| > If you are a white dude, you've never had a bank officer refuse you a loan for bullshit reasons because of his own racism. Non-white people exist, can be in positions of economic power, and can make decisions biased against whites in such positions. If you are white in the US, you are far less likely to have had a bank officer refuse you a loan with some false pretext but really motivated by his own racism -- but being white does not mean that that did not happen to you. > You've never had your resume skipped from a stack because the person looking at it didn't like your foreign sounding name Er, being a "white dude" doesn't mean you don't have a foreign sounding name (White does not imply Anglo-American name, whether given name or family name), in much the same way that being a non-white dude doesn't mean you don't have an Anglo-American sounding name. > or because they were worried you might get pregnant. White dudes can have given names that are more commonly female, so certainly could have a resume bounced from a stack for that reason. > You've never had coworkers contribute to a climate of harassment because "it's just a joke" about rape, sexism, race, etc. Actually, its quite possible to experience that as a white dude, especially in a predominantly non-white or non-male workplace -- especially given a prevalent attitude that whites and males are somehow magically immune to that sort of hostility by virtue of the supposed "privilege" whites and males have in most workplaces by virtue of the on average superior positions of power. There are real and valid reasons for discussing privilege of different groups in broad aggregate social analysis, and even in recognizing that, for networking and other reasons, that privilege can result in an advantage to members of that group compared to otherwise similarly situated members of other groups. OTOH, its also very easy to overstate what that "privilege" really means on an individual level, and to let it become a source of blindness towards (or an outright source of license for) discriminatory abuse of power positions against those who happen to be in groups that are, on average, better situated with regard to power relations, even when the subject individual is not advantageously positioned in the relevant power relationship to the instance of discriminatory abuse. The concept of "Privilege" is, IOW, an important part of understanding social context and how it affects individual experience, but when it makes you see people only as stereotyped members of groups and blinds you to the real individual circumstances, well, then its just another source of racism/sexism/etc. |