White privilege and class. A reply to Chris Bertram by Kenan Malik

To a large extent, this is like a midget proclaiming that he is not short, he is just not tall. When one sees economically stable Black people receiving more harassment from police than economically marginal White people, it really does begin to look like one group is being favored over the other for strictly racial reasons. You might not like the word “privilege” to describe that; I’s love to hear a different but equally useful word.

nastywoman @2 “But it helps us – ”Whites” who enjoy ”White Privilege” to use these words to challenge racism.”
But does it work, or does it boomerang by turning off the substantial portion of whites who don’t accept the message and are insulted by it, and then become Trumpists? I suspect we may be planting red pills that will grow up to make maters worse.

When one sees economically stable Black people receiving more harassment from police than economically marginal White people, it really does begin to look like one group is being favored over the other for strictly racial reasons.

If and when you see that, then the correct word to describe that is not anything subtle like privilege, but racism. That would be the symptom of a significant number of cops being members of organised m0vements that held the harassment of minorities to be a positive goal to be actively worked towards. Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses, and so forth.

Other things you could see would be symptoms of different causes, which should be described differently.

Supposedly Inuits have 50 words for snow. By which measure americans should have at least 75 words for racism. It does seem at least 50% more dominant of the US environment than frozen water is of the sub-Arctic one.

Unfortunately it does not seem collectively able to have two and use them both appropriately.

What unmitigated bullshit. Please do find us the armies of white parents who teach their parents that if they’re not 100% respectful and never, ever, ever lose their temper, they’ll get killed by po-po. And then there’s the difference in the black children are treated in school vs. white children. And on and on and on.

And where is the unending stream of videos of white people being brutalized by the po-po? The few incidents we learn of, like the one of that Black cop who shot that White Australian lady, go to prove the rule: he was convicted, ffs.

Jesus. What bullshit. You should be ashamed of yourself.

An actual conversation I witnessed at a needle/syringe program where I worked, 20 years ago. At the counter, a white client who was a person who injects drugs (PWID) with very chaotic lifestyle, chatting with the staff after collecting her clean needles.

An Asian street-based sex worker walks in and asks for some condoms. The staff give her a pack, and ask her if she would like some clean needles too. They have to show her because her English is poor. She shakes her head no and leaves.

The white PWID says to the staff “I don’t know how they can do that job without drugs. Fucking sluts!”

When you’re white, there’s always a way you can find other people in the same circumstances as you, and make them less than you. And that’s almost always done by race, gender and sexuality, usually a mixture of all of them. White Privilege can be a very useful tool for understanding those cultural processes. It doesn’t have to replace class, but it is a very useful way of understanding how things work within classes.

@1 What’s wrong with good old “white supremacy?” It seems to fit your example much better than “privilege.” The distinction, such as it is, is that “supremacy” implies an active process of marginalization while “privilege” refers to the passive accrual of benefits by people who may or may be contributing to white supremacy. When people favor the “privilege”‘ frame to refer to actively racist things (like calling the cops on random black people) that are not merely passive free-riding on the coattails of previous white supremacist projects, it becomes a PC euphemism that conceals something much uglier. That’s my biggest issue with it, anyway.

“Some analyses suggest that the best predictor of police killings is not race but income level5 – the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be killed. The data here is relatively sparse, largely because it is easier to break the figures down by race and ethnicity than by class. ”
Here, as in many other places, “class” and “income” seem to be used interchangeably. Do these categories really coincide? Do we find the same political outcomes regardless of which metric we use? I think the analysis of how “race” functions in US political life is difficult enough without additional complication from (what strikes me as) unexamined sorting.

@3
”But does it work, or does it boomerang by turning off the substantial portion of whites who don’t accept the message and are insulted by it, and then become Trumpists”?
AND
@8
”I think that depends on who you use the words to. I doubt if they could be counted on to convey the right concept to a group of White proles who you were attempting to enlighten”.
AND
@10
”What’s wrong with good old “white supremacy?”

WE have found out – that ”White Privilege” works a lot better – than “white supremacy?” – for – as Anarcissie wrote: ”White proles” – as there is only a very limited
amount of words in order to challenge racism.

AND! – Again! – it has a lot to do with ”trending” and ”memes” – and as I’m – anywhoo – according to QAnonTrumpists – ” a member of a global ring of elite, cannibalistic, satanic pedophiles – who drinks the blood of children in order to stay young – I just can’t tell the ”Trumpists”:

STOP BEING SUCH A F… RACIST!

Sooo – there very polite: ”White Privilege” suits ME very well…

”Sooo – there very polite: ”White Privilege” suits ME very well…”

and the… weird thing – as I hinted before – if one looks 100 percent like ”white privilege” – but loves to bond with ”the Proles” -(as Anarcissie called them)
AND you can repair a Harley –

”The Proles” -(and even some Trumpists) understand that ”Whites” -(like ME) always were and always will be much more ”privileged” – than my -(very, very good looking ”brown” friend) –

https://youtu.be/vGg0myZ7B9g

How much of this whole exchange (comment threads included) consists of British people not quite getting what things are like in America, and Americans not quite understanding why the former group don’t get it?

‘White privilege’ seems to me a useless phrase for many reasons mentioned by Malik. If there were to be anything at all there, it is surely that it is a (very) lazy proxy for something like ‘western (?culture) privilege’, which is to say that the possible privilege that might inhere in certain individuals is that which corresponds to Western traditions, such as the built-in assumption of (Western-style) education, language, institutions, arts, family life, civic norms, respect for the law and so on.

In the Europe and Western-culture dominated New World countries (all of North & South America, Australia …) those who are directly descend from the European culture get all these things for free, and are automatically part of that culture. These people are arguably all approximately ‘white’ as well, but only in some purist genetic sense (i.e. that Europe was originally Caucasian) rather than any other interesting sense I can think of (I see no ‘a certain metaphysics’).

Those who come to Western countries from elsewhere have 3 choices: maintain their original culture (e.g. Chinese, Lebanese, Indian etc), adopt the extant culture in the adopted country, or create something entirely new (or, obviously, bits of all three).

If the historical trajectory that got your people (say, slaves from Africa) to Western countries (say, US or Brazil), your people were forcibly deracinated. But being second class citizens, there was little access to the mainstream culture; in some cases they created a bit of something new (e.g. various forms of music, synthetic religious practices visible in southern US and Brazil). If in recent times (1960s and later) your people (finally) achieved the same citizen rights as others, then those who by luck or sheer hard work managed to properly adopt the Western culture tended to make it, while those who got stuck in urban ghettos with poor education and opportunity didn’t. They might live inside a Western country but they’re effectively marooned outside of its culture.

It’s not hard to see that immigrant populations such as the millions of Japanese, Syrian and Lebanese workers who came to Brazil, Chinese and more recently Koreans, who went everywhere, etc, none of whom are ‘white’, nevertheless adopted the extant Western culture very quickly, in terms of creating businesses, families, working hard at school etc. Not only that, but the successful people in most countries in Africa and the middle east, even those that claim to despise Western culture, are all nevertheless educated in the Western model, and work within Western style administrations, institutions and do Western-style business. Hardly any of these people are ‘white’, but in those societies, they have the ‘white privilege’.

Why are they never mentioned in the ‘white privilege’ debate? Why are successful blacks in the US ignored? It’s because in reality, they have effective ‘white privilege’ (which is really ‘Western culture privilege’), but don’t fit the race-based WP narrative. Similarly, the oft-mentioned white underclass or the Appalachian hillbilly counter-example to WP fits better with a ‘Western privilege’ concept (i.e. they don’t have good education or opportunities, just like other poor people in rich countries).

Conclusion: what matters far more than innate qualities such as race for any group of people is trajectory of their history – by what means and under what conditions did they arrive at their current situation? The obsession with race (as with other innate qualities) only serves to obscure a clear reading of history.

My question would be: is there such a thing as Western privilege, i.e. now questioning the ‘privilege’ bit? I would say that there is certainly something we could call ‘Western advantage’. If you were born straight into its upper echelons of Western culture (primarily good family and education) – which can happen in any country in the world, and has little to do with skin colour – yes, I think ‘privilege’ could be argued for. That may be unfair (the whole world is unfair, as every type I diabetic will remind you) but unlike ‘white privilege’, one can work one’s way into ‘Western privilege’. Under this argument, societal redress reverts to the usual boring goals of improving education, civic values, and opportunity, for the populations that lack them, i.e. the long-term poor and other culturally deprived groups.

Rjk, these British people might be mostly discussing Britain?

Is anyone going to talk about male privilege?

Even more of a longstanding issue, I would have thought.

It’s a claim that conflates the critique of the white privilege thesis with a denial of racism. I have not at any point denied the existence of racism, nor do I know of any leftwing critic of the white privilege thesis who does so.

This is technically true, in that none of them outright say “racism doesn’t exist”. But in practice, you can follow class reductionists on Twitter and find them denying that each individual instance of racism is racism.

@23 Hidari
Is anyone going to talk about male privilege?

I would love to – but so – would I love to talk about something completely different –
like… Monty… Monty Python?

Arguments about class and race reductionism generally cut both ways. So to me it is obvious ( despite the OP’s arguments) that there is such a thing as white privilege, but I also think it is obvious that upper middle class educated whites use this term as a stick to bash poorer less educated whites. I have always known people who would never use a racist term who will use the term “ white trash” unironically.

One could be economically stable, and nevertheless fit the profile of someone who robbed a gas station nearby a half-hour ago. And not by the skin color alone: gender, age, height, weight, the style of clothing.

Not sure if this is intended sincerely or not (the eternal dilemma of internet discussions), but I’d like to reply assuming Gorgonzola is genuinely open-minded about this point…

The main issue with this line of thinking is the underlying assumption that “black male” is a significant category for identifying individuals (especially for criminal dragnet purposes), when “white male” generally is not. If someone robs a corner store in Boston and is described as “white male, medium build, teens to early 20s, wearing a t-shirt and jeans”, you don’t fond cops suddenly pulling over every MIT and Boston College frat kid to frisk them on the sidewalks or search their cars. Even if they do approach white kids on the street, it’s more likely to be with an attitude of “we both know you didn’t do it, but humor me here” and not with a hand on their pistol.

You may counter that a suspect being black, as a minority with 1/4 the population of whites (on avg in America), contains slightly more informational content than a suspect being white. But it’s still nowhere near enough information to have a meaningful percentage chance of randomly identifying the correct suspect on the street, which would require orders of magnitude greater information (say a license plate number, or very specific car make/mode). This discrepancy in treatment for blacks versus whites in the interest of a tiny tiny possibility of finding “the right guy” can only be excused if you consider the buttonholing and questioning of dozens to hundreds of black citizens trying to go about their day a tiny price to pay for a chance at identifying any given criminal.

I certainly would not want to pay that price in civil liberties because police had nothing better to go off than “White guy in his thirties, between 5’8” and 6 ft” every time such a person committed any crime in a several mile vicinity.

@Τεύκρος 17

In another thread, Tm asked me about class privilege, and I said that I didn’t like the term but didn’t elaborate. I will elaborate here why I think that ‘class privilege’ is a wrong concept.

Let’s simplify class and let’s say that class is about rich and poor.

Now rich people can, for example, pay for better schools to their kids, that will likely get a better job and higer income for their kids.
But the whole point of being rich means having more money for buying stuff, including capital goods that increase income. A rich guy who pays for a good school for his son is not different from a rich guy who buys an apartment for his son, or buys some bonds and leaves them to the son.

