Not if his goal is to rule the headlines. He does and says things that can only mean he’s fighting to stay on that front page. And the media keep him there. Publicity is his currency, and he does stupid things to get it.
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Is all press good press? Colluding with Russia seems like bad press. Increasing the defense budget by 50 BILLION and then pretending like Trans people simply cost too much also seems like bad press.
I get he did it intentionally, doesn’t make it any less stupid.
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I have not suggested that you are. Neither, I would add, is it your fault that you enjoy a certain degree of what is commonly referred to as ‘white privilege’ (and what you would perhaps prefer to call ‘a lack of presumptive bigotry owing to skin color’). After all, you didn’t ask to be born white; likewise, you didn’t ask for the US to have the racial legacy that it does. As I said above, it’s simply a fact-of-the-world.
I do get what you’re saying, and will reiterate that I recognize the validity of your point. But it doesn’t change the facts on the ground. So long as you recognize the basic fundamental reality of the phenomena I’m referring to (which you seemed to do upthread), I’m happy to call it pretty much whatever you want (I already attempted to solicit alternative names from @Mufasa, who also objects to the term white privilege, albeit perhaps for different reasons).
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that human dignity should not be a privilege. Unfortunately, it is.
I’ll stick with human dignity. In the war of words and the way it is being waged it seems people would be less likely to want to attack one another over “human dignity” than they are over “white privilege”.
And, on a personal note- I was thinking about this exchange and hope it hadn’t gotten too contentious. I got sloppy with the tenses and instead of using One and We was just using I & You. I really appreciate the challenges to these ethical conundrums and am glad that they’re done with some good, smart people with their own set of well formed principals and ethics. The typical social media garbage has been getting under my skin lately (from both sides).
No worries on my account, brother. I’ve enjoyed engaging with you on it, both in terms of the perspective you’ve brought and the thoughtful, respectful way you’ve brought it. I only hope I have held up my end of the discussion in like manner.
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Yep. Great exchanges!
It’s just a term (“White Privilege”) that just tends to shut down discussion, while putting people in an all-too-familiar defensive mode.
I’ll have to give it some more thought on what would be a good “alternative”; but the concept itself seems to have some major flaws to it.
Care to expand on this?
I don’t think the term “white priveledge” causes defensiveness so much as “check your priveledge”. Always delivered with dripping venom and implied moral authority. The implication is that your mindset is clouded by your advantaged position.
Now me as a guy who had a grandfather that worked his butt off farming, construction, tow boat captain all the way to operations manager. Then dad worked 2 jobs while farming with Grandpa in his off time. Mom worked too. I’ve been working around the house since I could walk and working outside the home since I was 12 years old. First W2 job at 14 years old. Worked 3 jobs through college. My priveledge was having awesome role models and upbringing. Nobody handed us an advantage.
When someone tells me “check your priveledge” the only non-profane response I can think of is “check your sloth”. That catch phrase is personal, there’s no way to have it directed at you and not take it personally… at least at first.
White Privilege as a concept is fine. I get the idea. People don’t treat me poorly because of my skin color, unless I’m on the receiving end of an unprovoked beat-down on a basketball court. I can put aside that isolated incident and get my head around the notion. Being alive and breathing is the first step towards understanding, and I was lucky enough to be descended from Poles who managed to get out of Poland and come to the USA penniless instead of becoming one of the six million or so who were exterminated with the (real, actual) Nazis and Communists in charge.
Water under the bridge, of course. I’m a white American living in 2017 and I generally don’t get a lot of shit from people, which is great. Life in Maine isn’t so bad.
That said, the practice of invoking white privilege, especially the phrase “check your privilege”, strikes me as racist to the core. The idea is that a white person’s ideas and perspective count for less because of their skin color. It is a rhetorical club wielded by racists who want to shut down a conversation.
If I’m missing how the concept of White Privilege and the rhetoric surrounding it is somehow positive, I’d love to hear it.
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Respectfully, and assuming you and your forebears are/were white, you had an entire set of unspoken, unacknowledged advantages going for you. You/they weren’t aware of them, and didn’t ask for them. Further, in no way did the presence of these advantages mean you and/or your forebears didn’t work like dogs to achieve in life. But the advantages were ever-present nonetheless.
For example: If your GF had been black, how likely is it that he would have had the opportunity to have all the jobs he had? Especially when you consider the times in which he grew up, I think it’s fair to say his opportunities would have been far more limited in this regard. Again, let me stress I’m not suggesting for a second that anyone gifted your GF his jobs, or that he didn’t earn every cent, and every advancement, that he received. But his whiteness played a role in affording him the opportunity to be the role model he was for you. Or to phrase it in a way more consistent with how @SkyzykS views the situation, the fact that your GF wasn’t black meant he didn’t encounter barriers (to employment, housing, etc) of the sort that permeated society back in the day (and still does to some extent).
I’m confused by what you’ve written. In the first paragraph, you seem to acknowledge the legitimacy of the concept of white privilege. Assuming this is true, why do you contend that ‘invoking white privilege is racist to the core’? Now, I get that the term can be thrown around in a hostile manner intended to belittle the (white) listener, and/or as a ‘trump card’ intended to delegitimize and stifle opposing opinions. (Personally, I wouldn’t characterize such rhetorical gambits as ‘racist’ so much as ‘rude and unhelpful.’) But assuming the term is being employed appropriately and civilly in the context of respectful discourse, how is doing so ‘racist to the core’?
Again, the concept itself has some legitimacy. Generally speaking, white people get treated well and have been for some time. But even that is a generalization that is, well, pretty racist. My grandparents were on the receiving end of a LOT of anti-Polish discrimination in the Chicago area. We were quite literally the butt of jokes, even decades later during my childhood. Hell, even Ronald Reagan told a Polak joke on the campaign trail.
