as a white that grew up very very poor, I can't possibly understand why so many black people try to convince me that I'm guilty of white privilege, when most of them had many more resources growing up.
I could never join a sports team in school or other extra curricular, that shit's expensive.
I had to steal food to get enough to eat.
I've been pulled over multiple times, nearly every case because my car was shitty and the cop was shaking me down.
I've been stopped by cops for walking through a hospital parking lot to go visit a friend.
I've had a cop pull a gun out at me and order me to the ground. I was 14.
I was told at a young age to follow cop orders exactly and be non threatening else I may get shot.
My mom didn't come to a complete stop at a side street stop sign. Pulled over and the entire car tossed. The cop told my mom she likely stole it and they will find out what she did.
A white buddy got the shit beat out of him by a cop. His crime was being poor and skating.
I've seen a lot of nice cars going to a car race and then there was my buddy and I in a shitty car. We got pulled over and harassed.
I was constantly excluded from most of my peer group because I was poor.
I had to work multiple jobs to put myself through college -- little financial aid there.
I spent over a decade scraping by because I didn't have a single role model on how to grow my career (or even really start one). Living in a low socio-economic area makes it hard to earn enough to get out.
I was the first and only person in my family to go to college.
I've been ghosted on interviews, called racist names, and hell, my wife had rocks thrown at her as a kid because she was one of like 5 white kids at her inner city school.
Classism is elephant in the room nobody seemingly will acknowledge. But, hey, I'm white, so it can't be that bad, right? /s
The articles beating this drum are actually overwhelmingly written by white people.
I think the term was popularized precisely because it is needlessly incendiary, as controversy means better click-bait. If you ignore the blanket term entirely and focus simply on meaning, people mostly agree with one another.
For instance, it's uncontroversial to suggest that most white people will not face racial discrimination on the level that black people do in America. It's uncontroversial to suggest that there is a disprivilege by virtue of discrimination. But the term "white privilege" is employed to convey that all white people get "special treatment". That is literally what privilege means, after all. And of course people don't respond so well to that.
If you ask a proponent of the term whether they would tell a homeless white man they have "white privilege", they will hem and haw, finally suggesting that it would be "impolite" but that they do indeed have it. *Why the hesitation* if it's innocuous? Cognitive dissonance is why. When they have to explain it to people, white privilege is typically defined in terms of black dis-privilege, but the literal meaning is that every white person gets special treatment. Of course that will be met with resentment.
All of which to say, if use of language isn't well designed to create an understanding, it's not designed to further social causes. It's designed to create friction.
Like you said, it would have been so much easier for everyone to acknowledge the black dis-priviledge. In the current state of affairs, the poors of Appalachia are somewhat privileged? That's laughable, they haven't had a good chance in generations.
Maybe "accused" and "guilty" are not the right framing here - you inherit white privilege because of your ethnicity, it doesnt necessarily make you guilty of anything, but you benefit from it whether you want it or not.
You can think of it in the same way that the wealthier people you mention have inherited a better social class by just being born. They can profit from the privilege of their wealth, while suffering from racial discrimination. You can suffer from poverty, while not being hindered by your skin color. People are multi-dimensional.
I think a fairer way to compare would be to compare people from the same social class when looking for privilege and inequality here. Is a poor white person doing better than a poor black person? Is a rich black person doing better than a poor black person? Is a white rich female doing better than a white rich male? Etc...
Going by your second paragraph, a black person born from wealthy parents who send their kid to harvard, has much more priviledge than a trailer park white kid.
So why are you grouping "whites" together as priviledged? What the hell does race have to do with anything?
The idea goes something like this. You have white privilege because you are visibly white. By being visibly white you gain an automatic differentiation from those who are non-white. The belief is that the system, being largely run by white people will extend courtesy and nicer treatment to those who look like it whilst those who differ in appearance must "earn" the position you are given by the elements of your birth. It's a bit more complicated than that but that's my understanding of the core of it.
I am not trying to strawman the argument and if I have it wrong, please explain where I wandered off course.
To continue, briefly. The difference between the various other types of benefits vs "whiteness" is twofold but interconnected. It is obvious who is and is not in the group and the group has institutional power. Most other sets of parameters do not work together in this way.
Again this isn't my position so if it is yours and I've misrepresented it, chime in please.
Regarding the point itself, rich people or higher classes people as a group also have "institutional power", much more than white people as a group. It is pretty easy to differentiate people background after some sentences as the research shows. So the only difference between those two disadvantages is exchanging some words. Even if it is a significant difference, it still doesn't change or cancel other circumstances in a person life and doesn't make this difference overruling any other difference.