So ‘class privilege’ would consist in buyng varius forms of capital goods. But being rich also generally means owning capital goods. In pratice there is no difference between the concept of ‘being rich’ and the concept of ‘class privilege’.

The idea of class privilege make no sense in a capitalist society, because the whole point of it is the ownership of capital goods; it just obfuscates the way a capitalist society works by implying that capital goods are not supposed to give the owner some social advantage, but this is obviously a nonsense.

The concept of white privilege is less a nonsense because, when we look at the economic part of it, it goes against the ideal functioning of a capitalist society as this kind of identities are not supposed to give you an advantage. But this works only if you assume a zero sum economy, that is problematic. In other words I’m not convinced that whites as such get an economic advantage from racism against blacks, but this depends on my opinion about how the economy works.

“We’re gonna fight racism not with racism we’re gonna fight it with solidarity. We’re not gonna fight capitalism with Black capitalism but we’re gonna fight it with socialism”
https://mobile.twitter.com/broseph_stalin/status/1267438742396116994

@33 lblack, as a minority with 1/4 the population of whites (on avg in America)”

Your stat is incorrect; let me take the opportunity to provide the correct one. Non-whites, according to Wiki, make up just over 1/4 of the population of the US, but only half of that group are black.

Whoops, not sure what went wrong in my hyperlinks in the previous comment, but they were meant to refer to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “It Is Time for Reparations” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations”, respectively.

“Speaking in 1848, Senator John C. Calhoun saw slavery as the explicit foundation for a democratic union among whites, working and not:

With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

On the eve of secession, Jefferson Davis, the eventual president of the Confederacy, pushed the idea further, arguing that such equality between the white working class and white oligarchs could not exist at all without black slavery:

I say that the lower race of human beings that constitute the substratum of what is termed the slave population of the South, elevates every white man in our community … It is the presence of a lower caste, those lower by their mental and physical organization, controlled by the higher intellect of the white man, that gives this superiority to the white laborer. Menial services are not there performed by the white man. We have none of our brethren sunk to the degradation of being menials. That belongs to the lower race—the descendants of Ham.”

Here is a piece of a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay with, two historical quotes, that seems apposite

If a random Black guy is killed or permanently paralyzed by a cop, and racism is clearly implicated, who is at fault, the cop who did it (and the rest of the force that stood by) or all White people who are not victims of police violence?

It’s not either/or, but if your answer is predominantly #1, the issue is racism, both on the individual level (the cop/s directly involved) and the structural (lack of monitoring and accountability). If your answer is #2, white people across the board have to be divested of their privilege.

I’m obviously loading the example against privilege, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful term; it depends on the situation. If there’s competition for the job of being a cop and one of the criteria is not having an arrest record, then White applicants are privileged: simply by virtue of being White and not being subject to discriminatory arrests they have a better chance of making the cut. And yes, I think a solution to that problem does involve Whites giving up something, since dropping this criterion will lower their chances of getting accepted.

The reason the blanket use of the word “privilege” bothers me is that I think this distinction matters.

MisterMr;

I don’t think anyone can rightly say what the “whole point of Capitalism is” but we can say that rich have access to opportunities over and above mere enhanced purchasing power. Capitalism is as much about social power and privilege as anything else.

sean s.

@Robo Friend
thank you for the reply. Yes, I would like to think of myself as open-minded. I just don’t like to follow the mob.

You make good points, but I feel you’re caricaturing my argument a bit. I didn’t suggest “a several mile vicinity” or pulling over every car. I’m not an expert in police procedures, but if someone described as “white male, medium build, teens to early 20s, wearing a t-shirt and jeans” robs a corner store in Boston, then, I assume, within the next 20 minutes or so some white male, medium build, teens to early 20s, wearing a t-shirt and jeans persons will be stopped and checked. Perhaps they will be less inclined to perceive it as harassment, though, because it doesn’t fit the standard narrative.

Take this passage from the OP:

…the concept of white privilege fails to distinguish between “not being discriminated against or facing bigotry because of one’s skin colour” and “having immunity from discrimination or bigotry because one is white”. The distinction is important. Many whites, because of privileges afforded by wealth and class, do have immunity against discrimination. But many others, who are poor or working class, do not. Their experiences of state authority or of policing is [sic] often similar to that of non-whites.

This is not put as clearly as it might be, but what the passage appears to be saying is that no one is “immune” from, or less likely to be faced with, discrimination simply because they are white. The passage says that those whites who are immune from discrimination are immune “because of privileges afforded by wealth and class,” not whiteness.

The situation in the UK may be different, but in the US there is reasonably abundant evidence, some statistical but probably more that is convincingly anecdotal, that, to take one example, blacks are stopped by police while driving for minor infractions (or for no real reason) more often than whites. I heard (on the radio) Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), hardly a leftist, referring to being stopped by police more than once while driving in the vicinity of the Capitol building. How many white Senators would say the same? Probably none. Wouldn’t you think the local police by now would know and recognize the African-American sitting Senators? Anyway, putting that aside, this is one concrete case where being white, irrespective of wealth and class, does seem to confer an advantage in terms of how one is viewed and treated by police (on average; obviously this is not an indictment of every police officer). I don’t know whether “white privilege” is a good phrase for this phenomenon or not, but some phrase is probably required. (In this case it may be more a matter of implicit bias on the part of some police rather than conscious racism.)

Malik may well be correct that poor (and/or working class) whites are not especially “privileged” when it comes to the issues of police violence and mass incarceration. Class may be the more, or at least an equally, salient variable when it comes to these issues, though he does acknowledge that African-Americans are disproportionately killed by police. Where I strongly suspect “white privilege” does come into play, though, is in the more quotidian aspects of experience: being stopped while driving, being asked to explain one’s presence in a particular setting/neighborhood/etc. These may seem somewhat trivial, but there is (again, at least anecdotal) evidence that they can take a strong psychological toll.

Chetan Murthy:

And where is the unending stream of videos of white people being brutalized by the po-po? The few incidents we learn of, like the one of that Black cop who shot that White Australian lady, go to prove the rule: he was convicted, ffs.

Daniel Shaver was killed while crawling toward officers and trying to obey their confused shouted commands; the officer involved was charged with second-degree murder, but acquitted, and was reimbursed for the PTSD he suffered due to his own actions, and received a pension. Here’s the video of his violent death.

Joseph Hutcheson was killed in custody: “Witnesses said Hutcheson ran into the Dallas County jail pleading for help. Police restrained Hutcheson and at one point a deputy’s knee was allegedly placed on his neck. Police handcuffed Hutcheson and authorities said he became unresponsive shortly after. His death was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner’s office.” But, his killing was ruled justified. His brother prays for justice for George Floyd. Here’s the video of his death by suffocation.

Dylan Noble, shot while lying on the ground. Apparently no consequences for cops.

See also Troy Goode, dead after being left hogtied for ninety minutes. Apparently no consequences for cops. Sorry, no video.

Matthew Russo, tased four times and probably suffocated. Sorry, no video.

Again: in the U.S., police kill half as many white people as black, per capita. (NB: 1/2 is not zero.) The whites living in the poorest 20% of census tracts are killed by police at the same rate as black people as a whole. So, yeah, race matters a lot, and poverty matters as well. But everyone would be helped by reducing qualified immunity and increasing accountability.

(Sorry: the first video linked is of Daniel Shaver‘s violent death, the second video of Joseph Hutcheson’s death.)

It makes me despair of the CT commentariat

Quick, the smelling salts!

@45
When commenters here report that it has been useful to them, does that prompt you to review your position? If not, would more reports of the same kind prompt you to review your position?

Is it useful at all? Maybe, a bit. For example in the sense of reminding white people that black people are stopped more often by the police or are on the receiving end of casual racism in shops or wherever. But we’ve known that forever, decades before the invention of this simplistic term.

The interaction of the police with the black population in the US is better explained by a) serious problems in police recruitment and training and b) the objectively true reality of high criminality in areas in which the police operate (i.e. the assumption of weapons or violence being reasonable). This is a bad state of affairs, and the term ‘white privilege’ just fails to capture any of it.

It would be better if half the energy of arguments around WP were expended on addressing (say) the education crisis of the excluded.

While I appreciate how well-researched and written this response is, it doesn’t actually address the issue. If poor white people didn’t think there was some value to their whiteness — some privilege conferred by it, if I might suggest a term of description — they wouldn’t be racists in the first place. It is certainly true that poor white people experience state violence and economic oppression. It is also true that they live in a world constructed by and for people who look like them, and that seems (based on outcomes) to have a palliative psychological effect for even the most victimized whites; many of them end up blaming their oppression on, for example, Spanish-speaking immigrants, rather than on the predatory corporations whose civil rights they proudly value more than those of their fellow citizens. You can’t argue with that, no matter how many footnotes you painstakingly construct. Racism isn’t rational.

It may be objectively true that poor whites lack white privilege (they do not lack white privilege, lol). But they think they have it. They are willing to fight — to kill — in order to maintain it. It is one of the greatest fantasies of the economically-struggling, stupid white man that there will be a great race war, which he can finally and decisively win. Again, I hate to be a squeaky wheel about it, but it isn’t black and brown people sowing these political divisions; it’s racist white people who value their whiteness more than their survival, economic or otherwise.

I understand that this concept is difficult for non-Americans to understand & accept, but that doesn’t affect how real it is. A semi-toothless Walmart shelf-stacking white female Trump supporter has privileges Michelle Obama can only dream of. She votes for Trump (and whatever racist deluge manifests post-Trump) in an effort to keep it that way. She will let her remaining teeth rot out of her head and stack shelves until she dies rather than vote for a Democrat, because Democrats pander to n-words. Fact. I know that many class-reductionist (new vocabulary word!) leftists want to look away from this phenomenon, but that won’t make it vote for Bernie (or even Biden).

Another weird thing I noticed about this essay is the way it treats racism as a concept. Like, who is doing the racism, for example? We all know it exists, but from whence does it emerge? Malik makes it seem as if racism is an unfortunate by-product of non-human environmental factors. I wonder why that is? Has racism become an entirely structural problem, now? Have I been hallucinating all these pro-Confederate monument rallies, and Blue Lives Matter protestors, and armed white supremacists running random innocent people over with cars? Do I need to go to the doctor?

@10: Charter schools and a “literacy”-based theory of economic mobility. Is this 1997?

@13: “Here, as in many other places, “class” and “income” seem to be used interchangeably. Do these categories really coincide?” This is probably the biggest takeaway I got from the 2016 election. There were enough uneducated, racist white people making decent livings in the suburbs to support Trump. That’s his “base,” insofar as he has one outside of “racists.” These are people who operate in the middle-class practically, but see themselves as outraged, struggling working-class schmoes who can’t get no respect (from black people, apparently). It’s bizarre.

@16: “He is likely to be approached by a cop, which is perfectly legitimate: the cop is simply doing his job. The cop will be nervous, apprehensive, because people robbing gas stations are likely to be armed, and they don’t want to be arrested. What follows is likely to be perceived as harassment.

Yes: a different skin color would prevent the incident, but so would the different gender, or a significant difference in ages.” This doesn’t happen, though. Cops love the KKK. Cops are the KKK. They only do this to black and brown people. Google “Kyle Rittenhouse” & tell me cops are rational actors subjecting random citizens to mistaken acts of overzealous community protection.

