What my bike has taught me about white privilege.

[laughing dog]

White privilege is racist, no doubt about that. Perhaps you could explain how using the term "white privilege" makes one a racist.

I already did explain it by highlighting that skin color is not the reliable determinant of privilege any more than of bike riding, but your racist ideology blinds you to understanding how using a person's skin color to determine who is privileged over whom is definitionally racist (and that is exactly what the use of the term does).

You are confused. There is no explanation by you whatsoever in this thread prior to my question why the use of the term "white privilege" is racist. If you think there is, you should be able to point to it. Furthermore, regardless of your view of the validity of concept of "white privilege", you are not explaining why its use is racist. For example, slavery of black people was racist, but the use of the term slavery is not racist. Perhaps if you focused on responding to the content of a post instead of childish insults, this might be more fruitful.

 

[doubtingt]

I already did explain it by highlighting that skin color is not the reliable determinant of privilege any more than of bike riding, but your racist ideology blinds you to understanding how using a person's skin color to determine who is privileged over whom is definitionally racist (and that is exactly what the use of the term does).

You are confused. There is no explanation by you whatsoever in this thread prior to my question why the use of the term "white privilege" is racist. If you think there is, you should be able to point to it. Furthermore, regardless of your view of the validity of concept of "white privilege", you are not explaining why its use is racist. For example, slavery of black people was racist, but the use of the term slavery is not racist. Perhaps if you focused on responding to the content of a post instead of childish insults, this might be more fruitful.

Your well established inability to accurately comprehend the rules of basic grammar is not my burden to overcome. The "white" in the term refers to a persons skin color as the determinant of whether they have the referred to trait of "privilege". It inherently, uses skin color to make judgments about the lives of individuals and what they have experienced and overcome.
It is just as racist and for the same reason as if one used the term "black retardation".

 

[AthenaAwakened]

ASIDE

<puts on school teacher hat>

Never use two words when one will do. Never use a paragraph when a sentence will do. Arguments should be debates of ideas, not tests of endurance.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

White privilege isn't a trait people have but a description of a system under which people live.

 

[doubtingt]

ASIDE

<puts on school teacher hat>

Never use two words when one will do. Never use a paragraph when a sentence will do. Arguments should be debates of ideas, not tests of endurance.

Some of us like to present reasoned arguments with supporting information rather than just baseless assertions of faith. In fact, Laughing Dog just showed why this is needed even when a basic understanding of how words work and the meanings they imply ought to be something we can take as a given.

 

[doubtingt]

White privilege isn't a train people have but a description of a system under which people live.

That's a distinction without a difference. The term along with the context in which you use it, including the bike analogy, still presumes what is true about the lives that individual people live based upon their skin color, ignoring huge variance within groups and overlapping distributions between groups. It is racist.

 

[Trausti]

White privilege isn't a train people have but a description of a system under which people live.

. . . a religion whose tenants must be taken on faith and any inquiries regarding actual evidence are eschewed as unpardonable heresy. Mere doubt or questioning is seen as proof of its existence.

 

[PyramidHead]

White privilege isn't a train people have but a description of a system under which people live.

That's a distinction without a difference. The term along with the context in which you use it, including the bike analogy, still presumes what is true about the lives that individual people live based upon their skin color, ignoring huge variance within groups and overlapping distributions between groups. It is racist.

Out of curiosity, doubtingt, if there WERE actually a systematic tendency within society to favor white people, in the same way that the author claims streets are designed to favor drivers, what would you call that tendency? Or are you saying it is literally impossible for one race to be at an advantage over another due to the way society is structured?

- - - Updated - - -

White privilege isn't a train people have but a description of a system under which people live.

. . . a religion whose tenants must be taken on faith and any inquiries regarding actual evidence are eschewed as unpardonable heresy. Mere doubt or questioning is seen as proof of its existence.

My landlord takes his tenants mostly on faith, with the occasional criminal background check.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

White privilege isn't a train people have but a description of a system under which people live.

. . . a religion whose tenants must be taken on faith and any inquiries regarding actual evidence are eschewed as unpardonable heresy. Mere doubt or questioning is seen as proof of its existence.

How do you define white privilege?

If we aren't defining it the same way, there is no heresy, but there is miscommunication.

 

[dismal]

How do you define white privilege?

It's like, the opposite of riding a bike.

 

[laughing dog]

You are confused. There is no explanation by you whatsoever in this thread prior to my question why the use of the term "white privilege" is racist. If you think there is, you should be able to point to it. Furthermore, regardless of your view of the validity of concept of "white privilege", you are not explaining why its use is racist. For example, slavery of black people was racist, but the use of the term slavery is not racist. Perhaps if you focused on responding to the content of a post instead of childish insults, this might be more fruitful.

