I don’t find it to be racist (unless your definition is ‘someone who talks about race’).
But it is exceptionally lazy. Rather than making the case they wish to directly, they’re offloading that work onto their audience, many of whom will obviously defer to popular generalizations. The majority of the time I see “privileged white male” shorthand, what the author is talking about is character and behavior, both of which can be warped by one’s environment or social status. But hiding that entire analysis in three words does wrong by the reader and makes it easy to view poor behavior as some kind of essential trait rather than a failure of socialization.
If we’re looking to shift patterns of misbehavior or help people understand them better, that’s a bad way to start.
But it is exceptionally lazy. Rather than making the case they wish to directly, they’re offloading that work onto their audience, many of whom will obviously defer to popular generalizations. The majority of the time I see “privileged white male” shorthand, what the author is talking about is character and behavior, both of which can be warped by one’s environment or social status. But hiding that entire analysis in three words does wrong by the reader and makes it easy to view poor behavior as some kind of essential trait rather than a failure of socialization.
If we’re looking to shift patterns of misbehavior or help people understand them better, that’s a bad way to start.