@21: “Why are successful blacks in the US ignored? It’s because in reality, they have effective ‘white privilege’ (which is really ‘Western culture privilege’), but don’t fit the race-based WP narrative.” They aren’t ignored. They don’t have white privilege. Breonna Taylor was an EMT. Sandra Bland was a middle-management food-vendor administrator. No black American is safe. Also, “race” is not an essential characteristic. Despite all my beautiful African DNA, no white person knows I’m black until I tell them. Race is a construct, and an arbitrary one at that.

@26: Just because racist cops who openly support white supremacists occasionally also kill white people for little/no reason, that doesn’t mitigate their racism. It just means that cop subculture is even more trigger-happy than its white defenders know. & if BLM is “based on lies,” what is the entirely-white “Blue Lives Matter” movement based on, lol? Hiding the data in as much statistical noise as possible doesn’t make the data disappear. Cops murder people for no reason. Some of those murders are targeted. Some are “accidents.” This thread may not be the exculpatory evidence you and Twitter OP were looking for.

I was really happy to see the content and tone of most of these replies. It was a big surprise, tbh. I’m just one person, & I represent nothing but myself. But I still want to say “thank you.” It’s a conversation worth having, no matter what.

Problems with the term white privilege:
1) It distracts from the actual problem (cops) and the solution (reform/defunding of police forces).
2) It pushes guilt onto people for something they shouldn’t really feel guilty about. Nobody should be hassled by the police in this way. It’s not a privilege – it’s a goddam human right.
3) It ignores that poor whites also experience an extraordinary amount of police brutality.

There is no solution to the problem of ‘white privilege’ except white guilt. There are solutions to the problem of policing. And when you make it about policing you can build broad coalitions. When you make it about ‘white privilege’ you can build resentment, particularly in communities who also are oppressed by the cops.

@sean samis 38 & Faustusnotes 43
I think the opportunities above direct purchasing power exist, but are a really small part of the total.

More generally about the use of the term “privilege” (white or otherwise), it seems to me it presupposes some form of meritocratic equality of opportunity, so that deviations from this equality of opportunity are “privilege” (if positive).

But this supposed meritocratic equality of opportunity doesn’t really exist, so the term “privilege” muddles the waters my implying it does exist.

It might make sense to use the term “privilege” for specific infractions to this supposed meritocratic system, but then one should first specify what exactly this meritocratic system is.
For example: someone white gets a degree in engeneering and then gets a job as an engeneer. Is this privilege? What if someone else (black, or perhaps white but from a poor family) also gets a degree in engeneering but can’t land an equivalent job, does this make the first guy’s job retroactively a privilege?
What if the first guy’s parents also had a degree so they could give to their son some good piece of advice on how to find a job, can we call this privilege? Well maybe we can, but it becomes a somewhat useless term IMO: in what sense doesn’t the first guy merit his job?

It’s the implicit reference to this supposed meritocraticy as if it existed or at least as if there was a clear idea of how this meritocratic system should work (so that we can identify deviations from it) that irks me.

This is a bit weird because on the one hand, the ideology of capitalism is meritocratic, but on the other hand, it is also obvious that a capitalist society cannot work with equality of opportunity (it implies the non existence of privately owned capital assets), and furthermore many of the big decisions that one face in his or her life, like choosing what school to follow or whare to live, are about securing this or that competitive advantage, that if we use a large definition of capital goods (which includes for example education) simply means securing some capital goods.

So in my view in essence it is a contradictory concept, let’s call it a contradiction of capitalism, ha ha.

@61: W.E.B. duBois developed the notion of the “psychic wage,” the impalpable but very real advantage that white people get simply by virtue of not being Black people. I think access to it is a major driver behind the process of “whitening” that we know has happened with successive groups of ethnic immigrants–Irish, Italians et al. Will it turn out that whiteness-as-social-category–Isabel Wilkerson is applying the model of caste–really does have a physical component, i.e. skin tone? I don’t know. But thank you for your “plainly and without euphemizing” question, which as far as I can tell no one here has actually tried to answer.

MisterMr;

‘Privilege’ means a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group; so in this instance the term ‘privilege’ muddles nothing, it is quite apt.

Nor does the term ‘privilege’ presuppose any kind of meritocracy. It implies some advantage or immunity, not merit.

White privilege does not really refer to what Whites receive as much as to what Whites are spared from. The White engineering student you hypothesis about getting an engineering degree and an engineering job almost certainly did all that without having to overcome racial prejudices. Black student engineers are not usually so lucky, even if their parents had college degrees and they were gifted intellectually.

Capitalism pretends to be meritocratic, but that is mere pretense. The only “merits” capitalism rewards are wealth, social connections, or dumb luck. White privilege exists in America because most of the rich are White, and they use race to divide and control those the do not want competing with them.

sean s.

I know that John Halasz pointed this out (I can’t be bothered looking to see whether it was on this thread or another) but it’s extremely weird the assumption shared by almost everyone on this thread (apparently!) that African Americans are the people most likely to be murdered by the police.

Of course (of course) it’s Native Americans.

‘Mike Males, senior researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, looked at data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collected from medical examiners in 47 states between 1999 and 2011. When compared to their percentage of the U.S. population, Natives were more likely to be killed by police than any other group, including African American’.

And this is what of course one would expect. The United States, at least with its current borders is, so to speak, predicated on genocide and ethnical cleansing, crimes against humanity that no American President has ever made the slightest effort to apologise for (let alone offer some form of meaningful recompense, e.g. financial). So….yeah. https://search.proquest.com/docview/1823388680

CF also here.

https://www.lakotalaw.org/resources/native-lives-matter

It also seems strange to me that everyone seems to think (or at least acts as if it is reasonable) that the police are wandering round with guns all the time. If the police are murdering lots of people, white and black, with guns, it would seem to be obvious that perhaps if we took away their guns, they would stop murdering people with guns (of course they might murder people with other things too. Who know? Let’s find out!!).

Reforming the United States’ insane gun laws does not seem to me to be obviously more Utopian than ‘defund the police’.

Disclosure: I’m neither American nor British (I’m Italian).

@ Emma 61
” It is also true that they live in a world constructed by and for people who look like them, and that seems (based on outcomes) to have a palliative psychological effect for even the most victimized whites; many of them end up blaming their oppression on, for example, Spanish-speaking immigrants, rather than on the predatory corporations whose civil rights they proudly value more than those of their fellow citizens. You can’t argue with that, no matter how many footnotes you painstakingly construct. Racism isn’t rational.”

I 100% agree with this, but then this for me is a reason for not using the term “white privilege”, whereas you seem to think that this is a good reason to use the term.
Wouldn’t it better to say: “hey bro, this system is fucking you too”?

Some analyses suggest that the best predictor of police killings is not race but income level

If race has no power to predict discrimination independently of class, then white privilege doesn’t exist. The problem is, pretty much nobody with any sense believes this.

Anyway, that all seems irrelevant because it’s based on a plain misreading of the research cited.

The quote refers to footnote 5. The article cited in that footnote makes no effort whatsoever to compare the predictive nature of race vs. the predictive nature of income. It is only talking about income. The relevant bit from the article:

For the 441 police killings I researched, the average neighborhood family income where a killing occurred was $57,764. The median family income was $52,907.

This is imprecise writing. Do the $57,764 figure and the $52,907 refer to different types of averages of income with the same set of neighborhoods? I guess it must, but I can’t see why you need two averages. If it isn’t two different types of averages, then it would appear to be that police killings tended to be in neighborhoods somewhat richer than the median. Anyway, the census says that the median household income overall in the US was $56,516 — so still not hugely above the $52,907 median of these neighborhoods.

The author does cite a fairly dramatic decrease in such killings in neighborhoods where median income is in the top 20%, but makes not effort to discuss the race of those neighborhoods. So again, this statement is completely unsupported by the footnoted article:

Some analyses suggest that the best predictor of police killings is not race but income level

Sean Samis @70:

I don’t think the problem of police violence is that complex. All developed nations that I can think of have police forces vastly more competent and less violent than the US police. Politically difficult – sure. But less difficult than making all white people non-racist which seems to be the only seriously suggested alternative.

I don’t think that ‘privilege’ is the right word to use for the fact that as a white middle class person I’m at far lower risk of police violence than a black person. The word suggests I’m getting more than I deserve.

Secondly it changes the focus of the problem from the police to me. I’m not the problem here. Sure I’m a dick, but I’m not the one causing police violence against minorities and I’m not the one requesting it. The problem are the cops – maybe keep the focus on them.

And all of the other things that people apply the term ‘white privilege’ to are very different phenomenon and it flatterns far more than it illuminates. As a sociological category it doesn’t work, as a campaigning strategy it transforms action into passivity.

That poor Whites experience some of the injustices of non-Whites overlooks the salient point: even the richest Black American experiences those injustices occasionally, most Black Americans experience them regularly.

I mean everyone in the US can potentially experience those injustices. But again, I’m not sure why we need to minimise the very real injustices that poor whites experience, or suggest (wrongly) that wealthy blacks are more likely to experience them. Poverty is a significant factor, along with race, that determines how your interactions with the cops will go. That seems like a relevant thing that we might want to focus on if we want to change things.

To escape those injustices, a White person needs merely appear “middle class”. To escape those injustices, a Black person needs to hide at home.

Right, because for poor whites nothing could be easier than appearing middle class. Just move to a wealthier neighborhood, get a nice car, fix your teeth, wear more expensive clothes. What could be simpler…

White privilege lets the cops of the hook for their crimes. Which as we’ve seen in Portland can apply to white middle class people if the cops decide that they’re not ‘good people’.

@68Trader Joe:
”As a reasonably wealthy white male I think I can reliably report on White Privilege and I’m quite certain I have it and I’m quite certain it’s a thing. It goes far beyond an “absence of racism” its being able to go about your business (whatever that might be) without a second thought.

I walk into a country club, a Porsche dealership a nice restaurant and whether my shirt collar is frayed or my jeans have holes in them there is a presumption that I belong and I’ll not be asked to explain myself. Indeed, many of the ilk would tacitly take offense if they were”.

Hey – Joe – brother!

And do you mind if I call you ”brother”? – as you added so much more to my ZürichOprahStory –
(even if I still believe that it is Emma – who got ”the point” FIRST)

But do you think – these… these… these?… ”WhiteMen” –
here –
will finally… understand?

And:
GEH IN DICH?

Emma @61: A semi-toothless Walmart shelf-stacking white female Trump supporter has privileges Michelle Obama can only dream of.

Assuming this is not the quiet punchline embedded within an extremely subtle joke, I suppose we can say that our shelf-stacker’s privileges include—and must include—only and precisely what, as sean samis @69 puts it, she and other “Whites are spared from.” That Michelle Obama can only be spared other sorts of indignities (or dignities, as the case may be) than those imagined for her by her (mostly) white “allies” perhaps grants the former First Lady certain privileges of her own.

Plainly, Michelle O was a bad example, but the choice betrays an assumption on the part of those in favor of the “white privilege” thesis/discourse/cudgel: namely, that the psychic wound, even more than the obviously remediable statistical material disadvantage, of being “black” in America, is so profound, and so irredeemable, that it can only, maybe, begin to be healed by inflicting (mostly self-inflicting) a symmetrical, but necessarily incommensurate, psychic wound upon “white” people. Echoing reason @72, “I don’t think this is a useful approach.” Unless, of course, the goal is something other than the oft-claimed one of arriving at justice, which I suspect it may well be.