Your well established inability to accurately comprehend the rules of basic grammar is not my burden to overcome. The "white" in the term refers to a persons skin color as the determinant of whether they have the referred to trait of "privilege". It inherently, uses skin color to make judgments about the lives of individuals and what they have experienced and overcome.
It is just as racist and for the same reason as if one used the term "black retardation".

Thank you for an actual explanation. However, using your reasoning, the use of the term "black slavery" would be racist when, in fact, it is description of a social institution. Is there something you forgot to mention in your explanation that might make it more convincing?

 

[AthenaAwakened]

How do you define white privilege?

It's like, the opposite of riding a bike.

care to be more specific?

No?

that's what I thought.

NEXT!!

 

[Jokodo]

Thanks, doubingt, for demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt that you're incapable of putting yourself in someone else's shoes for even a minute. QED.

Yes, there are reckless cyclists - although I bet they are not as prevalent as you assume, ever heard of confirmation bias?

1 in 10 cyclists stopping at stop signs is overly generous toward cyclists. Just this morning, in the 1/2 mile that I was driving on surface streets I saw 2 bicyclists and 1 ran a stop sign and the other ran a red light. In contrast, I've seen maybe 1-2 cars blow through stop signs and lights in the past year (I'm not talking racing to beat the yellow, I am talking just looking to see if there is traffic moving on the cross street and acting light the sign or light is not even there).

But there's a big difference: a reckless cyclist is at most times a minor nuisance to drivers while a reckless driver (and even a driver who isn't at all wantonly reckless, just insufficiently aware of the needs of cyclists) is a potentially lethal threat to cyclists.

Wrong. A reckless cyclist is a lethal threat to themselves, and they put themselves in at least as much danger as car drivers do.

That is not a contradiction to what I said. A reckless cyclist can be a lethal threat to themselves and yet a minor nuisance to drivers - and it would still be true that reckless drivers (including drivers that would never consider themselves as reckless) are also a lethal threat to cyclists. In other words, a reckless cyclist may well be the greatest danger to himself, and yet drivers (even drivers who consider themselves reasonable) are a much greater danger to the most reasonable cyclist than even the most reckless cyclist will ever be to drivers.

I have directly witnessed 3 serious bike wrecks in the past year, and all were blatantly the fault of reckless, law-breaking cyclist behavior, such as riding the wrong way down a one-way street, and weaving around cars then abruptly turning left without warning/signaling. Also, this is a threat to car drivers too, who are often forced to suddenly break to avoid hitting reckless cyclists, of even to veer into an oncoming lane because one cyclist illegally passes another by veering into the car lane as cars are passing (which I had to do just last night).

To pick one of your complaints:

Why pick one?

Because, unlike some people, I have no intention to make two-page essays out of my posts.

Because you can't even pretend to rationalize away the reckless danger of blowing through stop signs and red lights that most urban cyclists do on a regular basis?

They also constantly ride down one-way streets

I don't know whether your city's one-way streets have exceptions for cyclists (in my city, many though not all do).

It is illegal in my city, and the fact that such an inherently dangerous special exemption is given to bicyclists is some cities only goes against the overall argument of whining victimization (in addition to the fact that they are almost never cited for their constant violations of traffic laws). One way streets are generally narrow with minimal room for passing and usually slow max speeds. When a cyclist is going in the same direction, the passing speed average around 10 mph and it is easy to wait to pass the cyclist when its safest (e.g., when the road widens, or at the next stop sign in the rare change the cyclist stops).

That's a joke, right? I don't count the number of times cars overtake me in narrow lanes literally ten meters away from a red trafic light! If they can't even refrain from doing it when it's obvious they don't gain anything from it (I'll easily catch up with them as they wait for the trafic lights), why should I trust them to wait for a safe opportunity? In certain kinds of streets, I've taken to the habit of riding in the middle of the lane - and that's not being reckless, it's being self-preserving. If the street widens, or if there's a couple of empty parking lots in a row, I'll pull to the side to let any cars pass me. I might even wait to let several cars pass. But I want to be in control of when they overtake me because it's an empirical fact that drivers cannot be trusted to wait for a safe opportunity.

When the cyclist is coming in the opposite direction, you now have two vehicles coming at each other on a narrow road at a speed = the sum of each of their speeds, which would typically be 40 mph on a 25mph one-way road. That means a bike coming the wrong way quadruples the passing speed, which not only exponentially increases harm when an accident occurs, but greatly increases the odds of a collision in part by reducing the reaction times and reduces the odds that both parties have time to see each other before they pass.

Bullshit. The fact that I see the car, and can determine whether the driver has seen me, gives me a chance to pull out that I don't have with a car coming from behind. It's true that the harm when an accident occurs is greater, but the chances are orders of magnitude smaller, not larger.

