White Privilege?

[Dill]

(07-09-2018, 11:10 AM)Beaker Wrote: I am not ignoring the problem. I have maintained over and over that racism needs to be combatted. I simply do not believe that terms like white privilege and institutionalized racism need to be added to the lexicon to make it appear like there are more problems. They are both covered under the term racism. If you are afforded an advantage based solely upon your skin color, that's privilege. That privilege was afforded to you by a racist person who made the decision to give you the advantage based upon your race. Racism is the basis for any type of privilege. Call it racism, not privilege because that's the basis of it.

Do you think terms are "just words," or themselves the problem, or can they illuminate aspects of racism that just aren't very plain? Also, fish, grasshoppers and pandas are all covered by the term "animal."  But that doesn't mean there is no advantage to further distinguishing animals with backbones from those without, and/or those with warm blood from those with cold, right?

I think "institutional racism" is a very useful concept, because it decribes practices which are racially discriminitory in effect, but could be maintained by people who do not consciously think about race at all.

Surely you can see how policies like ivy league universities' legacy admissions discriminate, can't you? And calling that "institutional racism" makes it usefully distinguishable from "just racism" of the blatant Charlottesville type? And asking people to be nicer wouldn't help much in this case, since the policy is carried out independently of individual preference, by employees just doing their job.  It is the institution, the policy, which has to be addressed--not some "racist-making-a-decision." 

And would you say that it is utterly impossible that proportion of black drivers stopped for speeding--or stopped and frisked--is proportionally higher than whites?