In the meantime, no one is spared. Not whites, not blacks, not even right-minded ideologues. The idea of “white privilege” neither clarifies the problem of race and racial “disparities,” in America or anywhere else, nor does it motivate anyone to solve it, and IMO most of the work it does in academic discourse is to turn attention away from reality and onto individual neurosis, whether consciously or not. Within the academy, and by osmosis in much of professional journalism, the accusation—and again it is primarily a self-accusation—acts as a kind of dowsing rod to sniff out sin, and at the same time or even before the fact imposes a mild but sustained penance upon its faithful, middle- and upper-middle class white academics, who perform various prayers and exercises to reinforce to themselves and to their colleagues how, yes, sad and unacceptable the histories of oppression, but really, really, the purpose—and I believe it is much more a metaphysical purpose than a social-material one—is to atone for being haves in a world of have-nots and, above all, for preferring this state of affairs to any alternative they are capable of imagining. They believe, truly, their own personal miseries notwithstanding (first-world problems!), that what they have and who they are must be the envy of the whole rest of the sleepwalking world. Outside the academy, its effect, which many admittedly seem to relish, is to confuse and confound, to provoke resentment, to signal virtue and/or vice and/or tribal allegiance, to hijack the good intentions of well-meaning people and distract them from the spiritual-material-technological crisis they might otherwise have a chance of responding to, and, for good measure, to undermine any hope for solidarity among people who, for all their good will and educational achievement and, indeed, merit, just can’t manage to look or talk or think or act enough like one another.

The utility of “white privilege” depends on what it is being used for.

To describe a condition in which poor white people have some baseline, poor black people get screwed more than that, poor Hispanic people get screwed in between, rich white people/rich Hispanic people do MUCH better, rich black people do somewhat better than baseline it isn’t awful–though ‘baseline’ isn’t usually ‘privilege’ but whatever. And it is highly contextual. In the case of “trying to successfully pressure your employer into doing something for you” a rich, Asian, trans, woman in San Francisco is far better off than a poor, white, cis, man in Detroit. Even though every privilege checklist other than class goes his way.

But if your goal is to change that state of the nation, “white privilege” seems unhelpful because the diagnosis doesn’t tie in well with the policy fix. Whatever the policy fix for the policing problem, it definitely isn’t “people who are treated better by the police should change their interactions with the police somehow”. The solution is much more in the direction of “we need to change the police” or “we need to change the incentives of the police” or “we need to massively overhaul the system of policing”.

And if your goal is to have a broad coalition, it is fine to notice that the police treat black people SUPER poorly. But there aren’t that many black people compared to noticing that the police treat non-rich people PRETTY DARN badly. Non-rich people are an enormous majority, that also includes almost all black people. “White privilege” talk (to the exclusion of class talk, which is how it appears to function right now) works against harnessing that enormous super-majority. Which is exactly what rich people want of course.

As a reasonably wealthy white male I think I can reliably report on White Privilege and I’m quite certain I have it and I’m quite certain it’s a thing.

Funny how indestructible this assumption is. As a reasonably wealthy white man you’re the last person qualified to opine about any of this.

@85 Angel
”As a reasonably wealthy white man you’re the last person qualified to opine about any of this”.

BUT I –
ME! –
as a reasonable wealthy American Indian –
I am THE FIRST person qualified to opine about everything – of this.
And as agree –
100 percent –
with the ”reasonably wealthy white male –
who thinks he can reliably report on White Privilege
and he is quite certain –
that he has it –
and he is quite certain it’s a thing.
AND
YOU –
WhiteMan!

GEH IN DICH!

So are we now debating whether poor white people vote rightwing because of racism or because Democrats haven’t done anything to materially help them?

Sh*t I just wrote a long, elaborately researched continuation of my former post and Windows froze when I submitted it… I hope it still was sent but if not, here’s a summary.

White voters poor and rich have been trending rightward but the claim that this is due to the Democrats not doing enough for the poor is unsubstantiated. I quote the particular example of Arkansas, where access to health care has increased dramatically due to Obamacare and still, white Arkansans voted Trump in record numbers (see also my comment 22 above). I further point to Medicaid expansion ballot measures in several right-leaning states as evidence that while progressive policies can be winning issues, the margins are smaller than you’d expect (e. g. Missoure 53%, Oklahoma 50.5%, Montana 47% (failed)). After all, these measures cost the states little and bring great benefit and still roughly half the voters were opposed. Progressives must not underestimate the fact that many Americans, not least evangelicals, actively oppose progressive economic policies. I doubt that Biden misjudges the politics when he hesitates to run on “free dental care for all”. It probably isn’t a winning issue, just another opportunity for the Right to rant against “socialism”. Progressives run the risk of taking their own views for granted. Who could disagree with redistribution and helping the poor? Sorry folks, most Americans do (*). Progressives need to work hard to change that state of affairs.

(*) I once read in the local Arkansas newspaper that government policies to help the poor are “against the Bible”. Boy was that a revelation!

Cian;

Regarding, ‘privilege’ “suggests I’m getting more than I deserve.”

That is a superficial understanding of the word, which is defined to include immunities from something. Privilege includes the idea of escaping something others do not.

Regarding, “it changes the focus of the problem from the police to me. I’m not the problem here.”

That’s how you hear it (that you’re the problem); that’s not what I or others mean when we refer to privilege. Limiting it to police violence overlooks a vast array of advantages that constitute White privilege.

Regarding, “ everyone in the US can potentially experience those injustices.”

That statement is only POTENTIALLY true. For Black Americans (even the richest Blacks) it’s ROUTINELY true. That is no small distinction.

Regarding, “White privilege lets the cops of the hook for their crimes. ”

Quite the opposite: restricting White privilege to Police Violence lets all other whites off the hook; it lets you off the hook.

It doesn’t work that way. All of us—all Whites—we are on the hook to respond to Police Violence and to acknowledge the systemic racism of our culture and our White privileges.

sean s.

A semi-toothless Walmart shelf-stacking white female Trump supporter has privileges Michelle Obama can only dream of.

I can’t really get my head around anyone writing this, let alone in a left-liberal forum. It makes me think Americans really do live in a dream.

This seems relevant —

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/opinion/education-prejudice.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

faustus –
“If you grow up poor in the UK you will be raised on Tom Sharpe and musicals”

What? Paging Stormzy..

“they won’t do this to a middle class man who became rich through football”

Frank Lampard? Peter Crouch? Are there any others?

“Rugby, a rich man’s world, has at least one out player”
ex-player.

Golf?Squash? Eton Fives? Any? Posh enough?

We have now heard many times that White Privilege is “simplistic” and whatnot. Well duh, what isn’t? You can turn every complex concept, certainly concepts like “class” or “racism”, into something simplistic if you insist on simplifying it. But when you simplify, at least you shouldn’t make up something from whole cloth. I cannot follow why talking about WP can be construed as an accusation of whites let alone an appeal to their “guilt” or “neurosis” when it is obvious and has now been pointed out many times that privilege does not involve any individual wrongdoing and therefore one cannot be “guilty” of being privileged (whereas one can certainly be guilty of racism).

I think we have reached the stage of “let’s just put out whatever” of the debate.

Thomas;

Regarding, “…along with the very fact of the tortured nature of this and the other 100,000 such debates on the term ‘white privilege’ just go to prove that such a simplistic term that a) maps very poorly to complex social reality and b) is really intended not as a good faith analytic term but a purely political one … doesn’t serve any serious or deep purpose.”

The tortured nature of this debate (if it is so) go to prove that people will dispute anything—even the most legitimate things—in order to avoid uncomfortable ideas. The tortured nature of this debate shows that the idea of “White privilege” is frightening to those who cannot accept that some of their personal experiences do not match what others experience daily.

LFC;

Regarding, “… the phrase ‘white privilege’ is not likely to help build or cement political coalitions to support necessary reforms.”

The term is not intended to do that; it’s rare for any term to be so powerful. “White privilege” is intended to identify a fact: that there are advantages and immunities that nearly all White Americans enjoy which Black Americans and other Persons of Color simply do not have access to. If stating that fact gets in the way of political coalition or support, then the problem of race is truly intractable. I hope it is not so.

TM is correct. One can demand more of a term than is reasonable; and then reject it for failing to meet unreasonable requirements. This is a classic strategy for protecting thin skin.

sean s.

Faustus 80: „most of the socialist larpers on here grew up rich“

Another useless and probably unjustified generalization that adds nothing of value to the debate…

engels, “white privilege” was originally developed by WEB Dubois and activists in the 1960s civil rights movement. It became famous after a white woman linked it to feminism. The fact that you think it was invented by “privileged know-nothings at Harvard” is a classic example of white privilege in action – a white woman getting the credit for the unmarked labour of black people. It’s also a sign of your complete ignorance on the topic, but that’s never stopped you before.

Dave Heasman, Peter Crouch has a regular advice column in the Daily Mail, and Frank Lampard has an OBE. Meanwhile Gazza is the constant whipping boy of the Mail’s gossip pages, even during lockdown.

It’s no surprise to me that the socialist larpers are willing to throw the concept of class privilege out in order to make sure their own race-based privileges aren’t acknowledged. This kind of “loyalty” to the cause is exactly the reason so many working class people gave up on socialism.

@engels

Class and racism have been elaborated by brilliant sociologists, socialists, black radicals, … over centuries whereas “white privilege” (as widely understood today) was invented by a handful of privileged know-nothings at Harvard and similar intellectual centres of the world’s most privileged and idiotic country, from whence it was rolled out to the rest of the internet and bien pensant academic and managerial mediocracy.

As my comments above indicate, I am ambivalent, at best, about the usefulness etc. of the phrase “white privilege.”

But I googled for the nonce “origins of the phrase ‘white privilege'” and one of the first hits was an article from The Scotsman, which states in its opening paragraphs that Kehinde Andrews, a professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, “believes the term was coined” by W.E.B. DuBois in the 1930s. If DuBois did coin it (and it should be possible, w more time than I currently have, to determine that, but he apparently did use it), then the term was certainly not coined by a “know-nothing,” since DuBois was one of the most knowledgeable and eminent intellectuals of the 20th century. The Scotsman article then goes on to mention a 1988 essay by activist and writer Peggy McIntosh.

In any case it would be interesting to know whether engels has specific names in mind w his reference to “privileged know-nothings at Harvard and similar intellectual centres,” or whether he simply assumes that because he views the phrase as idiotic it must have originated in a contemporary Ivy League school or other “elite” university.

Corax 106: “But as a reality, WP means that people whose phenotypic traits identify them as “white” but who may or may not identify as such themselves, or who have yet to get the memo about how they are supposed to think about things or other people, or who don’t quite grasp the meanings or implications you intend for them to grasp, are made to feel incriminated”

This is quite a bit convoluted. Why would a hypothetical person who doesn’t identify as white would feel incriminated? And how likely do you imagine it to be that a “phenotypically white” American does not identify as White? (To be sure, racial categories are social constructs but I don’t think that is your point or is it?)

And most importantly, what is your evidence for your claims? Isn’t it all in your fantasy? Perhaps it is you who feels incriminated? It is clear from this very thread that many white people consider WP as a useful concept and don’t feel “incriminated” or such by it. There may be others who react differently, sure, but you are making unwarranted. The very concept of “privilege” points to a structural inequality and specifically does not imply an individual fault. I cannot exclude that some people will misinterpret the term but why is that the fault of those who use the term correctly, rather than those who insist on misinterpreting it?

