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Comment by jonahrd | Hacker News Reader

I'm not trying to diminish the experience of your ancestors, mine were also Irish.

But in most contexts, white privilege doesn't care about your actual ancestry. A 2nd generation black immigrant from Africa to NYC will face some of the same discrimination as a descendant from slaves. And with your white skin you will receive some of the same privileges as a wealthy descendant of the Mayflower.

It doesn't really hurt to recognize this, and it doesn't have to "erase" the pain that your ancestors went through. It's simply recognizing that there are inherent subliminal biases in our systems and society.

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My white privilege must have been on vacation growing up because my parents were too poor to pay the light bill several times and eventually were foreclosed upon (this was way before 2008). And it certainly wasn't around when I had to work as a farm hand for less than minimum wage in high school to help pay the bills. A lot of what's perceived as white privilege is actually economic privilege, and most of the rest is made up.

I wonder how poor whites react to their resume getting tossed out for not being diverse enough [0][1].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/new-lawsuit-exposes-googles-desp...

“You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula of doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity."

-MLK

Again, even people with privilege can have a really hard life. But you do in fact have the privilege of driving a car without the threat of being pulled over for how you look, or walking down the street without being asked questions, or boarding a plane without being "randomly" searched.

It's a form a privilege. It doesn't make you bad. It doesn't mean your life is easy. But it's worth recognizing.

Let's assume that you're completely right, and a white person has all those privileges that you pointed out.

Now let's compare this theoretical white person to a theoretical black person with none of these privileges. One caveat though, the white person is poor and the black person is rich.

Now the question is, does the economic privilege of the black person offset the other privileges of the white person?

In my opinion and the opinion of the person you're replying to, the answer is yes. Economic privilege generally outweighs other privileges, so focusing on these other privileges seems counterproductive if we want to increase equality.

The only thing I can assume is the whole woke/privilege thing has been devised by people out of touch with the common American experience.

If you think a poor white person can drive around West Virginia in a beat up car without being pulled over and harassed because they look like they deal meth you don’t know what the average experience is like.

This happened to me in high school. I was taking some of my buddies home from football practice and was pulled over. Me (the one white guy) and two black guys. A sheriff's deputy pulled us over. He asked us to get out of the truck and sit on the ground while he asked us questions, a lot of questions. A few minutes later another deputy showed up and asked if he could search the truck. The deputy that pulled us over was black, the other was white. They thought I was buying or selling drugs. Given the amount of drug activity in the area, and that the area was mostly black and I wasn't gave him reason to pull me over.

If someone wants to say my privilege was not living in that type of area then I guess maybe, though my situation wasn't too much better. This whole notion of having privilege is absurd.

It's actually "majority privilege." It's just called white privilege in the USA because that has historically been the majority color. Go to any country, or geographic area, and you fill find a majority race/sect/tribe/religion that gives them more privileges/rights than the rest of the people who live in smaller numbers, because there are less of them in numbers to win a vote (or whatever.) You will also find that majority holding some sort of power over the minorities in the area. Can you think of a country where this hasn't been true at some point in world history? China? Russia? Nigeria? Mexico? Cambodia? Vietnam? Greece? Rome? Rwanda?

I totally agree with you. We were talking about the US.

In some cultures, the aspect of giving every single person inalienable rights and equality isn't explicitly valued like it is in the west. I wouldn't want to impose western values on those cultures.

However, your argument boils down to whataboutism. Yes there are other countries with other forms of privilege. Yes there are civilizations in the past with other forms of privilege. In the US we tend to value equality, and in the pursuit of that we must recognize all forms of privilege that exist in our society. It doesn't matter that it exists elsewhere.

FYI I am not at all talking about the original article. I was simply responding to this tangent comment thread.

An awesome take away from the comment you replied to may be: why call it white privilege? It’s seems better to call it majority privilege. It’s more accurate, more general, less inflammatory, less targeted, less convoluted. It seems better in every way. Focusing on whiteness just serves to entrench people (as anytime you call someone’s intrinsic traits harmful, you tend to offend). Why don’t we just call it majority privilege?

> white privilege doesn't care about your actual ancestry

Only because there haven’t been any large groups of white immigrants to the US in recent history. If there were, you could expect to see the same sort of intolerance you can see in Europe, where some people really do care a lot about your ancestry, even if you’re just as white as them.

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