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Something must be wrong. My finances are in shambles; mainstream newspapers won't publish my pieces; and, no matter how much I try to convince Fox News that they need male eye candy as well, they just won't give me a show. Then I gaze into the mirror at my alabaster complexion and say, "What's wrong with this picture? I'll have to address this at the next White People's Meeting."
Of course, it isn't really true that all we Caucasians get together in a big conference hall somewhere and, rubbing our hands together with devilish glee, conspire as to how we're gonna get ourselves some'a that there white privilege. Yet you wouldn't know it listening to egghead academics, media mouths, and uncivil rights agitators.
Put "white privilege" into a search engine and no small number of results will be for ".edu" URLs, which means that our mental institutions of higher learning are busy teaching "critical race theory" and ideas such as "Whites are taught not to recognize white privilege" and that, as this University of Dayton site informs, white persons have a "special freedom or immunity from some [liabilities or burdens] to which non-white persons are subject[.]" There is also something called "The White Privilege Conference" and a website devoted to it (I actually had to log on to make sure it wasn't a spoof site, but truth is stranger -- and stupider -- than fiction). And American Thinker recently wrote about an event called "Erasing White Privilege," during which whites sat around in a room confessing their collective oppressor sins while "people of color" discharged rage, "yelling at them" and "preaching." Ain't Obama's post-racial America grand?
Of course, I don't imagine there are many plumbers, supermarket workers, or forklift operators at such meetings -- and not just because they actually have to work. It's also because they know something:
White privilege is a myth.
It's also because they know something: White privilege is a myth.
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Daily effects of white privilege
Elusive and fugitive
Earned strength, unearned power
"I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group"
Peggy McIntosh
Through work to bring materials from women's studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to women's statues, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.
Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of while privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.
I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks.
Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women's studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, "having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"
After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are just seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.
My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow "them" to be more like "us."
Originally posted by phishyblankwaters
reply to post by Dark Ghost
It's also because they know something: White privilege is a myth.
The extent to which your quoted text goes, yes, that is indeed a myth.
but let's be realistic shall we? and forgive me, I'm far too white and lazy to actually post the statistics but...
Whites earn more than minorities.
Whites are more able to get student aid and loans to go to school
White males are more likely to have life saving heart surgery than their black counterparts, where heart disease is a leading killer of black men (other than gun violence of course)
i'm white. I don't attend meetings, I don't get a secret white's only letter in the mail. But I'm not going to sit here and convince myself we're equal. We aren't. I have more opportunities than the average black person in my position would.
Hell, we haven't even fixed the income disparity between men and women, let alone addressed the issues of equality when talking about race.
i don't get racially profiled and pulled over for driving while white.
I don't have store owners following me around when I'm shopping, because I'm white.
People don't cross the street, or clutch their purse tightly, when they see me approaching
Both sides of this take it to extremes, but don't sit here and pretend everything is hunky dory. And stop blaming Obama for everything, honestly, do you think this is what he intended? Obviously not, this is dividing, not bring people together.
Obama may be a bad president, he may in fact be an idiot, but he's not foolish to think he can win another term on the black / minority vote alone.
Originally posted by OutKast Searcher
reply to post by Dark Ghost
People confuse "white privledge" thinking it should mean that all white people are rich and successfull...and if you can find one example of that not being true...well then "white privledge" must by a myth.
The facts are right there for everyone to see...whites as a group are better off in America than any other group.
Originally posted by Down4Whateva
Lol, do blacks in africa get black plivaledge.
Nope, they get screwed by nonaficans that came in and raped their land for the resources.
Sorry but the good ole boy club is still alive and well in america.
White privaledge is more then a socioeconomic issue.
People like Dr Fancise Crest Welson and Michelle Alexander have good books on the subject.
I will agree that race is used as a way to divid and concure but that dosnt mean we can be dismissive about the role its played in the development of america and the western world.
Originally posted by someguy0083
A white man driving down a predominantly black neighborhood and cops are watching him. It is very unlikely that the white man will be pulled over.