I think when white people respond defensively when WP is mentioned (supposing they are not actually racist), they either have never thought about racial issues (which is hard to imagine, certainly in the US), or they have managed to convince themselves that racism has nothing to do with them personally. They don’t want to hear about it, not be reminded of it. It doesn’t matter whether you use WP or some other terminology, they would react in the same way. And I don’t think it’s a good idea to not talk about an important aspect of reality just because some people don’t like to hear about it.

AND in order to relate White Privilege to the ”unmarked idea” AND to prove –
(not only for our ”Angle”) that it is ”race” before ”class’# which get’s noticed FIRST in the current world – I brought up – my ”HOMELESS T-SHIRT” now a few times.

BUT did anybody here notice IT –
Or listen?

Okay – you guys obviously liked the OprahHandbagStory – but even then –
one of you guys tried to deny – that it was ”a demonstration of how no amount of money will buy you white privilege – and tried to weasel out of it by writing: ”it shows how non-central such concerns can sound to someone who lacks the money required to exercise any such privileges they might have, if they did”.

Okay – so it ALL about the money – guys?
THEN why do nearly ALL doormen of Luxury Hotels in the World complain that they can’t identify ”the (moneyed) class of their guests anymore – as even Billionaires might like to wear a ”Homeless-Shirt” – from time to time.

And so the shirt ”marks” them to be ”unmarked” – as Billie Eilish once said – if I just wear a BLACK (Beanie) NOBODY – (thanks god) notices me at THE hotel – airport or ”THE Store” –

BUT – EVERBODY NOTICEs that BLACK Man in the Homeless-T-Shirt.

Right?
Guys?
(Angel?)

@106 “…and this, as far as I can tell, with very little nuance in the general discourse (and not much more in academia), all to very little real and certainly to no clearly articulated, or positive, end.”

I don’t know if it’s a positive (though definitely real) end, but it seems obvious to me that the whole purpose of this absurd sloganeering is to increase voter turnout for the political party favored by the hedge-fund industry.

One of the groups who have politically supported over policing and incarcertation in black neighborhoods are black people. Middle class black people have historically always kinds of despised ‘ghetto’ blacks (and judging by the Howard U educated that I encounter, this hasn’t changed), while many older people who lived in these neighborhoods were terrified by the young hoodlums and the drug/crime epidemic they saw rising among them. Among black people who vote, support for law and order has always been very high.

How does white privilege fit into this? How does it help, or does it disguise and flatten a much more complex phenomenon, while ignoring a very difficult political problem (social conservatism among many black voters). How do we think about the wealthy black real estate developer who benefits from over zealous policing in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood? Or the black mayor who presides over a racist police force with many black officers (and often black police chiefs)?

Is it white privilege when white people generally inherit more money than white people? That would seem to be a very peculiar war to think of it.

Is it white privilege when banks financially exploit black borrowers, given very few white people gain any benefit from this (other than I guess the negative privilege of not being fleeced)? Again, it just feels very odd and not useful. The issue here is a predatory banking system that affects most of us to some degree.

Sean Samis: That statement is only POTENTIALLY true. For Black Americans (even the richest Blacks) it’s ROUTINELY true [that they are mistreated by the police].

It’s not routine. It happens too much, but it’s also an occasional inconvenience. It’s a vicious fact of life for poor black people because they live in neighborhoods in which the police are told to spend most of their time. And one of the reasons why the police see black people as criminals is because most of their time is spent around black people who they are arresting/harrassing. The stereotyping in part comes from the job (which is why black cops are rarely very different from white cops in this regard).

And the reasons for this are various, but a lot of them relate to the interests of the real estate industry and gentrification (and also as I pointed out above pressure from black groups who live in these neighborhoods.

Regarding, “White privilege lets the cops of the hook for their crimes. ”
Quite the opposite: restricting White privilege to Police Violence lets all other whites off the hook; it lets you off the hook.

Let’s me off the hook for what?

It doesn’t work that way. All of us—all Whites—we are on the hook to respond to Police Violence and to acknowledge the systemic racism of our culture and our White privileges.

I mean I’d like to think it’s everyone’s responsibility regardless of race, or creed. Maybe the white kid who got killed up the road for being the subject of a failed police sting could be included.

And who gives a damn if I acknowledge that the US is racist. That changes nothing. That’s just liberal piety.

Faustus: for the working class our experience is either preposterous or inappropriate or, if amongst socialist larpers, is intrepreted as scorn and derided as patronizing and condescending. We see the former with engels laughing at my Tom Sharpe reference, as if he/she is the ultimate arbiter of what a working class upbringing contains

I suspect he was laughing at the idea that the middle classes look down on Tom Sharpe, or musicals. The former is very popular with bourgeoise men of a certain age, while I’d guess more middle class people go to musicals than the opera. Maybe it’s different among the upper classes, I wouldn’t know.

and the latter in the outraged reaction to the gap-toothed kmart worker.

The outrage was that this person was somehow being presented as representative, and I see no evidence that Emma is working class, or was talking from experience. It was a stereotype, and a rather ugly one at that. There’s a word for this when people do it with racial stereotypes.

I could come on here and talk about a “tattooed former borstall boy who beats his mail-order Czech bride while he complains about the EU” and the likes of engels and Cian would complain I was stereotyping working class people

Well I would if you help him up as representative of all working class people and I’d be right to. I could also talk about a local black guy who voted Trump. He’s a real guy, but he’s hardly typical, but by your argument I guess he’s as good as anyone else.

Amongst the class-only activists this is unacceptable: working class people can only be pure and innocent victims, and we are only allowed to talk about economic anxiety.

I mean that’s certainly one way of putting it. The way I would put it is that I would prefer if people actually looked at working class people as a class, instead of focusing on individual examples that support their prejudices. Or making ludicrous generalizations based upon newspaper articles written by middle class journalists with a fetish for racist authenticity. Are there white working class racists? Of course? Are all white working class people racist? Well no. Is racism the only thing white racists care about – I mean it kind of depends upon the individual. Can people ignore their racism when there are other things they want more such as better jobs/housing? History tells us that some of them can, and some of them just do double shifts at the racism factory.

I guess my tolerance for complexity and nuance is why I’m always on here defending Trump and (checks notes) Putin apparently.

Guess about half my annoyance with this kind of topics comes from the predictable copy paste way without any adaption for a very different context. But black Americans more often than not speak the same motherlanguage as anybody else involved to point out the most obvious difference. Only half however.

Which brings me back to my rather cryptic example about tutoring a foreign student with lets say distinctive non caucausian skin features in Germany in response to another example suggesting one should take into account the crudest form of racism – the skin colour based one* when giving career advice in the US.

The Zeit really ran an opinion peace in the college category where an immigrant from some arabic nation was argueing that Germans can´t speak arabic and were getting all those jobs arabic immigrants should get. They were doing so by lying on their CVS which could not be revealed because everyone doing the hireing spoke no Arabic. We then learn that some female personal deparment head agreed at least half. It were only the men of course that were inflating lingual skills. Next there was a complaint about how people getting arabic degrees would not be able to speak arabic either, which was supposed to be fixed by a new standardiced test. And on it went. The sad part is the clearly rather young and confused guy would have had one or two good points that could have been made corrected in a more nuanced piece. Those were lost among acculaturation strugles and the cultural missunderstandings that come with it. A good editor would have made that possible. Too bad confused trolling is cheaper and gets more clicks.
https://www.zeit.de/campus/2020-07/sprachkenntnisse-arabisch-bewerbung-job-muttersprachler

Another peace https://taz.de/Gaslighting-und-Rassismus/!5693141/ somewhere arguees that if someone sees the the crudest racism or sexim he is right even if everyone disagrees with him. Theres a scientific paper linked about the us and canadian situation with all the right culture warrior vocabulary, that proofs it! The piece then goes on to explain gaslighting, quite literarily including the word in its original language to the audience, enlightening us about the newest trends in adopting things that were not even helpfull in their original cultural context.

Thing is: You can have conversations with white Germans and they will quite often aknowledge that some result like not getting a job is based on illegtimate discrimination, even using that R word to describe it. Complaints about the racism in getting harsh words from strangers that have to do a sharp break for driving on the wrong side of the bicylce lane or non specific complaints about the taxi driveres lack of niceness while one was vomiting drunk on his seat are a different story. Those two are not hypotheticals. In particular during struggles with cultural adaption to the new environment, it is very common for immigrants to see racism in many places where that just is not true at all. Or maybe it really is racism, just a more subtile one than the skin colour kind and they have been primed by stupid stereotypical literature possibly in English that its all about skin colour.

*Also predictable: Someone will tell for example the poor Italian upmarket store salesperson trashed by Operah that there is only the skin colour based one

Corax;

Regarding “But as a reality, WP means that people whose phenotypic traits identify them as “white” but who may or may not identify as such themselves, or who have yet to get the memo about how they are supposed to think about things or other people, or who don’t quite grasp the meanings or implications you intend for them to grasp, are made to feel incriminated, as an accessory at least, for a series of historical and ongoing injustices in which the vast majority of them have played no personal part but for which they will now be asked to pay—socially and psychologically, at a minimum, hence “neurosis,” but perhaps in other, as yet undefined, ways as well—which feeling, I submit, is unlikely to motivate any typical actor of whatever color toward “doing the right thing,” and which is much more likely to produce a) confusion, guilt, animosity, etc., and/or b) resentment (racial, political, and/or private). It is not an “unreasonable requirement” of the tools at one’s disposal, pace sean samis @101, that they serve a well-defined and deliberate purpose.”

At first I thought there was a lot to unpack in this, but as I started that unpacking I realized there’s very little here.

To summarize your argument above: there are some Whites who were unaware of “White privilege” in the past and who are unable or unwilling to try to understand what the rest of us are saying about it, so instead of listening to our comments, they get hurt feelings. And therefore, the term “White privilege” serves no well-defined or deliberate purpose.

Umm: with all due respect, Corax, that is [CENSORED] nonsense.

sean s.

I’m not sure why the People’s project is Malik Kenan’s reference for arguing that race has naught to do with mass incarceration, but the people’s project stats showing that poor black people have a materially greater chance of being shot and killed by the cops than poor white people is, uh, overlooked. That”s a high school debaters move. I”m not sure how the people’s policy project reconciles its own figures, which would seem to indicate more extreme policing in poor black neighborhoods, but certainly Kenan should not pick and choose his references. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/06/23/class-and-racial-inequalities-in-police-killings/

@engels

That’s probably a fair point (i.e. the difference between what DuBois meant and what McIntosh meant). Lacking time to go into all this further, I won’t say anything more.

@
”You be the judge”.

He writes:
”Trump has made us all crazy”

Not all of US just him.

Hix 119: I read your Zeit article and I don’t think it is confused at all (tbh it is your comments that I find confusing; must be my fault). To the contrary it is very clear and the tone seems entirely appropriate. I cannot judge the factual content of course – I assume the editors verified it. So perhaps you want to explain your objections?

Here’s an article from the WOZ (another left newspaper but Swiss) about racism in schools that I recommend (paywalled). Perhaps you’ll like that one better. Percy Uszleber is a black German, a teacher, talking about his experience. Interestingly, he recommends the book by Robin DiAngelo.
https://www.woz.ch/2035/rassismus-im-bildungswesen/uszleber-haelt-dagegen

As others have noted, the OP’s statements about poverty, policing and incarceration are wrong, and misrepresent the references that are provided. I don’t think CT should be promoting this kind of stuff when it’s flat out wrong. It is factually incorrect to say that black people suffer greater rates of incarceration and police violence simply or even largely because they’re poor.

