Don2 (Don1 Revised)
Contributor
Personally...
I have concluded that white privilege is a fact, but I am not sure if the way everyone describes it is always something I want to agree with. So when I see the video I agree with some 85% or so of it. There are just certain ways some statements are framed that I think are more a form of hasty generalization. And so I don't personally have an opposing view to white privilege...just want to tweak the way it is stated.
Here (maybe????) is how I would make a first-pass at trying to frame it: white privilege is the thing that exists if you take me (a white guy) and a theoretical African American who is exactly me and subtract so filtering out the differences that are privileges that are there because I am white. So what kinds of things am I talking about? To me, they are extrinsic, defined by the interactions, perceptions, and opportunity potential assigned by society and culture. But those things lead to actualized, concrete examples statistically different among groups.
So, at any moment I may be aware that M% of people in the country perceive me as a good guy and theoretical African American (or non-white) me would be aware that only (M-n)% of people in the country perceive him as a good guy. I may know I have a N% chance of getting a job, but theoretical African American (non-white) me may have a (N-p)% chance of getting the same job and that has to do with different treatment by society.
When we look at an individual and examine their statuses in life (jobs, careers, losses, prison sentences, whatever), those things have multiple factors that have led to the outcomes. The external factors of perceptions and treatments by society lead to different built up internal factors (like say confidence or job resume), i.e. it is the nurture part of nature vs. nurture. These external factors are also stacked up over time: i.e., beginning even before birth--consider nutrition in gestational environment--not unlike how your financial savings works with compound interest. So the impact is huge. Now, those myriad of factors are not confined to a single dimension of racial privilege and include economic privilege, the very specific status of one's family and property, and offhand, I am not going to make a list of all the things, it's too vast and I'd rather look up some studies on the factors than take a stab in the dark.
There was a point in my life where I disagreed with the idea of white privilege, but I don't think the term was even being used as such. The reason was that I had grown up very poor as a young child and I felt a lot of stings in life. In high school, I was lucky enough to live with a relative other than my parents and had a much more stable and also middle class household. I had discussions with a fellow student--he was Hispanic--about the topic of discrimination and so forth and I had disagreed with him. Later on in life, I see some of the privileges I had but just didn't see the forest for the trees. So, for example, even when I was a poor kid, there were always people around me that had a perception that I had "potential" and that was a subset of the greater societal statistical reality of perception differences. When I made small successes, there was a lot of support and always there was some door open for growth. Later when I lived in a decent "white" neighborhood of a city in a middle class house, I saw racism in some of the white neighbors and my uncle, but this was also part of a trend of having these types of neighborhoods and thoughts of "don't let the blacks in, they'll ruin everything," and so various benefits of the neighborhood were indirectly conferred to me but those things have roots in historical racism. In school, too, the idea of potential and being ripe for success was an extrinsic property of teachers, school officials, and probably not only directly related to the color of my skin, but also the white culture I had greater opportunity to learn, such as language dialect, mannerisms. When I had failings, there was no significant subset of the population thinking I had those failings because of genetic inferiority. And I didn't have to deal with that as an issue of self-esteem due that culture or to be in a constant state of conflict and argument with that culture.
Like I have done above, I think it is okay to give anecdotes and discuss individuals. However, I think when we try to define white privilege, we should shy away from anecdotes and individuals in the definition, and stick to notions of what is extrinsic and interactions to the large populations and culture and aggregates. We want to avoid (informal) logical fallacies like hasty generalizations, anecdotal evidence, etc in the definition itself. (IMO). Still, white privilege is real.
I have concluded that white privilege is a fact, but I am not sure if the way everyone describes it is always something I want to agree with. So when I see the video I agree with some 85% or so of it. There are just certain ways some statements are framed that I think are more a form of hasty generalization. And so I don't personally have an opposing view to white privilege...just want to tweak the way it is stated.
Here (maybe????) is how I would make a first-pass at trying to frame it: white privilege is the thing that exists if you take me (a white guy) and a theoretical African American who is exactly me and subtract so filtering out the differences that are privileges that are there because I am white. So what kinds of things am I talking about? To me, they are extrinsic, defined by the interactions, perceptions, and opportunity potential assigned by society and culture. But those things lead to actualized, concrete examples statistically different among groups.
So, at any moment I may be aware that M% of people in the country perceive me as a good guy and theoretical African American (or non-white) me would be aware that only (M-n)% of people in the country perceive him as a good guy. I may know I have a N% chance of getting a job, but theoretical African American (non-white) me may have a (N-p)% chance of getting the same job and that has to do with different treatment by society.
When we look at an individual and examine their statuses in life (jobs, careers, losses, prison sentences, whatever), those things have multiple factors that have led to the outcomes. The external factors of perceptions and treatments by society lead to different built up internal factors (like say confidence or job resume), i.e. it is the nurture part of nature vs. nurture. These external factors are also stacked up over time: i.e., beginning even before birth--consider nutrition in gestational environment--not unlike how your financial savings works with compound interest. So the impact is huge. Now, those myriad of factors are not confined to a single dimension of racial privilege and include economic privilege, the very specific status of one's family and property, and offhand, I am not going to make a list of all the things, it's too vast and I'd rather look up some studies on the factors than take a stab in the dark.
There was a point in my life where I disagreed with the idea of white privilege, but I don't think the term was even being used as such. The reason was that I had grown up very poor as a young child and I felt a lot of stings in life. In high school, I was lucky enough to live with a relative other than my parents and had a much more stable and also middle class household. I had discussions with a fellow student--he was Hispanic--about the topic of discrimination and so forth and I had disagreed with him. Later on in life, I see some of the privileges I had but just didn't see the forest for the trees. So, for example, even when I was a poor kid, there were always people around me that had a perception that I had "potential" and that was a subset of the greater societal statistical reality of perception differences. When I made small successes, there was a lot of support and always there was some door open for growth. Later when I lived in a decent "white" neighborhood of a city in a middle class house, I saw racism in some of the white neighbors and my uncle, but this was also part of a trend of having these types of neighborhoods and thoughts of "don't let the blacks in, they'll ruin everything," and so various benefits of the neighborhood were indirectly conferred to me but those things have roots in historical racism. In school, too, the idea of potential and being ripe for success was an extrinsic property of teachers, school officials, and probably not only directly related to the color of my skin, but also the white culture I had greater opportunity to learn, such as language dialect, mannerisms. When I had failings, there was no significant subset of the population thinking I had those failings because of genetic inferiority. And I didn't have to deal with that as an issue of self-esteem due that culture or to be in a constant state of conflict and argument with that culture.
Like I have done above, I think it is okay to give anecdotes and discuss individuals. However, I think when we try to define white privilege, we should shy away from anecdotes and individuals in the definition, and stick to notions of what is extrinsic and interactions to the large populations and culture and aggregates. We want to avoid (informal) logical fallacies like hasty generalizations, anecdotal evidence, etc in the definition itself. (IMO). Still, white privilege is real.
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