Why? Surely a state that allows some people a comfortable base on which to build wealth that benefits everyone is a good thing rather than a bad thing.
Don't forget that everything as an opportunity cost. Would you rather eg James Watt fretted about privilege, or used his to build the steam engine?
I'm sick and tired of this privilege bullshit. I didn't get to where I am now because of being a white male.
Pretending that privilege doesn't exist because you haven't been on the wrong side does no good to yourself or society.
You are assuming I go to a nice school and I'm from a nice middle class family that can support all my stuff. I'm not. I dropped out because I had no money and I was born in eastern european ghetto filth.
Not have my sexuality be a real risk to my career and health? What do you know about my life, my career, my health, or anything, for you to lay baseless "privilege" assumptions?
Being white isn't a ticket to kingdom come and anybody who believes so has to do some deep self reflection.
I've been on the wrong side, the very very wrong side. What the fuck do you know about going to prison? Where was my white privilege when my teeth were being ground into the asphalt by 5 guys bigger than me?
What do you know about not having SHIT to eat for days at a time? Not seeing your parents for weeks at a time to just bring food to the table? What do you know about spending 5 years travelling through many different countries just to escape a communist regime, to leave your family behind, to have nothing?
"Privilege" is something created by the people that are already born into an upper class world and spend their days speculating upon the lives of the less fortunate which in turn sprouted this movement.
Do not fucking sit here and spout this poisonous bullshit, because it doesn't exist in the extremes of life, only in the made up comfortable society you've been brought up in, maybe.
You don't know shit about me.
This doesn't mean that you personally have benefited from this; but my grandfather smoked three packs a day and lived to be 90+, does that mean that smoking doesn't shorten the life expectancy?
Possibly, though being white (or male) has influence on whether you get into the right college (or go to college at all).
Being white or male might have helped a bit, but I'm a white male and I didn't get paid 500k right out of school. If EVERY white male make 500k starting the day they graduated I'd believe that your theory holds true. But they don't.
This is a baffling claim. So no one has any privilege over anyone else unless they are among the 1% top earners in society? I can't even comprehend such logic.
In any case, it's not my theory (I was just explaining it), and it's hardly without merit: this has been demonstrated in studies, such as [1] and [2].
While we're busy setting absurdly high evidentiary bars, let's make it a cool million.
Take, for only a small example, stop and frisk, and disparate prosecution and sentencing. It should really go without saying that there is a racial element to this -- police officers don't know how much money you make or how much class privilege you can truly bring to bear when they decide to stop you, pull you over, search you, or arrest you. Being black or brown in a predominately affluent (and chances are, predominately white) neighborhood doesn't make you exempt from being bothered - in fact, it makes you look more "out of place" and more likely to be stopped, and I say that both from a casual review of literature but also my personal experiences. And of course, just about every day we hear about all sorts of wealthy black people (Forrest Whittaker comes to mind as a relatively recent high-profile example) who get treated like criminals at stores because overzealous security guards have unconscious (or sometimes even conscious!) biases.
The fact that black & brown people are disproportionately stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, and sentenced means that white people are disproportionately not stopped, not searched, not arrested, acquitted, or given lenient sentences. It means that a lot of white kids have been given second chances / have had their illegal habits or decisions overlooked and gone on to still get financial aid (drug convictions can permanently disqualify you for federal financial aid), not be a felon, and get decent jobs in decent neighborhoods when the exact same doors are closed for many people of color who didn't do anything differently.
Yes, there is a class component to all of this - being wealthy may make it easier to get off after your arrest - but the biases in the criminal justice pipeline at and before arrest are really more race-based than anything.
I don't think that anyone thinks that being white affords white people the kinds of privileges that a $500k/year salary gives you. That's really a pretty absurd suggestion and I think most reasonable people who are not completely ignorant should be aware of all of the white poverty that exists to know that. But, even after controlling for everything else - including crimes committed - it does help to keep you out of prison and the criminal justice system.
That's not the only privilege, either. But in our overly incarcerated society, it's an important one.
It's not race that plays in so much as economic cues that sadly are not evenly distributed. A black guy in an M5 BMW wearing a suit likely faces no more prosecution than a white guy. The cops tend not to fuck with people who appear to have the means to buy influence or sue, irrespective of race.
If blacks are more poor than whites (on average) and thus have less education/family/friends/etc lottery to win, that happens not because they're black but because they're poor.