Engels, the psychological wage identified by DuBois is exactly white privilege. To cite someone above it gives white people “a public and psychological wage compensating them for their low economic wages”. More modern writing identifies how that wage is expressed, and describes it as privilege.

Cian, I note the desultory way you refuse to accept simple facts about policy – when JQ points out dental care is Democratic policy and gives you a link you huff “possibly”. What kind of response is “possibly” to a statement of fact? Are you so invested in denying these concepts that you won’t even agree to a fact? Is this your famed ” tolerance for complexity and nuance”?

MisterMr you say

I see we have different opinion, I’ll just point out that we have different opinions because we start from different view about how the world work, mine being approximately marxist and yours approximately liberal.

No, my worldview is not “approximately liberal”. I know how class privilege works because I grew up poor, and have had to come to terms with working among professionals from wealthy backgrounds when, well, when I’m not like them. It’s not “approximately liberal” to think that if a poor person suddenly has their income quintupled they will not, in fact, be exactly the same in personality, expectations, lifestyle or culture as a person who grew up five times richer than them. The neoliberal view would be that we will in fact become the same.

When a person who grew up black tells someone who grew up white that their experiences are not the same, that is not an “approximately liberal” view. It is not “idpol”. It is not a bullshit term invented by “know-nothings at Harvard”. It is lived experience that you are obstinately refusing to get. Using class privilege as an analogy I am trying to get you to see this, but it appears that the “approximately marxist” response is to deny that class inequality builds a culture of difference between classes.

If you think that there is no difference at all between poor people and rich people that can’t be fixed by simply giving poor people more money, you’re a liberal, not a Marxist. And if you deny the experience of poor people, you’re not a friend of their class. This is why I call people doing this socialist larpers.

Sean @121

I think it’s not really correct to interpret wariness of white privilege talk as it will make poor whites “get hurt feelings”. The emotional reaction is not the point, it’s more about what that emotion will mean for political objectives more or less everyone on this thread supports, namely a more equal fairer society.

The thinking goes something like: class inequality is the most important injustice in US society. Addressing racial inequality (which is real) would not do very much to address this first injustice. In fact the current level of focus on racial inequity as a political priority is a strategic bad move because it will hamper our ability to address the primary injustice (class inequality). I think there are supposed to be a bunch of reasons for this:

class accounts for a lot more of the negative outcomes experienced by African Americans than racial prejudice, and it is in some sense, simpler to fix
focus on race makes it harder to form the broad coalition needed to address class inequality because it reinforces racial distinctions which get weaponised by the upper class (the hurt feelings )
Its important to have just one headline political priority or message or strategy or something

On the other hand, addressing class inequality actually does go a long way to addressing racial inequalities because racial inequalities are too a large extent driven by the fact that non-whites tend to be more highly represented in the lower classes.

I’m not sure the points 1,2 and 3 are entirely independent. I think that of the 3 reasons point 1 is true, I think point 2 is probably true, and to be honest I’m not sure about point 3. But I guess the thinking is that race talk crowds our class talk, I’m not sure about this at all.

@faustusnotes 132

I’m not denying that people who grew up in a certain rich social background have cultural differences with people who grew up in a poorer background, I’m saying that this should not be conceptualised as a ‘privilege’, but as one of the various form of capital (in a broad sense) that wealthy people have.

Also by liberal I don’t mean neoliberal, these are two very different things in my book.
When I wrote about a liberal point of view, I meant this:
Up to some time ago, some conservatives said that they were for ‘equality of opportunity’, whereas lefties were about ‘equalty of outcome’.
In reality the difference between these two are quite fuzzy because, obviously, if there is a big difference in outcomes, people who end up rich will find various ways to pass these advantages to their prole, directly through inheritance, or sending their child to better schools, or through social connections etc.

While the term was coined by conservatives (iirc), in my view conservatives are neither for equality of opportunity nor of outcomes, liberals tend to think in terms of equality of opportunity imho, while at least my interpretation of marxism elides the difference between the two and therefore is closer to the equality of outcomes (in a very broad sense).

It seems to me that what you mean by class privilege is about equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcomes, so I class it as a ‘liberal’ approach (liberal not being a smear word in the context, in fact I see myself both as a liberal and as a marxist).

JD@120, Gorgonzola Petrovna@132

Just to clarify: I wasn’t trying to make any partisan political point w/r/t the fact that Medicare doesn’t have coverage for even prophylactic dental work. (For that matter, it doesn’t include ophthalmology coverage, or audiology coverage.)

Medicare passed under Johnson in 1965. Fifty-five years later, it still doesn’t cover costly specialist services the elderly often require, but cannot pay for. That’s on both parties.

With respect to dental care in particular (the cost of which in the U.S. is just, well, phenomenal), much of this has to do with the power of the American Dental Association (ADA) lobby – dentists don’t want to serve patients who can’t pay full fees, and Medicare fees would be substantially lower than what they are accustomed to.

In the Senate currently, the bill has a single Democratic sponsor (Ben Cardin, D-MD0). As I noted earlier, this isn’t a good omen, and it reflects on members of both parties.

In fact the current level of focus on racial inequity as a political priority is a strategic bad move because it will hamper our ability to address the primary injustice (class inequality).

I understand how this could be an important question: ‘Does the current level of focus on racial inequity as a political priority hamper efforts to redress the injustice of class inequality?’

But so far I have not observed anybody producing empirical evidence to support the conclusion that the answer is ‘Yes’.

@138
”Some questions for those who like this term and the discourse it generates”
Oh – good!

”What are or should be the policy implications of “white privilege”?
Laws which don’t ”privilege” – ”whites”

”Related: can you imagine a policy addressing “white privilege” that does not invoke race?”
No.

”Also related: is “white” just nebulous enough of a racial concept”,
No – as ”white” is not ”nebulous”

”and do “whites” just have it so good (let’s say in the USA), that discrimination against “whites” on the basis of race shouldn’t be a disqualifying factor in whatever “anti-white-privilege” policies we might consider crafting”?
What?

”Or are we not really against “white privilege” after all (in the sense of wanting to do anything about it, just identifying it as a phenomenon”?
W… what?

”Also: are we concerned about any other loosely affiliated tribes qua tribes having more than their fair share of the privilege pie”?
No – as the issue is ”WHITE” privilege.

”If so, who”?
Nobody?

”If not, why not”?
as the issue is ”WHITE” privilege.

”Finally: “Whites” in the US are a majority for now, but we can imagine a near future where this isn’t the case;”
Yes!

”what will “white-privilege” policies/laws look like then”?
Hopefully… a lot better – Right?

Corax asks what policies might derive from this concept of privilege. I don’t know about race privilege in the USA but for example in the UK people have lobbied for years to remove the entrance interview for Oxford and Cambridge because it is used to identify social signifiers of class that can be used to exclude working class people even though they are, on paper, eligible for admission. Similarly, for job applications a document review in which names and addresses are removed would ensure that black, Jewish and working class candidates were more likely to at least get to the interview stage of job applications. Ensuring diversity in interview panels also ensures that some interviewers’ privileged perspectives can be balanced by other voices.

Of course people like MisterMr will argue for equality of outcomes and say we don’t need kids to go to oxbridge but the reality is that the leadership of the UK is drawn from a very narrow educational background, and if only rich white kids can get into those institutions then in future only rich white kids will rule the country. And of course, every working class kid who fails to get into the top university is a working class kid who is failing to achieve their dreams, and that is wrong.

(I guess engels is going to say “great, so now poor kids can bomb the middle east too!” but if we follow that defeatist attitude we would never reform any institutions in favour of poor people, because those institutions are corrupt, and in the end Britain would never change).

I agree with others that privilege is not an especially useful framework for social justice but it is still part of the whole thing, and you can’t just ignore the demands from poor and black people to be taken seriously as human beings by those who consider themselves our “betters”. It might not mean much in the long run that once when I was at a demonstration for reduced university fees I was told by one of the left wing activists to “go to my technical college and advertise this protest” (when I was doing a master’s in public health!) just on the basis of my flanelette shirt and tattoos, but it’s offensive nonetheless and it doesn’t encourage a cross-class alliance for change. The same applies for race. If you don’t want black activists advocating for separatism, don’t treat them so badly that that’s all they think they can do.

Also, another quip:
I see that my position is referred to class reductionism or class only position, but I’d rather call it “economic structure first” position, since class sometimes is used to refer to social identities, whereas I’m arguing also against focusing on class as a social identity.

The reason that class-only leftists can’t comprehend privilege as a concept is that they won’t look beyond economic explanations for cultural phenomena. Chetan Murthy makes this point in the other thread where he points out that no matter how rich society gets men will still rape women, unless something is done about a culture of rape.

‘Society getting richer’ is not the limit of the changes that leftists hope to be possible, merely an enabler.

There is a side issue here, that I want to avoid diverting into; rape presumably has at least something to do with biology. Which to anyone less Stalinist than Lysenko obviously can be the same kind of underlying factor to culture that economics can, either as a real constraint or as a justification. But we can sidestep that by talking about an all-male environment, like prisons or boarding schools.

Imagine such an institution with a lower level of rape than typical. One theory would predict that such an institution would turn out to have policies, procedures and infrastructure in place that caused it to be so. This probably requires a higher budget, but is not a simple consequence of that budget in itself, but of the way it was spent.

The other that someone succeeds in persuading the inmates to rape less. Rape culture disappears without anything material needing to change, or any money needing to be spent.

Class-reductionists are those who would find the former made up example more plausible.

J-D 09.06.20 at 1:23 am @ 139:
“… I understand how this could be an important question: ‘Does the current level of focus on racial inequity as a political priority hamper efforts to redress the injustice of class inequality?’ But so far I have not observed anybody producing empirical evidence to support the conclusion that the answer is ‘Yes’.”

I thought that was exactly the leftist complaint about the leadership of the Democratic Party — that focusing primarily on racial inequity enables it to protect its donor class from the just wrath of the (economically defined) proletarians. But maybe you don’t regard their (the leftists’) perceptions as sufficiently empirical?

Is individuality an artifact of class, race, citizenship or something else? As I read over these comments I’m stuck by how uniformly they adhere to a focus on the individual as actor (miscreant/victim/beneficiary/whatever) within a variety of disputed constructs. Perhaps it would be fruitful to abandon that focus (obsession?).

J-D 09.06.20 at 1:23 am @ 139:
“… I understand how this could be an important question: ‘Does the current level of focus on racial inequity as a political priority hamper efforts to redress the injustice of class inequality?’ But so far I have not observed anybody producing empirical evidence to support the conclusion that the answer is ‘Yes’.”

I thought that was exactly the leftist complaint about the leadership of the Democratic Party — that focusing primarily on racial inequity enables it to protect its donor class from the just wrath of the (economically defined) proletarians. But maybe you don’t regard their (the leftists’) perceptions as sufficiently empirical?

There’s no good reason why anybody should. I don’t. Do you?

I have observed repeatedly that people say this is happening but produce no evidence of its happening. All you’re doing is telling me about people saying this is happening, something which I obviously already know about. You’re still not telling me about any evidence on which the complaints you cite are based.

