiteness”) while privilege is a passive trait. People might appreciate that passive tone when they’re trying to get reluctant converts to accept their implicit biases and their own role in the “system,” but I think social theory should dig deeper than these sensitivity training platitudes.

Too much focus on privilege actually naturalizes it as something people can acknowledge but never really escape. That’s bullshit. Privilege is the byproduct if supremacy. We can fight and ultimately dismantle the system of white supremacy and that process is already well under way even if it has taken several lifetines and still has far to go. The invisible knapsack has gotten quite a bit lighter in the past thirty years (especially the “white spaces” stuff) and I don’t think that process is stopping, but there are people who are standing in the way shouting “stop!” Those guys, whatever we call them (I like “trumpenproles”) aren’t merely passive holders of privilege, they are racists and white supremacists trying to seize advantages for themselves (not “white people,” just themselves).

Most ordinary white folks just living their lives don’t actually benefit from a rise in hate speech, unjust law enforcement, and white supremacist violence and do not feel “privileged” when such acts are carried out in their name. Solidarity can just as easily be based on the premise that white supremacy is something that hurts all of us (think of all the racist Fox News junkies hating their way to coronaries), so it’s something we all should oppose. Telling the “privileged” half of the population that they owe the peace and prosperity they enjoy to the systematic subjugation of communities of color, on the other hand, seems none too different from how the racists themselves think and can be taking entirely the wrong way if presented poorly.

Ana 101, your comment fails to address my objections. But just out of curiosity, how does the fact that Scalzi “is coming from” poverty affect your evaluation of the WP debate?

MisterMr @ 95

I don’t disagree that semantics can be important! The connotations for you are not the same for me (as we have established). I responded to your question “why don’t we just say racism” by explaining that it has connotations too – you can certainly say that you don’t feel the same way, but for me it implies active rather than passive. Indeed I specifically noted that I was only offering my thoughts to help clarify matters for you:

To offer my perspective (which I don’t posit as one people should necessarily share, but merely as a potential answer to your question)

Finally, I as I noted, I personally am not too interested in discussing the semantics as I feel the best way to find out the best [insert term] is to actually try seeing what people’s responses are. If you do find a much better term, I will be happy to hear it and use that instead. Until that time, I’m not really going to spend any more time on this. You feel WP is problematic – fair enough. I feel that racism and discrimination are too active sounding – also fair enough. The solution, one might imagine, is to find out experimentally the best term to use for the specific audiences you intend to use it with, rather debating our thoughts on a blog comment thread – I look forward to your results.

MisterMr: “The map is not the territory, but there are better and worse maps.”

Fine. I just don’t think that your terminological criticism is coherent. I’m still curious why you think that your objections to WP don’t also apply to class privilege? (You haven’t directly mentioned class privilege I think but you expressed agreement with Peter Dorman, who did).

I personally would welcome a deeper discourse about class in the US but what is usually on offer around here (from the likes of engels and so on) is embarrassingly and frustratingly superficial. I explicitly asked for a non-vacuous account of class privilege (@17) and got no response. The term class is mentioned close to 100 times in this thread but no attempt at an actual analysis. It seems that class only gets invoked for two purposes: to deflect debate from racism and sexism, and to discredit academics and intellectuals (who are alleged to be privileged by definition, “because education” (cf. 65 and 77, also cf. Matt Taibbi and others)), thereby reproducing classic right-wing inti-intellectualism.

Engels @ 96

And the beauty of taking the position that class is the only form of privilege worth talking about is that, while in theory it can include gender, race, and sexuality (as “another form of privilege”), in practice it rarely does. It also allows people who don’t believe race (or sex, gender, sexuality, etc.) can also be privileges to say “well, of course racism (or sexism, or … etc.) would be bad if it existed, but since it is only class that matters there is no need for me to worry about it”. Which is perhaps a little unhelpful.

It is also unhelpful when someone says “speaking about racial discrimination (while also acknowledging it isn’t the only issue) my perspective on that specific topic is…” and your response is “ah, but there are some people who don’t acknowledge other forms of privilege, allow me to start lecturing you about how important the very things you’ve just mentioned are”. That also applies to any other conversation along the same lines [1].

One might consider that perhaps it is better to take the perspective of looking at all forms of inequality and focussing on addressing those you care about most whilst also acknowledging other forms of oppression and supporting those working to address those. But perhaps that is asking too much.