Being poor sucks but people aren't poor because they're black anymore than they're black because they're poor. You can't try and find causation either way there. People are generally poor because their parents were poor and it's not terribly common for people to aspire to much more than what they're used to. But that has more to do with how people bias themselves than how society aggressively discriminates.
You can't win the lottery without buying a ticket and there are plenty of people white, black, asian, latino, etc who don't try to purchase tickets.
Can't say I've ever been to any neighborhood that would fit that description. Have you?
> Being poor sucks but people aren't poor because they're black anymore than they're black because they're poor.
I think the causal links binding race & poverty are a little more complex than you're giving them credit for.
Scale (e.g. how "much" one affects the other) is certainly up for debate. Arguing that they have no impact on each other whatsoever doesn't pass the sniff test.
I agree that I oversimplified but not by a huge margin. We human beings are very nearly robots that are programmed by our parents and once on our own, we tend to do what they taught us. Not 100% of course, but to a large degree.
We are the product of our parents. They are the product of their parents. And so on, it's basically recursive. Yes that's a bit reductionist, but there is a lot of truth to it.
So how is it that blacks today are disproportionately poor? My outside-in theory is because their parents parents parents...parents were slaves and didn't really have any reason to plan for the future and figure out how to accumulate wealth or any of that. If you can't own property (and as a slave you couldn't) there's no point to figuring that out, only how to either escape or survive. And then after that add in 100 years of subjugation and you've got a pretty good recipe for not necessarily teaching your kids how to try to get rich or at least middle class.
So what I'm saying is that if you took someone who was black and poor (and thus didn't necessarily learn the skills necessary to escape poverty) and magically turned his skin white on the day he turned 20 he wouldn't all of a sudden get rich as shit because a bunch of white guys would suddenly shower him with money. Might his life be a little easier? Sure, but it wouldn't get dramatically better. Similarly if you took a guy from a white middle class background and magically turned his skin black he wouldn't lose all the things his parents taught him and be poverty stricken. Might his life be a touch harder? Sure, but I don't think he would immediately go to jail just because he's now black.
What do you think would happen if you took a black male from an affluent black family and turned his skin white? How much would that help him? What if you took a white male from a poor family and turned his skin black? How much would that hurt him?
I would argue that it's far, far more important to somehow get magically transplanted from a poor family to an affluent one than it is to have the color of your skin magically changed from black to white.
That's a really roundabout way to say that I don't think there are much in the way of causal links that bind race and poverty. Or that if there are, you have to go back quite a ways to find it. I think how you're raised and what skills your parents teach you are far more important than the color of your skin. Family and upbringing, 90%, race 10% or something like that.
If you disagree with me I'm very open to hearing what you have to say. This isn't a deeply held belief that's core to my being but rather some rambling thoughts I had on the subject.
Privilege is most often applied to discuss life in a society that is already well off and thats true. I think this is because no one question the privilege of being born in a wealthy suburb rather then a shanty town. But the betterment of life people within and without of any society are not mutually exclusive goals.
http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/explaining-white-pri...
Because God knows powerful white males like nothing more than helping less powerful white males climb the next run on the ladder. Especially less powerful white males from Eastern European.
(and yes, the internet needs a sarcasm tag).
Even my local anarchist space has been overrun by identity politics (not that I'm an anarchist, just they used to do some interesting things there until privilege spouting dictators took it over to constantly preach about identity politics). I'm thinking about funding an entirely new free space just to get rid of that cancer but I suspect they will just show up to protest how we aren't conforming to identity politics, because the left here cares more about policing and attacking each other than they do accomplishing anything.
Know who is on the wrong side? Poor people born in 3rd world countries, with no food, jobs, infrastructure, nothing. On the top of that, a lot of them live in a freaking civil war.
People born in the USA, man or woman, who is middle-class+, is privileged beyond any dream of the majority of the world population.
I don't even tell many people in places like Eastern Europe enjoy better quality of life right now, with maybe somewhat less cash - in safe, walkable, well-designed cities, with better food and environment and less spoiled societies with a strong demand of democracy (nobody wishes to return to Soviet era and every government looking like doing so will be thrown out quickly).
The real bogeyman is pretending that people don't discriminate against their own kind. Just as in society as in work people have prejudices against those they don't know any many are formed based on societal norms.