“Did you know that the Polish Army bought 10,000 septic tanks? Once they learn how to use 'em they are going to invade Russia.”
It is a good joke, but you get the point. The color of our skin did little to guarantee dignified treatment, especially in the 1940’s and 50’s. That said, I’m not a fan of playing “whose ancestors have the saddest story”. I was raised better than that (White Privilege, maybe?), and prefer to just get on with playing my hand as well as I can.
Again, it is how White Privilege is used in discussion that is racist to the core. “That’s your privilege talking”. “Check your privilege”, and variations thereof is as racist as it gets. It is making assumptions about a person based on nothing more than skin color. It has nothing with how the white person’s ideas hold up under the light of truth, its just declaring that the ideas are bad because of the skin color of the person who is sharing it. That’s completely and totally racist. If the white person’s idea is bad, well, why not explain why?
I’m sorry, but I haven’t observed very many of these appropriate and civil uses of White Privilege as a rhetorical tool in a discussion. I just see it being used to shout down white people. If you have examples of this, I’d be happy to consider them.
It’s basically undeniable that on average white people have higher achievement than black people. If you assume that given equal opportunity achievement would be the same on average, then you have evidence that broadly speaking the median white person has more advantages than the median black person.
That doesn’t mean that a given white person necessarily has more advantages than a given black person. Assuming it for a given person is racist because you don’t really know what that person has experienced.
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White privilege is a racist term, yes a racist term. By default, by the fact that one was born a Caucasian, means that one does have the intelligence, experience or careful enough nuanced thought to even speak about race issues with a modicum of decency or mindfulness. As Mufasa said its used to shut down conversation. It’s like telling someone they are to dumb to talk to .
Considering the fact that the US is still majority white, white people have to be involved in the conversation and cannot be shut down over “white privilege”. The only way to solve the problem is to build the bridges between the races and quit name calling and labeling.
I am at least grateful for where I live because either I am blind, or most people around here treat each other with respect and dignity, even if the conversation get difficult.
It seems to me we are all on the same side here, really. And that’s a good thing. What we seem to be arguing about is labels. I am not against labels, academically we need them to categorize and organize things. But I am tired of the words xenophobe or bigot, racist, white privilege, mansplaining, etc.
We need to do away with this shit because most of it does not apply to most people. Just because one may disagree with another on something doesn’t mean they are bad people who are deserving of a bad label.
I would disagree with the underlying assumption that ‘Polish’ is a race.
As I mentioned upthread, there are multiple forms of privilege. And I never meant to imply (if I did) that having white skin guarantees an individual will be accorded respect and treated with dignity. But I dare say that, by and large, your Polish forebears in the 40s and 50s fared much better–and received more dignified treatment overall–than did the typical AA at that time. That is the white privilege they enjoyed (a statement which should not be construed to suggest it was something they were in any way responsible for).
Neither am I. Further, if we go back far enough, everyone’s ancestors were mistreated at some point. Rather, I am concerned with ameliorating current objective, quantifiable inequities that are the direct result of an undisputed legacy of institutional, systemic and de jure racism.
By definition, white privilege is a function of nothing but skin color, and it adheres to every white person around. So it’s difficult for me to see how acknowledging these facts is inherently racist. Now, if a nonwhite person twists the concept into one that is somehow unique to white people–ie, if they contend that white privilege stems from some sort of fundamental flaw in the makeup of white people, rather than from the particulars of the history of our country–I would agree that such would be a racist view.
Um, I sorta thought we were having just such a discussion.
It is true that some black people enjoy certain advantages absent from the lives of some (many) white people. However, I would argue that those advantages do not nullify at least some of the white-privilege-related advantages that adhere to the seemingly less-advantaged white people. (Have a 25 y.o. black NBA multimillionaire and a 25 y.o. white barista stand half a block apart and both try to hail a cab, and you’ll see what I mean.)
As it doesn’t imply one race is superior to another, there is nothing racist about the concept of white privilege. It is simply an explanatory construct that many people (not all, obviously) find compelling and useful (in a heuristic sense).
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Is this an experiment you have actually done enough times while controlling for other variables to have a statistically significant result or just a projection of your assumptions about the world?
I don’t really know how this experiment would go, but your assumption that you do tells much more about how you see the world than anything about the world.
So unless I think one group of people is superior to the other, I’m not a racist?
No, I have not performed this experiment. But a whole lot of AAs have.
rac·ism
ˈrāˌsizəm/
noun
Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior. [emphasis mine]
We were talking about whether or not a black NBA multi-millionaire would have better/worse luck than a white barista hailing a cab in the same place. None your links say anything about that. The only one that gets even close is the Al Roker one, but its anecdotal and kind of comes off as him raging about a single taxi that didn’t stop one time.
Strong attempt at a reframe, though. My entire point was that while median people from different races may face an average disparity that doesn’t mean the outliers from either race don’t overlap. And you responded by talking about averages.
Good to know that racism requires a belief of superiority. Segregation and white nationalism aren’t racist. And white privilege is in good company.
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I’d say most press is good press even if its meant to be bad. It at least says one thing," This is a very important person and we need to pay attention to him. I think the press attention is backfiring on the press.
Neither is gay, but his parents were discriminated against any way.
I guess in regards to Trump you may be right. His son literally tweeted proof of collusion between his campaign and Russia and his diehard people still herpderp’d all the way to the bank.
“the press” is a group of businesses. these businesses are in place to make money. I would point you to…
Sure doesn’t seem like it’s backfiring. Seems like they’re making record breaking profits.