Thought experiment. Two crazy looking homeless people approach you yelling. They are dirty in ripped clothes and look to be high on strong drugs. One is black, one is white. Do you feel better about, or differentiate the white person because he is "your people"?
Homelessness is a problem that must be solved at the highest possible level of government. Since the 'problem' is able to move around the entire country that is the only way to fairly have the collective whole (society) integrate and restore the individual in need to either being a productive member of society, or at least a dignified living solution for when medicine or some other aspect has failed.
Seen in an even wider view, much of illegal immigration is quite likely driven by the homeless or persecuted ignoring the borders of nations that have failed them, as they seek the natural birth rights of anyone on their planet.
Unconscious biases are likely to have much more effect in ambiguous situations where it's harder to try to understand someone's motivations or how to react, than in a situation where those things are clear. Their absence in the latter does not imply their absence in the former.
Why is being stopped by police such a big deal? I think the police should do more of that in the US, it would reduce crime considerably.
Note: I am not making a statement about the propriety of this, but merely working through an example of applied statistics.
If you're doing crimes, you're paying for them. Now the police, the argument goes, lets white people walk away with warrants. In the same time, they let less black people walk away. Is that the argument?
This might be true, but my problem is the letting people walk away in the first place. I don't want the police to do that at all. If the crime is not too bad, then don't emit warrants to begin with. But if there is a warrant, then that should be enforced.
I don't see how not enforcing warrants for black people or criminals of any color will make things better. It won't make things better for the society at large or for the black community. I believe the hard working black people also want less crime on the streets.
There is a problem with longer sentencing for black people, from what I heard. That is not a police issue. Police violence is a police issue, for all races. But police trying to arrest based on a warrant is not an issue, even if it devolves in violence.
What am I getting wrong?
Deal with it. The police stopping you is not them thinking you are a criminal necessarily.
That's a very different situation which is obviously non-discriminatory. But consider how you'd feel if they just stopped some and waved others through, don't you see the potential for unfairness?
I did make my point and tried to support it with (some) data.
There are several things wrong with this statement: the idea that most crimes are commited by individuals and not corporations, the idea that they are commited on the street, and the idea that searching a person somehow can prevent crime.
Firstly a large chunk of crime, is commited by corporates, thats wage theft, consumer law breaches, money laundering, environmental protection, etc. Secondly most crimes are white collar crimes, and we do a very poor job of investigating both.
Lastly even for street crime, which is a small percentage of all crime, stop and search is just a populist show of force that does nothing usefull.
You know what actually reduces crime? Having competent detectives, investigators and prosecutors who can actualy arrest not the individual weed smoker but the kingpin running the show, or bring a complex case against a major company have it stand up to their highly paid team of lawyers.
Real life experiment, look at Baltimore homicides https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2015
Look at pre-2015 and post-2015. The homicides increased from 200s to 300s. All because of a police crime and BLM protests in 2015. Now you have 100 extra people each year losing their lives. US needs more police, not less. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/12/baltim...
All the police did was not getting proactively involved on the streets, those stop and search you were mentioning. They still responded to calls and did their investigations. The result is 50% more deaths from homicides, each year.
Jacob Blake was wanted for rape and he violated a restraining order(approaching the said rape victim). He fought the police and even choke-hold one of them. He was preparing to run away with a stolen car with the kids in it (that he did not have custody of). Their mother was the one that called the police, and the police knew who they were dealing with. If he would have been let go by the police, I assume an amber alert would have been issued.
Floyd was being arrested for passing counterfeit bills.
Brianna Taylor was shot after her boyfriend started shooting at the cops. The cops were executing a warrant for drug dealing. They didn't find anything, but that is beyond the point.
The guy that was shot at Wendy's (Rayshard Brooks -had to look him up)was so drunk that he fell asleep at the drive through, and the employees had to call the police to clear the lane. He had prior DUIs and he fought during the arrest, stole a taser and fired it at the cops.
These were the big cases of last year that I can remember right now. None of these were because of mere stops in traffic.
The 3 shouldn't have died, sure, but I am addressing your point: It was more than a benign stop for any of the big cases last year. I am assuming there are traffic stops where innocent people died, but BLM of 2020 was not protesting for them.
nobody is going to call the police on you for simply walking in a neighborhood
nextdoor and facebook groups arent going to have messages from vigilant bored housewives just because you walked down the street
sundown towns and the ideas that reinforce them don't exist for you
but saying “privilege” suggests other things are handed to you that wouldn't necessarily be true
The people calling the cops are likely the white neighbors on their black neighbors and not the other way around. In your nextdoor example, it's not just "bored housewives", it's "white bored housewives". I don't suppose you feel that black bored housewives are also posting those messages.