Assigning privileged just because of skin color is another form of racism. Its an excuse. Not every white person was born on the right side of the tracks, not non-white was either. Fortunately most of us don't think of privileged status based on color, unfortunately some only do.
The word is just used to make people feel guilty. So they lash back. Not a helpful discussion technique. Why not just say 'genes' or 'heredity' if that's what we mean?
I think the discussion is mostly confused and non-productive, when it resorts to using charged words over the correct ones, and seeks to insult those who admittedly wield more power.
Because privilege derives from many sources and is much more complex than any one of them.
It is unfortunate that it is sometimes used, or taken, to shut people out. This is not the intention of the word. At its best it calls someone to take account of their unconscious biases.
The postmodern feminist has a very simplistic and Western-centric (particularly American-centric) worldview where being white and male makes you prosper, but being black or white and female makes you suffer.
This fails to address for countless nuances and by default simply stating "You're white, ergo you're instantly privileged." is just false and dishonest.
It's also funny how the end goal is to foster social equality, yet when you have every single slightly different group forming its own political advocacy and demanding radical shifts in human behavior/special accommodations, you're only stratifying things even further. I guess this can be warranted if people focused on actual issues, but instead most of our attention in the Western world is focused on people making ribald jokes in public places.
That’s not what modern (that is intersectional) feminism says. It says that whiteness gives you privilege over colored people. It says that being male gives you privilege over people who are female. And being rich gives you privilege over people who are poor. An interaction between a middle-class black man and a rich white woman can be a fascinating minefield, where either of them can be the „oppressed” side depending on the context. In fact it’s getting more popular to use the word „kyriarchy” to avoid the overly-specific „patriarchy”.
Of course yes, many feminists actively hate intersectionality, and others don’t completely grasp the context. But ignoring its existence in modern feminism shows certain amount of ignorance or bad will. The radical thought goes against the dominance-obsessed behavior in general.
Not inherently and once again, very centric to Western culture.
It says that being male gives you privilege over people who are female.
Historically and still in certain areas, yes. But once again complicated and dishonest to inherently portray it as such. Especially in the West, where it can be completely false. That or the privileges of being male are equalized by the privileges of being female (and please don't tell me they don't exist).
And being rich gives you privilege over people who are poor.
Oh wow, and bears shit in the woods. No wonder people mock the social sciences.
In fact it’s getting more popular to use the word „kyriarchy” to avoid the overly-specific „patriarchy”.
Kyriarchy is a moronic term, as virtually all systems have some concept of power or control.
If I make generalizations of an individual of a class based on characteristics of the class as a whole, that is racism. Example: "A young black male like you is much more likely to be a criminal."
But if you do the same thing with privledge, that is considered acceptable (and an indicator that you are an enlightened) Example: "A white male is more likely to go to a school that can afford up to date books" (from macimumloam.)
Both things are true. But if go around saying the first one all the time whenever I speak to a black male I'll be ostracized, but if I say the second, everyone will feel good about themselves about showing some white male his place.
(Posting from a throwaway account because of just this reason.)
In the second case it is an example of how society will affect you based on your race, outside of the personal actions of that person. The sentence makes no judgment on that person's character.
That doesn't judge their character but you still can't go shouting it whenever anyone brings up black people.
Instead of being so heavily concerned with what you "can" and "can not" say without being racist, its important to focus on why these statistics do exist and understand why they are true.
Your statement implies that the student is stupid because they are black. That is racist and strictly false. So why do these students score lower? Probably due the incredibly high level of institutionalized racism that they experience every day of their life.
We need to work towards building a better society together, and eliminating societal constraints based on characteristics beyond their control characteristics. By focusing on how you can't say racists things (and if you didn't know it would be racist, then not bothering to understand why), and how that is unfair to you takes focus away from the real issues. Black students are scoring lower on the SATs, and its because as a society, we have institutionalized racism towards them. That is the great injustice here, not the lose of anyone's right to remain ignorant.
I'm not implying people are stupid because they are black. That is just something you are picking up from nothing. What I said is the English version of: P(scores is in bottom decile | student is Black) > P(score is in bottom decile | student is White).
Is there a difference between someone being "stupid" and someone scoring very low on a g-loaded intelligence test? The first definition of stupid on Google is "lacking intelligence". Is it wrong to say someone whose intelligence test scores are very low is stupid? I'd probably say test scores <25 percentile = stupid, between 25 percentile - 75 percentile average, >75 percentile smart. (Obviously you have to make sure the test isn't biased which is why I originally mentioned math).
