Comment by zd123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zd123 | Hacker News Reader

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This isn’t about taking the poorest white folks in society, looking at their lack of economic empowerment and calling white privilege a flawed concept. IMHO theres more to it than that, and white privilege does exist.

For example, there have been a number of studies that show having a non-white sounding name during a cv screening process leads to far less callbacks, even if the remainder of the CV is identical. Is this not white privilege?

What about how the media treats different crimes. Take a look at the Daily Mail website, arguably the most popular UK tabloid and tell me it’s not designed to paint migrants and minorities in a negative light. For example, when there are acts of violence perpetrated in the name of islam, terrorism as a phrase is used frequently in the headlines. However when white nationalists do the same thing, the phrasing is completely different. Another example would be the coverage of the royals ie Kate vs Meghan.

Acknowledging white privilege doesn’t mean that those poor white folks in post industrial towns have it easy. It means that there are certain areas of society where being white does afford a privilege. It comes down to the tribal mentality at the end of the day. People still seem to like to favour people similar to them.

I'll admit I could have been more informative and less pithy, but the idea of white privilege being a foreign concept in economically underprivileged communities is more complex than "white people can experience poverty too".

I've lived in working class neighbourhoods for the majority of my adult life, and there are so many observations that fly in the face of white privilege as a theory.

Most of the poorest people I would encounter were white. The people most likely to be long-term unemployed were white. The people whose children were least likely to get an education and escape poverty were white. Almost all of the junkies were white. Every single homeless person was white, no exceptions.

Whether or not HR staff hiring for a white collar job prefer white names is irrelevant when you and the people you are competing against didn't complete high school.

What the Daily Mail think about Meghan Markle or Islam is less important that what the Vietnamese fruit shop owner thinks of you because you share phenotypal characteristics with the homeless ice addict that sleeps three doors down and scares away customers.

This doesn't even start to cover ethnic tensions (Serb vs. Croat, Indian vs. Pakistani atc.) which exist with no regard for the typical sociological black/white/asian racial boundaries and can cause real violence and discrimination.

I will admit that there are racial groups that have it rough simply because of their skin (black people in America, Aboriginals in Australia, Gypsies in Europe), but the idea that being white grants you privileges over and above all other racial groups ignores the lives and experiences of an enormous segment of the population.

(Just to clarify, I do accept that John Smith has an unfair advantage over Rajesh Kumar when applying for a software job at a FAANG. I also admit that this has worked out well for me. This doesn't extrapolate to the whole population, though; many white people will experience little to no privilege because of their race.)

I would agree with most of what you say above, in my life I have seen the disadvantages you highlight for the white working class (many kids I went to high school fell in this category).

To be clear, I am not claiming disadvantaged white folks don’t have it rough. However, my point is when we take folks from a similar socioeconomic background, being white does confer an advantages in a lot of cases (in western, white majority countries). I would say the majority of the disadvantages for working class whites is not due to their race. Whereas on the other hand, certain ethnicities do have disadvantages due to their precisely their race. Both are disadvantaged but for different reasons imho.

Personally if it were up to me, I would exclude poor working class whites from any notion of privilege as they clearly aren’t. I also think they need more representation in the work place (ie being included in diversity targets rather than excluded).

IMO we need a better term that’s more nuanced and can capture the disadvantages of these groups, but I dont know what that term would be.

>However, my point is when we take folks from a similar socioeconomic background, being white does confer an advantages

This is exactly the point I'm refuting. In all of the working class neighbourhoods I've lived in, poverty seemed to have a greater adverse affect on white people than other racial groups.

Being poor while Indian, for example, doesn't seem to be so closely associated with family breakdown/fatherlessness, drug abuse, malnutrition/bad diet, chronic unemployment, trouble with authority and just this constantly bleak outlook on life in an unbreakable spiral of poverty.

I'm not trying to say that they have it easy. They work bloody hard for what they've got and are an integral part of society. Still, despite their life being tough there's at least light at the end of the tunnel in the form of hope for the next generation. I would much rather be poor and brown than poor and white.

I think UK is a little "special" because of our messed up class system. I think we should include class into diversity definitions. Being white is also a massive privilege in at least several majority black country that I know of.

> I do accept that John Smith has an unfair advantage over Rajesh Kumar when applying for a software job at a FAANG.

Don’t know about UK, but in the US the advantage quite decisively goes the other way: people of Indian descent are significantly over represented in FAANG relative to their share of population, and people of Anglo descent are significantly underrepresented.

Is that bias/unfair advantage?

Most indians working in FAANG in USA tend to be immigrants. So comparing them to their share of population is ridiculous. Even if you limit yourselves to second generation indian American, they are not the same socio-economic background. I guess having rich and education focussed parents is now considered unfair brown privilege.

Got a source for that?

Some areas that apply also to working class types: most products are made by men and tested on men. For example cars: there is 1 female sized car crash dummy in the whole of Europe, which means cars are safer for men in a crash. Medicines are routinely tested only on men, since "hormones interfere with the studies". This means men have better medical outcomes.

Here's the problem with your argument.

Nobody is saying that white privilige means that if you're white, you always have it better than when you're not white.

e.g. if you're white and poor, of course you don't have it better than if you're non-white and rich.

The point is, that ceteris paribus, you have it better being white. And that is what we call privilege.

And this shows in countless studies which correct for all non-ethnic factors such as income, neighbourhood, parents' education etc. You'll find worse outcomes for non-whites in ceteris-paribus studies inn jobs/hiring, healthcare, safety, education, political empowerment etc.

So I'm glad you admit that people have it rough simply because of their skin, that's what white privilege means, you not having it rough because of your skin but because of other reasons which affect everyone else too. That doesn't mean you can't have it rough, it just means it's not related to your skin color, and that's a privilege.

Nobody is saying that white privilige means that if you're white, you always have it better than when you're not white.

Bollocks. Lots of people are saying that, or at the very least saying things that directly imply this with arguments to historical injustices which, though real and serious, have no causal bearing on the specific case being discussed.

"Ceteris paribus" is a wonderful average at which no one lives. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are white. That has zero impact on the earning power of a West Virginia coal miner whose job is never coming back and had gotten hooked on Oxy.

> Bollocks. Lots of people are saying that, or at the very least saying things that directly imply this with arguments to historical injustices which, though real and serious, have no causal bearing on the specific case being discussed.

Lots of people say vaccines cause autism or that the earth is flat. Just because some people are wrong, doesn't mean I am. Just look up the definition of white privilege, read a book about it. It's been an academic concept for decades, just because a bunch of kids on twitter use it in a wrong way doesn't change the concept.

> "Ceteris paribus" is a wonderful average at which no one lives. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are white. That has zero impact on the earning power of a West Virginia coal miner whose job is never coming back and had gotten hooked on Oxy.

I've got no clue what you're talking about. The point isn't to say that all white people have the same lives, it's an absolutely ridiculous claim. It's to say that it's, all else being equal, easier to be white than black. This has been shown in countless studies, which correct for differences and look to isolate the effect of e.g. skin color or ethnic background, but you choose to ignore it.

For example, tons of studies show if you apply for jobs with a black-sounding name, you get fewer responses than with a white sounding name, even if the resume is the same. That's a privilege which you refuse to acknowledge. It doesn't mean you can't be a poor drug addicted ex-coal miner.

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