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I feel like you're getting something backwards there. Most of the wealth is controlled by white families. This does not imply that all white families control wealth. Those white families that do control the wealth aren't exactly sharing it around with all their 8th cousins. They sure do share it with their direct descendants, and pass on advantages that way, but if any non-rich white person is advantaged, it is likely only because the rich white people are observably racist when delegating their authority and managing their assets. Imagine for a moment someone so racist that their toilets may only be cleaned by a white person, and realize that people like that do exist. So yes, I guess that white loo-scrubber is advantaged, by not having to compete quite as much, in a very minor way. There are plenty of white families out there who know that no-one is on their side, who believe that the illusion of equality is being pursued by cutting them down rather than raising everyone else up. And they believe that immigration is diluting their family's voice, rather than augmenting it. And many of them are "checking out". They turn to a bullet or a syringe, or blindly follow any person that tells the lies they most want to hear. The rich and powerful are free at any time to erase the echo of privilege enjoyed by middle class white people simply by not hiring them preferentially over darker people. Which is what is happening. And while that is happening, the reactive measures to prior institutionalized racism remain in place. The problem is not with affirmative action or feminism or egalitarian movements, but that the old money is far too powerful politically, and that the rich kids are not as disgustingly racist as their parents. So there will likely be a generation at some point where middle class white families have zero advantages, non-white families will have some preferences stemming from ongoing racial equality movements from the 1960s to the present, and the data that show they are no longer needed have not yet been collected and published. And that generation is going to have a lot of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in it, because people will still be telling them about white privilege when they remember growing up in a manufactured home, eating cold Spaghetti-Os and Spam, watching other people get things that they were never offered. I don't quite know if it is already here, or if it is still coming and will be even worse than what we have already seen. But I do know that part of the problem is attributing the source of privilege to any color other than green. |