If I changed from saying scored bad on the SAT to being illiterate as an adult does that make my statement any better. It seems like no one can say someone who is illiterate isn't stupid.
My point isn't to worry about what you can and can not say without being racist. I already know that judging individuals based on their race is wrong. I'm trying to use an analogy to say that if we can all agree that saying one thing is wrong, saying another thing about judging white people when it is also a generalization/stereotype is equally wrong.
"A young black male LIKE YOU is..." vs "A white male is..."
Regardless, facts are facts. If (big if) black men are incarcerated more per capita than white men, it is not racist to say so. What is racist are the usual reactions:
* Calling on the "black community" to denounce the culture that supposedly causes this
* Discounting the idea that police might be structurally racist and arrest black men less than white men, or investigate crimes typically committed by people with low economic means more
* Discounting the idea that the justice system might be structurally racist and find black men guilty on sketchier evidence
* Discounting the idea that structural oppression plays no part in this and that black people "just decide to join gangs and commit crimes" without any insight into the pressures of their life.
* Pointing out to every black man you meet that they are more likely to be criminals (I am actually aghast at the idea that you think this is not a contemptibly rude thing to do), when you don't point out to every white man you meet that they are more likely to be paedophiles.
I completely would agree that I have privilege. I was brought up by two loving intelligent college graduate who put a high emphasis on education and nurtured my interests in technology from a very young age. Unlike some people, my race or gender did not make things harder for me.
I think it is very offensive to people when they are told to "check their privilege" and that because they are white they automatically went to a good school and etc., when in the case of rfnslyr he had nothing to eat and had to escape a communist regime.
By comparison race and sexuality are only tiny factors. On top of this, even if you are white, straight, etc, you can still have a shitty life through random chance. What use is it to divide people into these specific categories when there are millions of other factors as well?
Women on freelancing sites definitely earn a lot more than men, i know a lot of men pretending to be women there to get projects easier, and not a single case of reverse. People who make their living of freelancing probably know what they are doing. And that is precisely due to (real or imaginary) positive sides of women as workers - being attentive to detail, better communicators, and more reliable - i can hardly imagine a girl forgetting about her unfinished gig and going drinking while that what's normally happens to guys all the time. If i was a customer i'd be that kind of reverse sexist either.
Being middle+ class definitely helps :)
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Privilege_checklist
Reading these constructively might require that you at least admit the possibility that you receive some help in life other than the effort that you directly put in.
I do not have "privilege" and I think it's disgusting that people offset their own deficiencies with someone else's imaginary "privilege" rather than working hard.
Victim culture is poisonous. Do you see how my "privilege" just adversely affected me instead of imaginarily pushing me in the right direction as you so define it? Randoms on the internet telling me I had an invisible hand to help shove me in the right direction.
Does that not discredit my effort? Is that not ironic and counter to what privilege actually is in the context you are using it?
Now I have to deal with people thinking I was skyrocketed into the good life simply because I'm a tall white male. The reality is I gave up a substantial portion of the beginning of my life to propel myself into the life I'm in.
It took countless hours of mental agony and breakdowns to finally repair myself to a point where I'm able to be a viable athlete in this hyper competitive concrete jungle.
I spent my nights and days studying finance, programming, and mathematics. I did not go out with friends. I kept to a very strict routine to better myself, and after years, it has finally fucking paid off.
Do not talk to me about privilege, I know what poverty is. You are disillusioning yourself and those around you.
If you at least skim read the checklists you will see that most of the examples don't take the form of anything like handouts or support groups.
By telling me "Do not talk to me about privilege, I know what poverty is." you are using the concept of privilege in your argument and are essentially telling me to check my privilege. I'm ok with that.
Privilege isn't about discrediting anyone. It is about helping us understand the experiences of other people.
I am asking you to not discredit ME based on your definition of privilege, which is really just a generalization under a different name. You generalized and put me in the "white male" category, then applied blanket assumptions to that group as a whole.
There is no such thing as "privilege". There is bias, and it differs from person to person. One manager may care if they are hiring a short lesbian black woman, another may not, that is up to the dynamic of the two individuals and cannot be attributed to some sort of greater force, privilege.
