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Comment by macimumloam | Hacker News Reader

It's not imaginary at all though. Do you truly believe that there is no benefit in everyday life gained by being a white, straight, middle-class+, male? Is there not a benefit to going to a school that can afford up to date books? To not have being open about you sexuality be a real risk to your career and health? Is there no benefit to not having racial slurs yelled at you? To not have many people in society assume that you know less because of your sex?

Pretending that privilege doesn't exist because you haven't been on the wrong side does no good to yourself or society.

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It is imaginary, its a guilt trip imposed by those who need it to profit off of or as an excuse. Oh it definitely existed, don't get me wrong, there were times every countries history where it did.

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.

I think its the loaded work 'privilege' that gets peoples' dander up. It intended to insult, and its the wrong word. Privilege is something given undeservedly, something that can be taken away, and exercised to the exclusion or detriment of others. Being born as whatever(white-male) is not a good fit for that definition. It wasn't given, it cant be taken away, and its not 'exercised' intentionally by any means.

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 privilege is definitely meant to get peopled dander up so that they discuss it. Also, as I understand it, the privilege isn't being white, its the average benefit that being white will yield you

So, it gets white males upset, who have all the power. Not very constructive. Further the benefit is accrued through the actions of OTHER people. So who's the right one to educate?

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.

> Why not just say 'genes' or 'heredity' if that's what we mean?

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.

Exactly, privilege is complex. The world does not work in absolutes.

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.

> 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.

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.

It says that whiteness gives you privilege over colored people.

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.

You are right that other people have it worse often through no fault of their own, but this doesn't mean "privilege" is a useful concept. You are also privileged by being born into the late 20th century instead of a medieval village. You are privileged by not having any disabilities. You are privileged if you are attractive (which correlates with a lot of good things.) You are privileged by hereditary IQ (correlates with income.) Especially what country you are born into.

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?

> that privilege doesn't exist because you haven't been on the wrong side does no good to yourself or society.

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 think this is very true, but no one questions the privilege of being born in America. However, people do doubt the average benefit that being male has on professional conversations within the developed world.

Maybe that was true 40 years ago. Nowadays a median middle class natural-born U.S. citizen is a fat type with an old SUV, living in a cardboard house and getting maybe $60k a year. Such a quality of life is within easy reach of every person in the world except maybe totalitarian societies like DPRK (which are very rare) and extremely dilapidated sub-Saharan Africa countries, given he has some brains and will to work hard. We live in a global world.

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).

Looking at the high layers of society, i can see a lot of open gays, much more than i can see around myself. So being straight is probably not such a big advantage.

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 :)

I don't understand.

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.)

I think the issue is this. In the first case you are attempting to pass judgement on the actions a person may or may not take based on their race. in your example, commit a crime, which is an unjust judgement of that person's character.

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.

So what about someone instead saying "A black person is more likely to be stupid (to be concrete: having lower math SAT scores) than a white person."

That doesn't judge their character but you still can't go shouting it whenever anyone brings up black people.

You can't go shouting that because someone with low SAT scores isn't necessarily "stupid".

Here the overarching problem with these statements. They are trying to pass judgment on a race based on certain statistics about them. Is it racist to say that black students on average score lower on the SATs? No, it is a statistical fact. Is it racist to proclaim these students as stupid because of that? Yes, extremely, because you are judging their intelligence base on race without understanding why that statistic might be true.

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.

"Probably due to the incredibly high level of institutionalized racism that they experience every day of their life." I completely agree. I have seen first hand cops being completely racist to minorities. And there are numerous cases of African Americans having their race being a factor in getting a job (http://www.chicagobooth.edu/magazine/sum_fall03/bertrand.pdf). There are a million other difficulties they face. I wan't to do everything possible to remove those barriers.

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.

Look at what you are actually writing here.

"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.

For some more clarification, I agree with the concept of privilege.

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.

No, I truly believe there is no such thing, it's something made up by the entitled. Why is it that I work alongside many tiny asian women and indian women that can barely speak a word of English and are in their 30's?

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.

Nobody is talking about you specifically, and nobody claims that white people are set for life or that no white people have shitty lives. The claim is that, all else being equal, and on average, being white provides a boost.

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?

Sounds to me like that's more a result of your family, smarts, getting into the right college, etc than being white or male. 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. Perhaps it has less merit than you suspect.

Sounds to me like that's more a result of your family, smarts, getting into the right college, etc than being white or male.

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].

[1] http://d.pr/f/guzI

[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

> If EVERY white male make 500k starting the day they graduated I'd believe that your theory holds true.

While we're busy setting absurdly high evidentiary bars, let's make it a cool million.

I think your scale is a bit off; you're looking at how far you or others are from a cushy life near the top, but you really should be looking at the distance from the bottom.

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.

Are there no affluent black neighborhoods where a white person might look out of place?

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.

> Are there no affluent black neighborhoods where a white person might look out of place?

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.

No but I've mostly lived in rural areas, small towns, or suburbs far removed from the actually affluent areas or big cities. The richest people I know personally emigrated from India and obtained US citizenship as adults.

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.

Yeah, unfortunately "white" in this country excludes eastern Europeans, pretty much anyone with an accent. No privilege for you.

I apologize if my previous was worded in way that made it come across as assumptions about you, my intention was more rhetorical questions. No one is saying that any of these characteristics are a free pass to happiness and fulfillment in life. It is just to say that many people do feel the consequences of it within their society and that is unjust.

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.

Link is exactly what it says it is:

http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/explaining-white-pri...

I suppose the "white privilege" folks would just respond "Well, it would have been way worse if you hadn't been white!"

Yes, but you benefit for being in the same class as other white males, who are sometimes very powerful.

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).

Just because you, personally, aren't able to see the benefits of being white/male doesn't mean it's not there. I was getting paid half a million right out of college and the fact that I was a white middle-class male absolutely made a difference -- I don't think I would've broken into the old boys network at my firm without that. Or how about the time I was ticketed for going 105 on a highway in TX with a bag of pot in my car, but the officer decided not to search my car (or even bring up the idea). Or a million other advantages I've received from being who I am.

Welcome to identity politics, it has taken over all discussion and derailed any hope of alternative political movements accomplishing anything except factioning, infighting and bullshit.

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.

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