Callum 150: “Likewise I think we might put more emphasis on the view that racism and misogyny(?) are social pathologies that are significantly exacerbated and even caused by underlying economic inequality.”

Wow, that statement does sound class reductionist! Which is it, exacerbated or caused? And what is the “underlying economimc inequality”, the one between rich and poor, the one between white and black, between men and women? Or is that all the same? Do you mean to suggest that racism and sexism mostly affect the lower class? Are mostly perpetrated by lower class people? That they shouldn’t distract from class struggle and will go away on their own after the revolution?

Chetan R Murthy:

we would have piles and piles of videos of police unjustly murdering otherwise completely unremarkable and law-abiding white people. We would know their names.

Again, <href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2020/08/30/white-privilege-and-class-a-reply-to-chris-bertram-by-kenan-malik/#comment-804333″>again, it’s not hard to find Daniel Shaver, Joseph Hutcheson, Dylan Noble. It’s not a contest.

@J-D 154
I don’t understand. Certainly if I’m focusing on A I’m not contemporaneously focusing on B, no?

Or are you referring to a crowding out argument? Unfortunately I don’t think there is a crowding out, I think many people who make a ‘privilege’ argument would not accept a ‘capital’ argument.

Your eyes change focus all the time, within fractions of seconds, thereby allowing you to perceive different aspects of your viewfield almost simultaneously.

My camera doesn’t.

@Tm 160

I’m not speaking of changing focus from one mechanism of oppression to another, I’m speaking of focusing on the same mechanism in one way or another.

@
”It’s not a contest”.

Especially by proving – that there are ”NO piles and piles of videos of police unjustly murdering otherwise completely unremarkable and law-abiding white people” –
by just posting ”NO piles and piles of videos of police unjustly murdering otherwise completely unremarkable and law-abiding white people” –
as response to:
”we would have piles and piles of videos of police unjustly murdering otherwise completely unremarkable and law-abiding white people. We would know their names”.

So we now know a few names?

I’m not speaking of changing focus from one mechanism of oppression to another, I’m speaking of focusing on the same mechanism in one way or another.

Focussing on it in one way does not preclude focussing on it in another way.

Class is not a different area of focus; a problem that could be solved before or after another. It is the thing that binds together solutions and problems, explains why it is that if you want see a pedestrian, you should swerve.

Literally, it is not the case that class explains why you should swerve to avoid a pedestrian. The metaphorical meaning, if any, is opaque.

Callum;

Regarding, “ I think it’s not really correct to interpret wariness of white privilege talk as it will make poor whites “get hurt feelings”.

I agree; but that is the argument Corax made and to which I was responding.

“The emotional reaction is not the point, it’s more about what that emotion will mean for political objectives more or less everyone on this thread supports, namely a more equal fairer society.”

Ok, now you contradict yourself; you’re saying that the emotional response to the idea of WP IS what matters. If stating the truth interferes with political objectives, then we are all doomed.

The problem is that WP refers to something real and significant but NOT to something culpable. Denying WP obstructs truthful discourse between Blacks and Whites; and enables some Whites (if they are so inclined) to blame Blacks for their situation by asserting they earned what WP gave them UNEARNED.

If it is true that “ more or less everyone on this thread supports … a more equal, fairer society” then how can it be that stating what makes our society in need of fixing will hurt the cause? Why does our society need to be more equal and fairer if it’s already equal and fair?

sean s.

nasty woman:

[quoting me]: “It’s not a contest”

Especially by proving – that there are ”NO piles and piles of videos of police unjustly murdering otherwise completely unremarkable and law-abiding white people” –
by just posting ”NO piles and piles of videos of police unjustly murdering otherwise completely unremarkable and law-abiding white people” –
as response to:
”we would have piles and piles of videos of police unjustly murdering otherwise completely unremarkable and law-abiding white people. We would know their names”.

So we now know a few names?

Sorry, my time is limited. (Translated to wokespeak: I can’t enact the labor to educate you.) Also, I would consider overall data more important (for at least the third time: according to one study, whites are killed by police at about half (40%) per capita of blacks, poorest one-fifth of whites comparable to blacks overall).

Working from a list by Radley Balko of cases of at-best-dubious police killings that “barely made the news at all”, here’s some cases, one with a video. Almost all articles I came across do not mention the victim’s race in the text (I guess their races were “unmarked”), I can only guess from photos. If you’re genuinely interested, Balko lists maybe a hundred more, I haven’t guessed the races of those.

Kelly Thomas. Homeless, schizophrenic, tased / beaten to death by police. His race is not generally mentioned, photo suggests white. Video here.

John Wrana, age 95; had a knife, surrounded by five cops. Most news stories I came across mention neither his race nor the officers’; linked article has a photo, I’m guessing he’s white.

John Winkler.
His race is not mentioned that linked article, but is here.

Jason Wescott, botched drug raid. His race is not mentioned in the article, but there’s a photo, so, guessing he’s white.

Allan DeVillena II, unnecessary police escalation of a traffic stop. Race not mentioned in article; judging from photo, maybe east Asian.

Eugene Mallory, age 80. Race not mentioned in artcle, maybe white, judging from photo. Botched drug raid.

…all I have time for. But perhaps, like Brienne of Snarth, you’re “so finished with white entitlement that you’re really not sad about a 2yo eaten by a gator because his daddy ignored the signs”. Sorry, no video for that one.

@172
”here’s a few more”.

Could we leave them as proof – that ”piles and piles” can be seen quite differently –
and in order to get back to ”White Privilege” I really would like to repeat the following comment from the ”Unmarked categories”:

”The massive demonstrations of this summer didn’t start because of some economic injustice; they didn’t start because of some class-consciousness. They started because Americans are fed up with police brutality towards Black Americans and people of color.

There’s only one class of Americans who agree with you: Trumpists. Think on that.

I’m done here”.

Please – NOT!
as there is this really Nasty Racist and Science Denier running for President – and at the last elections he managed to fool so many of the… am I allowed to say: ”Confused Types who post here” into NOT voting against him – that we need your help!

And as there is a bottle of Champagne waiting – for every ”Trump” -(the German Word for ”STUPID”) – WE can get on CT to vote against ”Trump” – let’s keep on rapping!

You want to win a bottle of Champagne – Kiwanda?

Historically, those with sophisticated and accurate personal models of the class system, e.g Du Bois and MLK, are those who have been successful at positive social reform. Those lacking such high quality models commonly end up confused as to why their efforts did nothing, or made them worse.

If
you have devised and implemented an intersubjectively verifiable method of systematically listing examples of people who have attempted positive social reform
and if
you have devised and implemented an intersubjectively verifiable method of systematically distinguishing between those who have sophisticated and accurate personal models of the class system and those who do not
and if
you have devised and implemented an intersubjectively verifiable method of systematically distinguishing between those who have been successful in their efforts for positive social reform and those who have not
then
you could describe all the above and other people could check your work to find out whether there is adequate basis for accepting your conclusion.

As things stand, you’ve supplied no good reason why anybody else should accept your conclusion.

Mind you, even if that conclusion were established, it would remain the case that talking in terms of white privilege does not preclude a sophisticated and accurate personal model of the class system.

In that respect, Donald Trump is the President of the USA, and within a few percentage points of winning a second term. Given that is an undesired outcome, those taking political action with that goal are going to need accurate models in order to find a path to avoid it.

If you are in possession of good reason for supposing that talking about white privilege will obstruct the goal of avoiding Donald’s re-election, you have cunningly concealed it.

Further to my previous comment.
@J-D
It seems to me your point is that I’m arificially restricting the argument only to my point of interest, and rejecting other points of interests.
But it is not so, I’m not restricting anything, I’m speaking of the same things but from a different perspective.
What changes is the perspective, not what I’m intersted in: I don’t become a fan of “class privilege” because I call it “social capital”, nor of “white privilege” if I call it “racism due to false consciousness”.
It is actually the opposite from my point of view, that at least some people like the framing in terms of “privilege” because it isn’t systemic.

“It provides no justification for rejecting arguments made in terms of privilege.”
I think I’ve lost you. What agument made on privilege did I reject (assuming we are still speaking of “class privilege”)?

I was picking up a very strong impression that more than one commenter was taking the stance that talking about ‘white privilege’ is a bad thing because it’s counter-productive, or something very like that. Maybe I was right about that but you weren’t one of those commenters. Or maybe I was wrong entirely and nobody’s taking any stance like that. If nobody has any objections to people talking about white privilege, what do you think this discussion is about?

“Focussing on it in one way does not preclude focussing on it in another way.”
It totally does, it’s called “estabilishing a narrative”. If you are estabilishing narrative A, you are not estabilishing narrative B, so if I think narrative B is better I will push for narrative B at the expense of narrative A.
I don’t understand this, really. I mean “focussing” mean to lend attention to one thing at the expense of others, how can “focussing” not be mutually exclusive?

Even if it’s not possible to focus on two different things at the exact same instant, it’s still possible to focus on two different things in the same year, the same month, the same week, the same day, the same hour, the same minute. Nor is there any good reason to conclude that it’s impossible for two different narratives to be established.

But if you don’t like the term focussing, let’s call it framing.
If I think that framing a situation as A is better than framing it as B, then I will push for A at the expense of B.

if the same situation can be framed in two different ways, it doesn’t have to be case that one framing is better than the other.

Justine Diamond

Curiously, it turns out that while Justine Damond migrated from Australia (to the United States), Justine Diamond migrated to Australia (from the UK). (I suppose there might be more than one Justine Diamond, but that’s the one I found. For that matter, I suppose there might also be more than one Justine Damond.)

@sean samis, 180
I see no necessary contradiction between ‘police are violent and out of control, and in a majority-white society, there will be many white people among the victims’ and ‘Black people are disproportionately the victims of police violence’.
This site has more than 100 Black people killed since 13.3.: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/
The data seems incomplete; I can’t find Daniel Prude there, for example. He was Black and having a mental health crisis. Intersectionality.

sean s.

The 20 or so stories mentioned span about 6 years.
Many of the victims had mental health issues; they represent a group against whom prejudices may be as bad or worse than POC.
Since March 13, 2020 (about 6 months), more than 80 Black people have been killed by police. Some sources find the number to be closer to 100..

You’re comparing apples and oranges: one is individual stories and videos, where the killing was clearly dubious; the other is total number killed for whatever reason. I’ve given both: examples, and also statistics (from one study).

Putting the numbers for 2020 from here with a U.S. population that’s 13% black, 73% white, I get that in 2020, the number of whites killed by police per capita is 35% that the number of blacks, a bit less than the 40% I’ve been quoting (and quoting, and quoting, and quoting) from that study. What do your sources say?

@184
“…is to turn the struggle for justice on its head”

Here’s another one: “pay gap”. Nothing in the narrative would indicate that the wronged identity is underpaid. No, it’s just the “pay gap” that is the problem. Eliminate the “gap” by paying less to the other identity, and voila: problem solved.

AND –

”When Mr. Woodward pointed out that both he and Mr. Trump were “white, privileged,” and asked if Mr. Trump could see that they both have to “work our way out of it to understand the anger and the pain, particularly, Black people feel in this country,” Mr. Trump replied, “No,” and added, “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”

There is racism, but while one can argue that racism is perhaps rooted in some archaic psychological human trait, racism as we know it today is strongly intermixed with economic problems, e.g. racism against immigrants (the most evident form of racism in Italy where I live) is largely rooted in a “they are stealing our jobs” narrative. I believe this is true for most forms of racism.