At the end of the day, in this field, it is your work that matters. If you come to me with a shit portfolio and a 2.0 GPA, and you happen to be a short black lesbian female, that has less to do with your privilege and more to do with the fact that your works sucks.
I hire people. I hire people old, young, black, white, transexual, poor, wealthy, gay, straight, anyone. It's the work that matters.
Anybody who patches up their own deficiencies with "privilege plaster" should steer themselves in a different direction.
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Lived_experience
When you say that bias differs from person to person, I don't think anyone would disagree. Do you believe that it differs such that the net effect is exactly neutral across the population?
At the end of the day, in this field, it is your work that matters.
I admire your willingness to put forward a testable hypothesis. Unfortunately, it has been tested, and (at least for scientists) is wrong: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3478626/
Which leaves you claiming that you are peculiarly immune from robustly observed cognitive biases. This may well be true for you particularly, but even if that is the case it is still not a widely followed effect (even among people who believe themselves to be gender-blind).
Are you a white male? The fact that you had a hard life doesn't negate the fact that you derive certains advantages from being white, and male.
You say you've had it hard. That's an absolute measure. Privilege is a relative measure. If you had had the same circumstances, except you were black, your life would be hard-ER. A relative measure.
You should take a look at the linked privilege checklists. For each item that applies, ask yourself: would my life be hard-ER, in a relative sense, if this weren't true for me?
What just happened was, someone commented that I have it easy because of my supposed white privilege. They simply just assumed I'm from a white middle class post-college family just because of my skin color.
Now if this was real life, and I worked at some nice company, now I have to fear people blaming my position and my state in life because of my privilege, when in reality it was me who struggled day and night with basic necessities to get to where I am today.
Nobody is denying that privilege exists in our little micro upper class bubble, which is my point exactly. Did some hiring manager have a better outlook on me when they first met me? Yeah probably, but that doesn't do shit for me if I can't back myself up with good work.
It's just such a dumb inane topic. I am now being discredited and disregarded because of "white privilege".
The benefits of being a white male in this society are negligible at BEST.
That's probably going to be the funniest thing I read on HN today.
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html
That's an article on white privilege. For numbers 1-50, would you make the claim that they either i. do not apply to you, OR ii. are of only marginal use, and you'd be fine with them not being true
Would you make that claim for all 50? Again, NO ONE is saying your lift hasn't been hard. Privilege is a relative claim. It can only make life harder or easier, not hard or easy.
Many of these items are nothing but restatements of "if I want to stick to my own (racial) kind, it helps to be in the majority." Since I have no particular desire to stick to my own (racial) kind, I'm fine with them not being true.
Of the remainder, I assert they are not a big deal. In a few days I'm travelling from a location where they are true (UK) to a location where they are not (India) and it was not a significant factor in my decision. I've devoted far more thought to things like the the weather, consistent running water or a gym than I have to anything on this list.
This is a strawman. The concept of privilege isn't "white males are always fantastically successful"! Privilege means that, on average, someone identical to you but female, dark skinned, disabled, etc. would - again, in general - have a harder time of it.
Look at it from my point of view. I now live in a world where:
- I don't ever have to think about money, or food, or basic necessities - Everything I do is simply making use of all the shit that has been delivered right to my doorstep
Define "harder", because if you are struggling in the first world with such intangibles like race, skin color, and sexuality, then you really need to check yourself and realize how good you have it.
Because some random manager or someone formed an initial bias about you based on your outward appearance is not privilege, it's personal bias and we all have it.
The fact that I work at arguably the whitest place to work (largest investment bank in a first world country) that employs over 50% females of all varieties already wrecks your "privilege" assumption.
Do you know why? All those different people were hired solely based on their work and experience, nothing else.
I see all these articles and postings about what white privilege affords me, but none of it is concrete. I can't find anything tangible, where someone was explicitly discriminated against in the tech industry for their skin color or sexual preference.
I'm also gay as it fucking gets, yet I don't go around flaunting it and start making it a problem, to the point where my life revolves around my sexuality.
This is demonstrably false on a non-anecdotal scale. http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.htm...
The general logic that goes behind these checklists seems to be "I'm a woman in tech. Something inconvenient or unpleasant happened to me. Therefore all women in tech suffer from this institutionally and men are privileged not to experience it."
Most complaints make me believe the author(s) have some sort of narcissistic or histrionic personality disorder, with only a few legitimate points.
Could not have said it better myself.