Speaking as someone who grew up lower class [2] and poor, I find that acknowledging that white privilege does exist somehow does not preclude me from realising that class privilege (and gender privilege, and sexual privilege, etc.) also exist. But it is fascinating how many people seem to think it must.

Maybe they struggle to understand me because of my lower class accent?

[1] If someone is saying, for example, “my boss is pretty sexist” and you insist on demanding they talk about class (or race or whatever) instead, you are 1) ignoring what that person is saying (given how often the first piece of advice regarding addressing privilege is “listen to people” do I need to spell out the problem?); 2) you are hijacking a conversation to discuss you personal topic (and if they have already acknowledged that your personal pet topic is important too, do I need to spell out why insisting on steering the conversation to it is unhelpful?); and 3) you are not really adding anything to the conversation other than a demand to derail it. Do I really have to give a long talk about why this behaviour is problematic?

[2] Yes I do also have my own privileges (as well as other disadvantages!), and no I am not particularly interested in describing every single facet of my being so we can total up the score card when the point is that the score card shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Please quote anywhere where I have said that wealth and class do not have a significant impact on life?

When you approvingly quoted the title ‘Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is’.

There seems to be some basic miscommunication here. You acknowledge that wealth and class have a significant impact on life. But then you quote and approve of a statement that says they do not.

Is it just you would use ‘lowest’ to mean very low rather then a thing which nothing can be below? As far as I can see see we agree on everything substantial, so I won’t further contribute to your exhaustion.

I’m still curious why you think that your objections to WP don’t also apply to class privilege?

One answer is that class privilege (e,g. between citizen and non-citizen) is sometimes still fully legally formal, and enforced by putting people in camps.

Class privilege doesn’t mean ‘assuming everyone is fundamentally middle class, what about any economic and social differences that remain’. It is about the full set of classes that actually exist, which are bounded by the decisions on that basis that the average person would feel entirely justified in making.

If someone is saying, for example, “my boss is pretty sexist” and you insist on demanding they talk about class (or race or whatever)

At the personal and immediate level, obviously you express sympathy, instead of starting discussion about policy.

But in terms of understanding what is going on, as we are trying to do here? I honestly do thing a better map of the world is to consider the word ‘sexist’ to mean ‘acting towards an employee in a way that implies or assumes they are a housewife or sex worker’ . And all the three nouns in that sentence are socioeconomic classes (or at least were in the 1950s). Each provides a sufficient answer to the question ‘how do they earn their daily bread?’.

One problem with it is, of course, the one you noticed. It’s a bit like being an early IPhone adopter and being so amazed by the shiny gadget that you can talk of little else.

Richard Melvin @ 110

With respect, I am not sure you have carefully read what I’ve written at all. As far as I can tell I have not quoted approvingly the title ‘Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is’ (are you sure you are not confusing me with Theophylact @ 75)? Again, please write the exact bit of text which convinced you of my position – quote me exactly, and then explain. Because you are repeating the accusation, but not giving me anything to work with so I can see how you’ve got to your conclusion.

My response to AFOR was “are people saying that white is the only form of privilege?”. When I mentioned the Scalzi article (which was amongst a lot of other text addressing this question), I said “Even the Scalzi article (which, to be clear, I don’t necessarily fully agree with) doesn’t say being white is the easiest setting…”. If your interpretation is that that is me quoting the title approvingly, and that just because I am not making every single statement I ever make include a discussion about class then it must be something I am arguing against, then perhaps you are being a little ungenerous in your discussions? Consider if someone were to repeatedly accuse you of not thinking sexism exists because you do not repeatedly and always mention it as a form of privilege – do you think that would be helpful or particularly fair?

“Is it just you would use ‘lowest’ to mean very low rather then a thing which nothing can be below?”

With respect, I have tried to make this very clear. I have repeatedly said my position, even in the response to you. Again:

“white privilege is where a society is set up so that if you are white you will be more likely to experience good things; less likely to experience bad things; and/or the bad things you do experience are more likely to be less bad than if you were not part of that demographic.”

Please note my language (and remember I have repeatedly caveted this by noting I am not an expert). I have never said being white is easiest, only easier (and I often point out that it is not necessarily easier in every case and that other factors are important and etc. etc.). I have been pretty careful making that obvious. If the only reason you think otherwise is that when responding to someone talking about an article I mention the article’s title (while still caveating that I do not agree fully with the article), then I would say you seem to have a very interesting idea about how to determine someone’s position.

“I’m still curious why you think that your objections to WP don’t also apply to class privilege?”