What is your justification for favouring the conclusion ‘racism against immigrants is largely rooted in a “they are stealing our jobs” narrative’ over the conclusion ‘the “they are stealing our jobs” narrative is largely rooted in racism against immigrants’?

I dislike the term “white privilege” for the reason that, as Malik says in the OP, ”Framing the absence of oppression or discrimination or bigotry as a “privilege” is to turn the struggle for justice on its head”.

Despite drawing on my previous experience with the metaphor ‘turn on its head’ (and I do have previous experience of it), in this instance I am unable to grasp the intended literal meaning; as a result, you have not made clear to me your reasons for disliking the term ‘white privilege’. They might become clear to me if you explained without metaphor.

On whether it is possible to frame (better word IMHO) the same thing in more than one way, it is possible only to the degree that a framing isn’t in contradiction with the other, which in this case in my view happens because class privilege (please note that I’m not speaking of racism) cannott IMHO be distinguished from “class”, although faustusnote gave some examples of the opposite.

No logical connection between the first half of this sentence and the second half is apparent to me, so you have not made clear to me how it is that you understand two framings to be contradicting each other.

It is so easy to look at others who are all racist and sexist in contrast to a proper educated person in ones own bubble that knows all the right complicated passive aggressive words and the proper allowed ways to be aggressive as opposed to those that are ugly mansplaining or whatever. To me the entire discourse just looks like class slang and reinforcement of stereotypes.

Hurray to the toothless Walmart employees and their ability to look down on someone based on skin color. Everyone can use those kinds of more or less realistic concepts about his in group to feel superior. In all kind of marginalized low status groups, including minority ethnicities a nontrivial number of members regularly ascribe some kind of superiority to that group. It’s not a privilege to do so, it is a sign how bad one is doing if one has to resort to that kind of stuff. The number of occasions where that view is shared by society at large should be rather limited for toothless Walmart employees. That kind of stuff, those are just toxic distractions:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflix-ceo-fires-top-executive-after-use-of-the-n-word-1529709156
https://cosmicbook.news/brie-larson-netflix-bully-fan-unicorn-store

Some rich old white dudes, including but not limited to current presidents of the US and some poor saps being more wrong does not make oneself right.

Gorgo 187: “Nothing in the narrative would indicate that the wronged identity is underpaid.”

Great of you to tell feminists how they are doing the struggle against workplace discrimination all wrong. I can really imagine that it has never occurred to them that women are underpaid and should demand higher wages. It must be a true revelation to them.

@J-D 189
“What is your justification for favouring the conclusion ‘racism against immigrants is largely rooted in a “they are stealing our jobs” narrative’ over the conclusion ‘the “they are stealing our jobs” narrative is largely rooted in racism against immigrants’?”

It is a circular causation, one causes the other, however both depend on a system where good jobs are disappearing for different reasons, so that even without migration some other form of racist claim would pop up for the same result (e.g. northern italians being nasty against southern italians).
But to stop this circle one has to point out that the job situation actually depends on stuff like austerity or various aspects of neoliberalism.
If you instead point to “white privilege” as the root cause, you are describing a situation where there is some sort of zero sum competition between identities, at which point poor white (or other relevant identity) worker will logically conclude that as they are already quite screwed with WP, if they lose it they are totally toast, so they’ll just vote one who they perceive as “their guy”, who will actually screw them big time, but they think it’s a good idea because of “white privilege”.
Which is the whole reason racism is being weaponized by a variety of right leaning “populist” government across the world.

On the “turn on his head”: basically if you think that everyone should have rights 10, but ethnicity A actually has rights 10 while ethnicity B only has rights 8, you can’t say that ethnicity A is privileged, because you are undermining the idea that everyone should have rights 10 by badmouthing A for being exactly in the place where they are supposed to be.

Logical connection: if you distinguish “class privilege” (as used by e.g. faustusnotes, meaning things like cultural differences among people that can act as barriers to entry for people of poorer background) from other form of capital, you are implicitly saying that differences in capital ownership are a-ok, but this evidently negates the whole idea of marxism, where the logic is the opposite (differences in the relation to capitals shape society so that this kind of cultural differences are just the superstructural projection of differences in capital).
So one conception IMO negates the other.
Now if we compare both to an idea like, “the rich are rich because they had been selected in a dawinian way so everything is ok”, certainly both the class privilege idea and the capital idea are closer to each other and the differences tend to disappear, however it seems to me that if we are speaking of intra-left debate the two conceptions are quite contradictory.

J-D:

It’s not clear whether you also think that talking about white privilege is no help in defeating Donald and the Republicans or, worse, actually counter-productive. If you do think so, you haven’t provided any justification for anybody else to accept that conclusion, just as you haven’t provided any justification for the conclusion quoted. (I am not sure I understand correctly what you mean by ‘liberal humanism’ and ‘left-identitarism’, but you have not provided the justification for your conclusion about them no matter what you mean by them.)

As far as I can tell, your contributions here consist of pointing out, for a selection of views expressed, that you think those views need more clarification, or evidence, or justification. Eventually, maybe, I hope, you will make a claim, and provide arguments and evidence in support of it. Or, dispute a claim someone else has made, and supply arguments and evidence against it. When you do that, I’ll try to respond substantively.

lurker;

I see no contradiction between the items you list, and no reason for you to think I might.

MisterMr;

White privilege turns the struggle for justice on its head only if you see it as culpable. I and others have repeatedly reminded all that WP is NOT culpable.

Kiwanda;

Based on the source linked below, in 2020 Black Americans are about 2.9 times more likely to be shot to death by police than White Americans.

… .statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/

The link you provided was data from 2015 to August 2020, but the conclusion is not much different.

sean s.

Sorry, my last claim (about 40% for both) was nonsense. From those numbers, and using the same .13 black vs .73 white population proportions, the ratio of white without gun killed vs black without gun per capita is 34%, consistent with the other data.

As far as I can tell, your contributions here consist of pointing out, for a selection of views expressed, that you think those views need more clarification, or evidence, or justification.

If you don’t like it when I point out that your expression of your views is unclearly, you can avoid this outcome by expressing your views clearly. If you don’t like it when I point out that your conclusions have not been justified by evidence, you can avoid this outcome by justifying your conclusions with evidence.

When you do that, I’ll try to respond substantively.

You’re under no obligation to respond to me in any way. If you want to make your responses contingent on my satisfying your stipulations, there’s not much I can do about that.

That’s if you care about my reactions; I don’t know of any reason why you should.

Eventually, maybe, I hope, you will make a claim, and provide arguments and evidence in support of it. Or, dispute a claim someone else has made, and supply arguments and evidence against it.

It seems to me that I did something like that in my earliest comments to this thread, but if that’s not clear to you or if you’d like me to make a restatement, please let me know and I’m happy to oblige.

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I guess I must have imagined all the crap Polish people in UK were getting in the run up to the Brexit vote.

You might want to brush up on the history of anti-slavic racism, e.g. Hitler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Slavic_sentiment

MisterMr and J-D

White privilege is certainly not the cause of racism; racism creates it.

“Describing people as privileged is not badmouthing them.”

That’s quite correct; WP is not culpable. Saying someone is “privileged” in any way is not badmouthing them except for those privileged fools who think they somehow earned it. Like the joke about GW Bush: he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.

I have nothing to say about all the Marxist stuff; it’s irrelevant.

sean s.

Well, since my understanding of the word “privilege” is culpable, I will just not use the word. If you use a word, you don’t have the faculty to force other people to interpret it the way you mean, so if there is a common use where “privilege” implies culpability …

If your position is ‘It’s a bad idea to talk about “white privilege” in contexts where people have incompatible understandings of “privilege”, because it hinders communication’, then I think I’m inclined to agree with you; but I note that, nevertheless, people have reported that they have found the term useful, so I suppose that they were using it in contexts where there were not incompatible understandings of ‘privilege’, and I have no good reason to doubt their word about the use they have found in the term.

“Racism existed long before there was a system where good jobs were disappearing.”
No, unless by “racism” you mean “any situation where one ingroup hates an outgroup” (which is an extreme extension of the concept) it didn’t really exist (for example antisemitism in the Middle Ages should be regarded as religious persecution and not as racism).
I think you are reifying a modern cultural thing too much and projecting it into the past.
But anyway, even before capitalism existed economic problem existed and economic classes also did, so for example slavery certainly is an economic thingie and it is the main cause of anti-black racism, and antisemitism is rooted in cultural prejudices that were religious, but still placed Jews in a very specific socio economic position.
So while “before there was a system where good jobs were disappearing” is more or less true, it still is the case that in these two pretty iportant instances the root of racism is economics, not some sort of mystical instinct to racism. If you have an example of a form of racism that patently didn’t have economic causes please tell me.

‘A system where good jobs are disappearing’ is a much narrower concept than ‘economic problems’. Economic problems of one kind or another date back to a time before there were written records. I wouldn’t assert that racism existed long before there were economic problems. If your assertion is not ‘racism is the product of a system where good jobs are disappearing’ but rather ‘racism is the product of economic problems’, then my response would not be ‘No, that’s wrong’; my response would be ‘That’s an interesting possibility which merits further investigation although I’m not yet 100% convinced that it’s accurate’.

“I haven’t pointed to white privilege as the root cause, and as far as I can tell neither has anybody else.”
You asked in 191: “What is your justification for favouring the conclusion ‘racism against immigrants is largely rooted in a “they are stealing our jobs” narrative’ over the conclusion ‘the “they are stealing our jobs” narrative is largely rooted in racism against immigrants’?”
So you pitted an hipothesis where economics is the root cause against one where racism is the root cause. I was answering to this.

In that earlier comment I mentioned only two of multiple possibilities. Among the other possibilities there is this one: maybe neither of these phenomena has a single root cause. In my earlier comment I only asked about your justification for favouring your stated conclusion over just one of the possible alternatives, but I could have asked about your justification for favouring your stated conclusion over all the possible alternatives. If I gave the impression that I was favouring just one of those alternatives, then I could have expressed myself more clearly, and I’ll try to do better in future.

So if you distinguish between “class privilege” and “capital”, presumably you have a reason to distinguish between the two (maxim of relevance).

True: but that reason doesn’t have to involve thinking that one of them is okay and the other is not okay. When you referred to a Marxist distinction between different relations to capital and the superstructural projections of those different relations, did you think that meant one of them was okay and the other not okay?

@Tm 208

I think that some white people, often racist, vote for right populist parties because they feel leftish politics as an aggression against themselves, even if from an objective point of view rightwing populist policies are really bad for them.
It is a case of “false consciousness” in Marx-speak.
But if even the left frames the situation as “white privilege” this is giving to the rightwing parties a free assist to frame the situation in a way that suits them, they will say: “see, they are just a bunch of elite guys who want to take away stuff from you and give it to them, they are not really on your side”.
So if we put it in strategy terms, framing racism in terms of white privilege might be an own goal.
Then it might not be if it fires up people who are already leftish, it depends whether the best strategy is to lure the undecided or to fire up your own side (who might later lure in the undecided through personal conversations).

While tactically it could go both ways, it seems to me that this way the left is reinforcing a framing that is more appropriate to the right, so on the long term I think tis is bad; in addition, I see this as wrong because, if you frame racism in terms of white privilege, you are looking at reality with the wrong set of concepts, thus leading to false consciousness.