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by delazeur 3220 days ago
I am also white, and I also grew up poor. I agree that many (though far from all) of the college students who talk about socioeconomic inequality are spoiled brats.

However, you have misunderstood what "white privilege" means: it's not that your life has been easy, it's that the same situations would have been even harder if you had not been white.

1 comments

In theory that's what it was originally intended to mean, but these days there seem to be an awful lot of people who think it does mean that if you're white your life has been easy and you brought every hardship on yourself. For instance, this tweet was doing the rounds a few days ago: "Imagine sucking so fucking bad that being a white guy is hard for you?"[1]. 26,000 retweets, no ambiguity whatsoever, no real pushback or criticism of it that I saw at least on the left.

[1] https://twitter.com/mikeyfrecks/status/896362940634472449

One sarcastic tweet from a random nobody is not a bellweather of leftist discourse. That's a weak joke, not social commentary.
Of (overly pedantic) note: It's actually "bellwether".

A wether is a castrated ram. (Like a steer, speaking bovinely.) In a flock, a wether would be outfitted with a bell to serve as the lead sheep and herald the flock's motions, which is where we get the modern-day term.