I did not say this – TM did. Please explain why you’ve included this in a response to me – because I think that if you are attributing someone else’s comments to me it makes me suspicious that you are not reading me carefully at all.

“As far as I can see see we agree on everything substantial, so I won’t further contribute to your exhaustion.”

Agreed. Thank you for your understanding. If I do comment again, please just try to remember that if I am not specifically discussing class-privilege at that very second I have not suddenly changed my mind – I may merely be focussing on something else.

I wonder why people find it so hard to read what I in fact said, rather than trying to accuse me of holding positions I not only do not hold but have repeatedly argued against.

This is the human race. This is the planet Earth. Welcome! I hope you can find a way to enjoy your stay. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.

I definitely think some commentators are using “class” differently from others. In modern language, it’s common to use it as a synonym for “socio-economic status” but its broader meaning in the social sciences is just “a group of people identified with a common trait.” Races are classes, by this definition and, in fact, can only be described in any meaningful way by creation of a synthetic class (a social construct) that self identifies with or is assigned to that class of people. Most people think the census records race, but it is just as accurate to say that it assigns people to arbitrary classes and refers to some classes (but not others) as “races.”

Splitting people into demographic races at all involves making a lot of problematic judgement calls about how to count mixed-ancestry people and communities in transition from one identity to another Are Irish white? Jews? Arabs? Persians? The census says yes to all, but does society? My girlfriend is light-skinned Latina and doesn’t know herself if she’s white or a person of color (she’s adopted) and her in-group/out-group status can switch from too Mexican to not Mexican enough depending on the town we’re in. That sort of ambiguity is just part of social life, but it’s completely maddening to someone trying to turn raw census tallies into meaningful demographic data with legitimate statistical controls (how do you know if you’re undercounting a group if you don’t know who “should” count or if everyone is counting the same way?) For these reasons and many others, race is notoriously hard to work with quantitatively (unless you’re willing to adopt all the same biased assumptions as the Census Bureau) and scientists generally prefer to work with demographic classes that can be clearly defined by a single quality (nation of origin, age, income, etc.) whenever possible.

There might be a few people here who really do think economic class is the only thing worth talking about, but I think most people are just wary of chasing their tails for years “describing” groups they’re unwittingly helping to construct and reify.

To a certain extent, races can be whatever we say they are, but the lived consequences of racism are material and can be observed clearly and cleanly through class analysis as long as we know what we’re looking for (the statistical evidence on redlining, the wealth gap, and the school-to-prison pipeline are all very clear cut, despite the “colorblind” nature of many of the laws that created them). That data adds depth and nuance to theoretical work like “The New Jim Crow” even as emerging theories about intersectional identities, racialization, and “possessive” whiteness help us identity and describe meaningful yet unrecognized social classes (like ethinally displaced adoptees) lurking in demographic data that rigid and retrograde racial categories are more likely to overlook or erase entirely.

Intersectionality and class-analysis demography are two great tastes that taste great together. We just have to get the balance right.

Callum 103, MisterMr 109: Thanks for clarifying.

Hidari 117: In the US-context, in my understanding, even when whites were discriminated against – e. g. Irish and Polish immigrants – it was still always clear that blacks were far below the lowest whites. It is also important to note that racism/White Privilege played a very specific role in integrating these formerly looked down on immigrant groups into the “American dream”. Your point is worth keeping in mind of course. Reality is always more complicated than a slogan (especially antisemitism doesn’t fit into an easy schema of “oppression hierarchies)”. But I trust you are aware of the pitfalls of whataboutery.

notGoodEnough 105: “As someone who was not privileged in terms of economics or class (let’s not get into the oppression Olympics, please), I am aware of how important they are. But I do love people condescendingly telling me that I have never thought about these and then accusing me of not wanting to address them. It is incredibly helpful and not at all presumptuous.”

Yep. That’s how I feel too.

@177
”In a discussion of white privilege it seems strange that no one wants to talk about anti-semitism, or the discrimination and racism against Eastern Europeans”

Really?

And why would some people with ”White Privilege” want to talk about something completely different? – (asks Monty Python?)

Splitting people into demographic races at all involves making a lot of problematic judgement calls about how to count mixed-ancestry people and communities in transition from one identity to another

Splitting people into economic classes has a similar requirement for making judgement calls. Classification always or nearly always involves making judgement calls, but how do you expect to get along without classification? A classification isn’t invalidated solely by the fact that some instances are hard to classify. The distinction between blue and green doesn’t become meaningless just because the exact delineation of the boundary between them is debatable.