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Comment by forkandwait | Hacker News Reader

Modern aristocracies perpetuate themselves across generations by training at the school and in the family when young, and then so-called "competition" in the market place. The anthropology/ sociology theory that looks at these dynamics is generally known as Practice Theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_theory

The current system has the dual advantages of plausible deniability (anybody can, in theory, get into Stanford and become a master of the universe, but family income and culture radically boost your SATs and character), and it allows for new blood to enter the system more easily than when you needed a pedigree.

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I have friends that fuss when I use the term 'white privilege' but what you describe is exactly what I classify as 'privilege'.

Buffett calls it the 'ovarian lottery'.

There's nothing inherently white about privilege. In fact, whites are under-represented at Stanford compared to the US population as a whole.

This is narrowly true, but broadly false. The concept of 'white privledge' relates to the concept of 'white man's burden', which is european in origin. Nobody debates that indians, japanese, and other asian societies aren't highly adept at elitism.

White privilege is just one type of privilege, it's not the only one. Rich white guys get two sorts of privilege - not only are police less likely to stop them because of their race (for instance), if they do get stopped they will be better able to defend themselves in a legal manner (because of their wealth and probable education levels).

Whereas a poor white kid might be less likely to be stopped, but also not really able to defend themselves if they are stopped.

Finally, a poor black kid is more likely to get stopped and not really able to defend themselves if they are stopped.

no one ever said there was. There's just a statistically higher likelihood of being privileged if one is white.

Perhaps they fuss because it's idiotic to tie it to race when it doesn't need to be. Just call it 'socioeconomic privilege'. It's completely unacceptable to call someone who is poor/uneducated "black disadvantaged", why would you think the inverse is okay? Stanford is rife with asian students from well-off families, illustrating that it has very little to do with race.

I don't see why. There's nothing wrong with being black, unless you're saying there is. Statistically they're a more disadvantaged group because of obvious generational challenges other ethnicities inflicted. Most people are aware of this, and using the term 'white' for the corollary is simple information encoding.

It's not encoding any useful information other than your racist assumptions. The only difference between "privilege" and "white privilege" is a pointless correlation. What extra information can you possibly think it provides besides information about the person that uses it.

Would you be comfortable with saying that someone who is committing a crime is "acting black" because black people have a higher prison enrollment?

'acting black' yes that would be racist, because that's speaking of the individual.

'privilege' speaks not to one's own decisions, but one's own environment.

I'm disappointed. I thought abuse of the term 'racism' required greater sleight of hand. I'm only just starting to understand it

>'acting black' yes that would be racist, because that's speaking of the individual.

This criteria is nonsense. If you have an asian guy committing a crime and you say he's acting black because he didn't get enough white privilege, both of those components are racist. His crime and his relative privilege level have nothing to do with his skin color.

Would you be comfortable with saying that someone who is committing a crime is "acting black" because black people have a higher prison enrollment?

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