The two are forced to pass each other without having the option of waiting for an safer moment, and to do so at much higher speeds with less time to see and react to each other. Also, when a reasonable cyclist is already riding the correct way down the one-way street, then the wrong-way cyclists creates a situation where 3 vehicles are trying to pass each other on a narrow one-way road.

Didn't you just say drivers wait for a safe spot to pass? Are you retracting that ridiculous claim now?

Not to mention, the danger it poses when any vehicle (car or bike) are pulling out onto a one-way street. The safest way to pull onto a street is to look in the direction from which traffic is coming as you pull into the lane from which the traffic is coming. When making a left turn on a two-way street, that means you focus on looking left as you pull into the road, then shift focus to the right as you enter that lane of traffic. With a one-way street, there is only a single lane, which is not a problem if traffic can only come from a single direction. But when it can come from both directions but within a single lane, they you are fucked. You are forced to pull into the lane while focussed on one direction. Sure, you can and should look first in the other direction, but that is not the same and not as safe. The fact that you would put forth the idea that cycling the wrong way down narrow city streets can be made legal and blindly dismiss the inherent increase in danger this causes whether legal or not, shows that your baseless accusation of confirmation bias was pure hypocritical projection.

You will be glad to hear that cyclists are very much aware that they can easily be overseen and adapt to it by not necessarily expecting cars that are pulling into the lane to be aware of their existence.

So sometimes it actually feels safer to ride against the one-way street, and the reasons are drivers who half of the time don't even realise that they're being reckless.

What a bunch of dishonest crap. Cyclists do it to create the shortest path to their destination.

They do that too. That doesn't change the fact that due to the behaviour of drivers who can't put themselves into other people's shoes for even one moment, it can actually be safer than sticking to the rules.

 

[Unbeatable]

The "white" in the term refers to a persons skin color as the determinant of whether they have the referred to trait of "privilege". It inherently, uses skin color to make judgments about the lives of individuals and what they have experienced and overcome.
It is just as racist and for the same reason as if one used the term "black retardation".

I don't know if was your intention to indirectly make a point about the counterproductiveness of the use of terms like "racist" to stigmatize discussion of real statistical tendencies, or if you're just missing the point of what other people mean and what they're objecting to when they speak of white privilege or racism, but your analogy just leads me to rethink the unacceptability of "black retardation".

 

[AthenaAwakened]

This discussion puts me in mind of the little boy who kept hitting his little brother in the head every time the little brother would standup.

Father: why do you keeping hitting brother on top of his head?
Big Brother: why does he keep standing up?

 

[EricK]

uh, yes.

no.

and I am sorry that two words, relatively new to the lexicon that describe NOT YOU or anyone else but a system and its centuries of evolution makes you uncomfortable. The system makes me uncomfortable. The effects of white supremacy are what makes poor white miners in Kentucky vote for Tippy the Turtle, a man so deep in mine owner's pockets he bleeds coal dust. These effects are what makes an entire so called news network makeup shit about the POTUS that they can rant about and rile their audience about, when they could just do actual journalism and critique him of actual things he, his administration, and members of his party's congressional contingent are actually getting wrong everyday.

And this is not only not about you, it isn't even mostly about the color white, it's about the privilege. If Africans had sailed north and stolen Europeans, we would be talking about black privilege because black people would have been the enslavers, the arbitors of right and wrong, the writers of the cultural narrative and the public law. Instead of Jim Crow, we would have had Bob Gull, or some other silly name.

and it isn't just white privilege
It's male privilege
It's heteronormative privilege
It's able bodied privilege
It's age privilege
It's class privilege
It's educational privilege

Take any of the list or any you can think of and you can use the bike analogy to describe it.

It's not about you. The culture was here before you were born and will be here after you die.

It is a system of civilization put into place and adapted through the centuries that creates and perpetuates privilege, not you and any other person.

Yet every person living under privilege is in some way or another constrained and stifled by it.

But if it's not "about you" what are we actually meant to do about it? How are we meant to take it into account?

Suppose I know exactly how two people fit into each of the above categories. eg person 1 is a 50 year old, black, university educated, heterosexual female etc and person 2 is a 20 year old white male homosexual who is not at college etc. What further assumptions, if any should I make about them because of the way they are categorized? How, if at all, should I treat them differently because of the different ways they are categorized?

 

[Angry Floof]

no.

and I am sorry that two words, relatively new to the lexicon that describe NOT YOU or anyone else but a system and its centuries of evolution makes you uncomfortable. The system makes me uncomfortable. The effects of white supremacy are what makes poor white miners in Kentucky vote for Tippy the Turtle, a man so deep in mine owner's pockets he bleeds coal dust. These effects are what makes an entire so called news network makeup shit about the POTUS that they can rant about and rile their audience about, when they could just do actual journalism and critique him of actual things he, his administration, and members of his party's congressional contingent are actually getting wrong everyday.

