White Privilege?

[Dill]

(08-17-2018, 10:54 AM)fredtoast Wrote: No.  What I am saying is that since whites hold such a disproprtionate amount of these positions it is a privilege to be white.

If minorities can hand out 1% of the favors and whites can hand out 99% of the favors then it is a privilege to be white.

(08-16-2018, 08:14 PM)Beaker Wrote: The term privilege in the racial context we are discussing means a person is receiving some type of advantage (whether knowingly or not) from someone else based solely upon the color of their skin. 

You don't have to control entire industries to have power over others. Minorities all over the US are policemen, hiring managers, teachers and professors, judges, politicians, loan officers, prosecutors, housing managers, small business owners, large business owners and a myriad other types of positions in which they have power over others. 

Are you denying that minorities exist in these types of positions in today's society?

If you are,  then you're a racist and part of the problem.
If you are not, then privilege isn't confined to white people.

People might be missing a point here.  In the US today, whites AND minorities may hold positions of power owing to merit, not race, and many whites and minorities may exercise the lawful power of those positions, such as granting loans or selling real estate, without reference to race at all.  A black housing manager who rents to both black and white is not an example of "black privilege." Nor is a white housing manager who rents to both black and white an example of "white privilege." 

Further, the question is not whether there is a greater proportion of whites in such positions or whether "some" blacks hold powerful positions too.

And still further, it is not a question of whether some one person receives a benefit from some one other person based solely upon the color of his her skin.

The concept of "white privilege" describes a structural effect resulting from the fact that whites held power across a range of institutions for centuries. Central to this concept is also the notion of cultural capital, and the fact that previous generations of blacks in the U.S. were limited in their opportunities to acquire this.  To understand the concept, one needs to move beyond the notion of racism as simply the actions of racist individuals. A black housing manager who preferred to rent to blacks might be in a position to exercise that preference, but the exercise would not then constitute some mirror image "black privilege."  The concept of "privilege" in question here is embedded in a structure of often unspoken norms which regulate schools, advertising, business and government, and which people (both black and white) silently (for the most part) internalize and accept as they grow up.

Before one can determine whether "white privilege" still has any explanatory power in post-segregation America, people need to be clear on what the concept actually describes.  Best to get clear on this using historical examples first.

Hopefully people can agree that "white privilege" was, at one time, a consequence of institutions like segregation. Most whites could apply to most any college they qualified for in 1950. Most blacks could not, and further, had not the opportunity to acquire the cultural capital which would qualify them for higher education. This would have consequences for their children, who also could not acquire that capital. Some white people also did not have this capital, but race was not the barrier.  Few whites in 1950 (probably none, in fact) thought their access to higher education constituted some kind of "privilege." Unless very wealthy or legacy admissions, they had to work for their grades like everyone else. Same for access to housing loans and real estate. "I've worked for everything I've got" most would say, and would resent being told of any special privilege they had. But in this case the privilege consists in being able to attend college at all if you make the grade, or get a loan if you have collateral, or buy a house if you have the money. However, "privilege" was only acknowledged with respect to other whites. E.g., the white guy who gets to go to Yale because his daddy went is "privileged," not the white guy who gets to go to college at all.  Blacks didn't figure into the social reference at all, so privilege with respect to blacks does not register at all among whites, though it was very clear to blacks that all whites have this privilege with respect to education, loans, housing, etc.

A more subtle example:  young black women and men in the 1940s-50s straightened their hair and did their best to make themselves up like whites, in part because all the dominant models of beauty in the media were white and implicitly defined black hair, features and skin as ugly and inferior. This situation was not an intended effect of advertisers and media (for the most part), but a result of the fact that standards of beauty were determined by the dominant race which controlled the means of producing, disseminating, and maintaining those ideals.  Some whites could not live up to these ideals, sure, but it was not because they were white. Most blacks could not, and it was because they were black.  White privilege appears here in the fact that whites were not born into a world which implicitly defined them as ugly because of their race. Virtually all blacks were, and so had this additional struggle to define their self worth against prevailing social ideals which negated that worth.  Hard to imagine a young white person of this period walking around thinking "Gosh I sure am lucky the dominant ideals of beauty don't exclude me by racial definition"--though he was indeed lucky in that way.  A group of three or four hair-dressers in Detroit, LA, and New York in 1965 who start giving their patrons afros don't suddenly construct a world of black privilege against which whites must define themselves. Nor do a few black business which sprout up in those communities, dedicated solely to helping blacks buy homes.

So white privilege is not about whites getting 10% off at the grocery store or ushered to the head of the line at the post office. It is not about one white guy here or there exercising racial prejudice in hiring, so that a black who does the same is therefore creating "black privilege" (See! They do it too!).  It is the collective effect of a range of institutions, which goes beyond individual intentions. The question of whether it still exists is a question about social terrain and whose perceptions and definitions are included in defining that terrain.