SimpleDon
Veteran Member
While it may not be a privilege to be white in the US, excuse the play on words, there are many benefits to being a white male in the US still even after sixty years of progress for minorities and women.
An obvious one is that equality in opportunity is still limited to what white males are willing to grant. Take the supposed great equalizer, education. Whites, both men and women go to better schools than non-whites.
I realize that while I risk cries of derailing the thread, I feel that I have to point out that in parallel with white privilege, you also have to consider class privilege, which might be a much stronger support for the existing social order and a much larger impediment to a merit-based society than white privilege. Most of the advantages that white privilege is suppose to bestow on the favored are actually ones of class, not race. Upper class minorities have always been able to insulate themselves and their children from most if not all of the fallout from racism, providing an unearned advantage to be passed on to their children.
We have an example of what I am talking about, the recent thread on legacy admissions to top universities far outnumbering AA minority admissions, both under relaxed criteria, but without the conservatives' outcry in the case of legacy admissions of what they say is important, that the university is admitting less qualified candidates over more qualified candidates. The inescapable conclusion of the thread is that conservatives accept being disadvantaged by class privilege while denying the existence of white privilege.
I agree with you about 'class' privileges (inverted commas because socioeconomic status has tended to replace class as a categorisation in countries without formal or even semi-formal classes) and it may even be the case that they are more advantageous than, say, white privileges, nowadays, in the USA (where, as Randy Newman sang, 'it's money that matters'). It's an interesting topic. Possibly off-topic here, even if related. You wouldn't be the first person to suggest that differences in skin colour have been used to divide disadvantaged groups that might otherwise unite in common cause against the wealthy, the powerful elite and the establishment. It's arguably a bit of an ongoing con job, possibly in the USA more than anywhere else in the world, though it probably exists everywhere. As Gene Hackman's character in the film, 'Mississippi Burning' said (about his father poisoning a neighbouring black farmer's mule), 'as a poor white man, if you ain't better than a poor black man, who are you better than?' Nobody wants to be at the bottom, so last place and second-last place fight about it, when they should both be fighting someone much higher up. Something similar could be said about the middle 'classes'.
This is one reason why at least a bit more socialism would probably benefit most people in the USA, imo, and quite possibly partly why it's been strategically labelled a bogeyman. Another con job, imo.
Maybe we should mainly stick to the issue of white privilege here though, tempted though I am to branch off.
I am sorry that I raised it. Perhaps someone could start a separate thread about it.
I can't host a thread, it takes me too much effort to write posts and I "type" so slowly I answer a post two or three pages after the post I am answering.