And this is not only not about you, it isn't even mostly about the color white, it's about the privilege. If Africans had sailed north and stolen Europeans, we would be talking about black privilege because black people would have been the enslavers, the arbitors of right and wrong, the writers of the cultural narrative and the public law. Instead of Jim Crow, we would have had Bob Gull, or some other silly name.

and it isn't just white privilege
It's male privilege
It's heteronormative privilege
It's able bodied privilege
It's age privilege
It's class privilege
It's educational privilege

Take any of the list or any you can think of and you can use the bike analogy to describe it.

It's not about you. The culture was here before you were born and will be here after you die.

It is a system of civilization put into place and adapted through the centuries that creates and perpetuates privilege, not you and any other person.

Yet every person living under privilege is in some way or another constrained and stifled by it.

But if it's not "about you" what are we actually meant to do about it? How are we meant to take it into account?

Suppose I know exactly how two people fit into each of the above categories. eg person 1 is a 50 year old, black, university educated, heterosexual female etc and person 2 is a 20 year old white male homosexual who is not at college etc. What further assumptions, if any should I make about them because of the way they are categorized? How, if at all, should I treat them differently because of the different ways they are categorized?

What keeps such a system in place is a lack of awareness of it among the people who inadvertently create it. Much of what is unfair in our culture is not due to anyone making conscious decisions to be unfair or holding conscious views that unfairness ought to be built into the system. No one, or at least very few people, are consciously contributing to an unjust social system.

Our unjust culture exists because we are each attached to our self image of "I'm not a racist" and, more importantly, the belief that "I make rational, conscious choices in all I do and so do not contribute to this problem, therefore I will do nothing different," when in reality, we are all, ALL of us, under the influence of a great many factors of which we are unaware, and factors that are not the conscious doing of any person or group in particular.

What to do about it? Challenge whatever you think is true. Strive to see other points of view. Look for new perspective. Do what Athena does to continue the conversation. Challenge your fellow human beings when possible and if you're comfortable with that. We can't change something we can't see, and we're not going to see anything differently from what we are conditioned to see if we can't question ourselves and our culture.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

no.

and I am sorry that two words, relatively new to the lexicon that describe NOT YOU or anyone else but a system and its centuries of evolution makes you uncomfortable. The system makes me uncomfortable. The effects of white supremacy are what makes poor white miners in Kentucky vote for Tippy the Turtle, a man so deep in mine owner's pockets he bleeds coal dust. These effects are what makes an entire so called news network makeup shit about the POTUS that they can rant about and rile their audience about, when they could just do actual journalism and critique him of actual things he, his administration, and members of his party's congressional contingent are actually getting wrong everyday.

And this is not only not about you, it isn't even mostly about the color white, it's about the privilege. If Africans had sailed north and stolen Europeans, we would be talking about black privilege because black people would have been the enslavers, the arbitors of right and wrong, the writers of the cultural narrative and the public law. Instead of Jim Crow, we would have had Bob Gull, or some other silly name.

and it isn't just white privilege
It's male privilege
It's heteronormative privilege
It's able bodied privilege
It's age privilege
It's class privilege
It's educational privilege

Take any of the list or any you can think of and you can use the bike analogy to describe it.

It's not about you. The culture was here before you were born and will be here after you die.

It is a system of civilization put into place and adapted through the centuries that creates and perpetuates privilege, not you and any other person.

Yet every person living under privilege is in some way or another constrained and stifled by it.

But if it's not "about you" what are we actually meant to do about it? How are we meant to take it into account?

Suppose I know exactly how two people fit into each of the above categories. eg person 1 is a 50 year old, black, university educated, heterosexual female etc and person 2 is a 20 year old white male homosexual who is not at college etc. What further assumptions, if any should I make about them because of the way they are categorized? How, if at all, should I treat them differently because of the different ways they are categorized?

Policy, practice and narrative got us into this mess and policy, practice and narrative are what gets us out. Outcomes matter and where the outcomes don't match the input, we take that to mean there is a problem. We don't assume we know what the problem is but we can not be so frightened as to choose to deny its existence rather than find cause makes us feel bad.

 

[Angry Floof]

This guy gets it. https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152687483099769&set=vb.71760664768&type=2&theater

 

[barbos]

The person who wrote the article ain't kiddin' about how dangerous it is to ride a bicycle here. It's so awful that I won't even consider getting a bicycle even though I could use the exercise.

Having said that, I like it as privilege analogy too.

I rode a bicycle in East Lansing, it was OK to me.