[rfnslyr]

No, I truly believe there is no such thing, it's something made up by the entitled. Why is it that I work alongside many tiny asian women and indian women that can barely speak a word of English and are in their 30's?

You are assuming I go to a nice school and I'm from a nice middle class family that can support all my stuff. I'm not. I dropped out because I had no money and I was born in eastern european ghetto filth.

Not have my sexuality be a real risk to my career and health? What do you know about my life, my career, my health, or anything, for you to lay baseless "privilege" assumptions?

Being white isn't a ticket to kingdom come and anybody who believes so has to do some deep self reflection.

I've been on the wrong side, the very very wrong side. What the fuck do you know about going to prison? Where was my white privilege when my teeth were being ground into the asphalt by 5 guys bigger than me?

What do you know about not having SHIT to eat for days at a time? Not seeing your parents for weeks at a time to just bring food to the table? What do you know about spending 5 years travelling through many different countries just to escape a communist regime, to leave your family behind, to have nothing?

"Privilege" is something created by the people that are already born into an upper class world and spend their days speculating upon the lives of the less fortunate which in turn sprouted this movement.

Do not fucking sit here and spout this poisonous bullshit, because it doesn't exist in the extremes of life, only in the made up comfortable society you've been brought up in, maybe.

You don't know shit about me.

[dobbsbob]

Welcome to identity politics, it has taken over all discussion and derailed any hope of alternative political movements accomplishing anything except factioning, infighting and bullshit.

Even my local anarchist space has been overrun by identity politics (not that I'm an anarchist, just they used to do some interesting things there until privilege spouting dictators took it over to constantly preach about identity politics). I'm thinking about funding an entirely new free space just to get rid of that cancer but I suspect they will just show up to protest how we aren't conforming to identity politics, because the left here cares more about policing and attacking each other than they do accomplishing anything.

[icebraining]

Nobody is talking about you specifically, and nobody claims that white people are set for life or that no white people have shitty lives. The claim is that, all else being equal, and on average, being white provides a boost.

This doesn't mean that you personally have benefited from this; but my grandfather smoked three packs a day and lived to be 90+, does that mean that smoking doesn't shorten the life expectancy?

[msandford]

Sounds to me like that's more a result of your family, smarts, getting into the right college, etc than being white or male. Being white or male might have helped a bit, but I'm a white male and I didn't get paid 500k right out of school. If EVERY white male make 500k starting the day they graduated I'd believe that your theory holds true. But they don't. Perhaps it has less merit than you suspect.

[dannypgh]

I think your scale is a bit off; you're looking at how far you or others are from a cushy life near the top, but you really should be looking at the distance from the bottom.

Take, for only a small example, stop and frisk, and disparate prosecution and sentencing. It should really go without saying that there is a racial element to this -- police officers don't know how much money you make or how much class privilege you can truly bring to bear when they decide to stop you, pull you over, search you, or arrest you. Being black or brown in a predominately affluent (and chances are, predominately white) neighborhood doesn't make you exempt from being bothered - in fact, it makes you look more "out of place" and more likely to be stopped, and I say that both from a casual review of literature but also my personal experiences. And of course, just about every day we hear about all sorts of wealthy black people (Forrest Whittaker comes to mind as a relatively recent high-profile example) who get treated like criminals at stores because overzealous security guards have unconscious (or sometimes even conscious!) biases.

The fact that black & brown people are disproportionately stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, and sentenced means that white people are disproportionately not stopped, not searched, not arrested, acquitted, or given lenient sentences. It means that a lot of white kids have been given second chances / have had their illegal habits or decisions overlooked and gone on to still get financial aid (drug convictions can permanently disqualify you for federal financial aid), not be a felon, and get decent jobs in decent neighborhoods when the exact same doors are closed for many people of color who didn't do anything differently.

Yes, there is a class component to all of this - being wealthy may make it easier to get off after your arrest - but the biases in the criminal justice pipeline at and before arrest are really more race-based than anything.

I don't think that anyone thinks that being white affords white people the kinds of privileges that a $500k/year salary gives you. That's really a pretty absurd suggestion and I think most reasonable people who are not completely ignorant should be aware of all of the white poverty that exists to know that. But, even after controlling for everything else - including crimes committed - it does help to keep you out of prison and the criminal justice system.

That's not the only privilege, either. But in our overly incarcerated society, it's an important one.

[msandford]

Are there no affluent black neighborhoods where a white person might look out of place?

It's not race that plays in so much as economic cues that sadly are not evenly distributed. A black guy in an M5 BMW wearing a suit likely faces no more prosecution than a white guy. The cops tend not to fuck with people who appear to have the means to buy influence or sue, irrespective of race.

If blacks are more poor than whites (on average) and thus have less education/family/friends/etc lottery to win, that happens not because they're black but because they're poor.

Being poor sucks but people aren't poor because they're black anymore than they're black because they're poor. You can't try and find causation either way there. People are generally poor because their parents were poor and it's not terribly common for people to aspire to much more than what they're used to. But that has more to do with how people bias themselves than how society aggressively discriminates.

