White Privilege?

[Dill]

(07-10-2018, 10:48 AM)Beaker Wrote: I would contend that these terms provide people who already feel downtrodden that there are even more cards stacked against them. They promote more victim hood and hopelessness. If I had been told my whole life that racism is holding me down and keeping me from getting what I want, that can do two things...spur me to overcome, or cause me to say why bother, they won't let me win anyway. Now throw on top of that the relatively recent terms of institutional racism and white privilege and there's two more things I have to overcome to make it. Can you see how those make the deck seem even more stacked when in essence, they are both already part of racism? To me, I just feel they make the problem seem larger (and therefore harder to overcome) and further divide or separate the races rather than work towards bringing us together.

Thanks for the thoughtful answer.

If you consider the history of the US struggle for civil rights, there is little evidence that regarding racism as a personal choice of some or even most whites has inspired and driven change.  On the other hand, looking at how it operates in and through institutions certainly has; think of the research behind Brown vs Board, which provided both legal target and strategy. Think of King and CORE and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who went, not for "racism" in the abstract, but for laws, institutions, municipally sanctioned practices.

I have seen no evidence that specifying modes of racism, identifying more specifically where and how it operates, does anything but spur people to target and change it.  I don't want to speak for groups usually targetted for racism in the US, but as an observer I have seen no indication that their membership feels that more terms means more racism, more obstacles. Like Racism PLUS institutional racism.

So it's not really "larger" but "more specific"--that is what is at stake in using these terms.  Also "white privilege" is not a term usually addressed to racial minorities in the US as an additional difficulty to overcome. To the degree there is such privilege, it is a function or effect of racism, not something separately added. Inequality creates it by default (that's why so many whites who do not recall "choosing" their privilege are mystified and angered by the concept); equality erases it.