You can't win the lottery without buying a ticket and there are plenty of people white, black, asian, latino, etc who don't try to purchase tickets.

[doktrin]

> Are there no affluent black neighborhoods where a white person might look out of place?

Can't say I've ever been to any neighborhood that would fit that description. Have you?

> Being poor sucks but people aren't poor because they're black anymore than they're black because they're poor.

I think the causal links binding race & poverty are a little more complex than you're giving them credit for.

Scale (e.g. how "much" one affects the other) is certainly up for debate. Arguing that they have no impact on each other whatsoever doesn't pass the sniff test.

[msandford]

No but I've mostly lived in rural areas, small towns, or suburbs far removed from the actually affluent areas or big cities. The richest people I know personally emigrated from India and obtained US citizenship as adults.

I agree that I oversimplified but not by a huge margin. We human beings are very nearly robots that are programmed by our parents and once on our own, we tend to do what they taught us. Not 100% of course, but to a large degree.

We are the product of our parents. They are the product of their parents. And so on, it's basically recursive. Yes that's a bit reductionist, but there is a lot of truth to it.

So how is it that blacks today are disproportionately poor? My outside-in theory is because their parents parents parents...parents were slaves and didn't really have any reason to plan for the future and figure out how to accumulate wealth or any of that. If you can't own property (and as a slave you couldn't) there's no point to figuring that out, only how to either escape or survive. And then after that add in 100 years of subjugation and you've got a pretty good recipe for not necessarily teaching your kids how to try to get rich or at least middle class.

So what I'm saying is that if you took someone who was black and poor (and thus didn't necessarily learn the skills necessary to escape poverty) and magically turned his skin white on the day he turned 20 he wouldn't all of a sudden get rich as shit because a bunch of white guys would suddenly shower him with money. Might his life be a little easier? Sure, but it wouldn't get dramatically better. Similarly if you took a guy from a white middle class background and magically turned his skin black he wouldn't lose all the things his parents taught him and be poverty stricken. Might his life be a touch harder? Sure, but I don't think he would immediately go to jail just because he's now black.

What do you think would happen if you took a black male from an affluent black family and turned his skin white? How much would that help him? What if you took a white male from a poor family and turned his skin black? How much would that hurt him?

I would argue that it's far, far more important to somehow get magically transplanted from a poor family to an affluent one than it is to have the color of your skin magically changed from black to white.

That's a really roundabout way to say that I don't think there are much in the way of causal links that bind race and poverty. Or that if there are, you have to go back quite a ways to find it. I think how you're raised and what skills your parents teach you are far more important than the color of your skin. Family and upbringing, 90%, race 10% or something like that.

If you disagree with me I'm very open to hearing what you have to say. This isn't a deeply held belief that's core to my being but rather some rambling thoughts I had on the subject.

[icebraining]

Sounds to me like that's more a result of your family, smarts, getting into the right college, etc than being white or male.

Possibly, though being white (or male) has influence on whether you get into the right college (or go to college at all).

Being white or male might have helped a bit, but I'm a white male and I didn't get paid 500k right out of school. If EVERY white male make 500k starting the day they graduated I'd believe that your theory holds true. But they don't.

This is a baffling claim. So no one has any privilege over anyone else unless they are among the 1% top earners in society? I can't even comprehend such logic.

In any case, it's not my theory (I was just explaining it), and it's hardly without merit: this has been demonstrated in studies, such as [1] and [2].

[1] http://d.pr/f/guzI

[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

[doktrin]

> If EVERY white male make 500k starting the day they graduated I'd believe that your theory holds true.

While we're busy setting absurdly high evidentiary bars, let's make it a cool million.

[consz]

Just because you, personally, aren't able to see the benefits of being white/male doesn't mean it's not there. I was getting paid half a million right out of college and the fact that I was a white middle-class male absolutely made a difference -- I don't think I would've broken into the old boys network at my firm without that. Or how about the time I was ticketed for going 105 on a highway in TX with a bag of pot in my car, but the officer decided not to search my car (or even bring up the idea). Or a million other advantages I've received from being who I am.

[wisty]

Yes, but you benefit for being in the same class as other white males, who are sometimes very powerful.

Because God knows powerful white males like nothing more than helping less powerful white males climb the next run on the ladder. Especially less powerful white males from Eastern European.

(and yes, the internet needs a sarcasm tag).

[hythloday]

Link is exactly what it says it is:

http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/explaining-white-pri...

[macimumloam]

I apologize if my previous was worded in way that made it come across as assumptions about you, my intention was more rhetorical questions. No one is saying that any of these characteristics are a free pass to happiness and fulfillment in life. It is just to say that many people do feel the consequences of it within their society and that is unjust.

Privilege is most often applied to discuss life in a society that is already well off and thats true. I think this is because no one question the privilege of being born in a wealthy suburb rather then a shanty town. But the betterment of life people within and without of any society are not mutually exclusive goals.

[nsxwolf]

I suppose the "white privilege" folks would just respond "Well, it would have been way worse if you hadn't been white!"

[vinceguidry]

Yeah, unfortunately "white" in this country excludes eastern Europeans, pretty much anyone with an accent. No privilege for you.