It’s possible, but where’s the evidence of that? It sort of seems like you’re trying to suggest my experience doesn’t “count” because it could have been even worse. Is the above really what most people picture when they hear “white privilege”? I don’t think it is. To be clear I’m not questioning the existence of white privilege, but rather its magnitude or extent.
This wasn’t automated, at least not entirely — the notice was signed and hand delivered to my partner at home while I was at work, who then almost cried thinking we were going to be kicked out.
Asking for proof of white privilege in a single instance where we don't have all the facts is to misunderstand the topic.
Shitty things happen to people all the time. But for historical reasons, they happen at different rates to different groups of people. That's how our country started; e.g., only well-off white men could vote. We are slowly reducing that. Maybe in another hundred years we'll have it all sorted.
Your experience counts because it's your experience. But it doesn't say beans about privilege as a system. Your attitude, does, though. You're shocked and angry that a minor slip-up might end up with you out on the street. That's great! You're correct that it's unjust. But there are an awful lot of people for whom that isn't a surprise at all. They expect injustice, because they have experienced a lot more of it.
> Your experience counts because it's your experience. But it doesn't say beans about privilege as a system. Your attitude, does, though. You're shocked and angry that a minor slip-up might end up with you out on the street. That's great! You're correct that it's unjust. But there are an awful lot of people for whom that isn't a surprise at all
So if I as a non-white minority would have a similar reaction as the person you're responding to, in a similar situation, does that mean I'd have "white privilege" as well, because of my "attitude"? If you were tying this explanation strictly to economic status I would understand (even though I myself come from a low economic status anyway), but I cannot fathom what this has to do with race. Defining a psychological response as some kind of racial trait like that almost makes it sound like you're implying that I can't/shouldn't empathize with white people when they get dealt a raw deal, which is such a dehumanizing notion I don't even have words to describe it. Nevermind the other implication that I'm apparently expected to have low expectations and all kinds of troubles just because I'm a minority. But then again, I'd still have that "attitude" of a 'privileged' white person, so maybe that's the loophole that lets me have higher standards?
Back in my home country, everyone knew these sorts of disparities were due to money, nepotism, and/or corruption. But here in America where everyone's much better educated, it seems like everything gets tied to race somehow, as if correlation == causation. Like it wouldn't even surprise me at this point to wake up one morning and suddenly be informed that I'm eating a "white" brand of breakfast cereal, and that I should opt to have more 'racially appropriate' meals. My home country has many flaws, but I've certainly grown to appreciate it's simplicity and lack of convoluted social dynamics the longer I've lived here.
If you are a non-white person, no, I would not say you have had your expectations set by experiencing white privilege.
You are welcome to empathize with white people. I often do. I am one. I empathize with that guy. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge privilege.
If you can't fathom what this has to do with race, I'd suggest you haven't studied the topic enough. There is an ocean of history and rivers of current evidence that in America race drives a lot of this.
For example, you could go read Loewen's Sundown Towns, [1] which demonstrates that America had a major period of violent ethnic cleansing circa 1890-1930 known as the Nadir. That peaked with white people destroying America's most prosperous black district, firebombing it from the air and burning 35 blocks to the ground. [2]
You could go back from there and read about slavery and the civil war. You could read the various declarations of secession, where white people make clear they're willing to go to war because they believe black people are so inferior that they must forever be property. You could read the reports of the Freedmen's Bureau, and how even after the civil war there was endless violent aggression against black people.
Or you could go forward from the Nadir and read about Jim Crow. About white flight. About redlining. About racial exclusion covenants. Heck, right here in the Bay Area after WW II there was public debate over whether the peninsula should be declared whites only in its entirety.
From there you might read about the present. There too there's a ton of material. E.g., the classic resume study showing discrimination against black people. [3] And there are plenty of evocative books. E.g., Julie Lythcott-Haims's memoir Real American about growing up biracial. [4] Or Ijeoma Oluo's So You Want to Talk About Race. [5] And I don't think an understanding of American racial dynamics is complete without a look at white fragility. DiAngelo recently did a talk about her excellent book that's a good intro. [6]
I agree that America could be unique in the extent to which race matters historically and currently. But it's not like other countries don't have major issues with racial discrimination. Wikipedia has a very long list of ethnic cleansing campaigns, for example. [7] Congrats if your home country never had any of that, but that's not where you are now.
I also get why you might think discrimination was due to some correlative factor, like money. I used to think that too. But over time I came around. What changed was studying the history, looking at the evidence, and really listening to non-white people with empathy and an open mind.
> If you can't fathom what this has to do with race, I'd suggest you haven't studied the topic enough
Unfortunately I have studied it a fair amount, and I still don't see it. What I do see is a lot of opinionated history pieces (because history is written by the victors), prompting white people to harbor a lot of needless guilt and negativity towards themselves over the actions of their ancestors as if they were personally responsible somehow, or as if nothing about the culture has changed since then. I certainly don't feel indebted to the world in $CURRENT_YEAR because of violence and warfare my indigenous tribal ancestors committed ages ago, because times change and people change.
It's one thing to remember history, but it's a whole other thing to continually reenact it in an endless loop as if the questionable actors of the past were still alive today. I see no better way for this country to end up having Jim Crow Laws 2.0, than by continuing to reduce everyone to their racial identities in a way that people find "socially acceptable". If most of the people in power begin to view whites as less than [other types of] human, it will only be a matter of time before such sentiments get established into law (again), and that's a scary road to go down. Instead of using history as a means of learning about past mistakes to avoid, I see people using it like a kind of bible/handbook which they use to justify repetitive traditions. And instead of aiming towards a harmonious future of forgiveness, I see everyone scrambling to further their own myopic interests and building a divisive future.
> What changed was studying the history, looking at the evidence, and really listening to non-white people with empathy and an open mind.
Humans, unfortunately, have the tendency to reliably find evidence for whatever beliefs they orient their minds to, so that's neither here nor there. In the words of C. G. Jung: "People don't have ideas. Ideas have people." So anything that isn't a hard science or mathematics might as well be a theological discussion that that point.
I would also wager that many of the non-white people you've spoken to are probably culturally American/Western as well, which would naturally predispose them to similar ideas anyway. Not that this would be your fault in any way, as simply speaking English already brings a lot of selection bias into play. But in my own personal dealings with people who were still culturally rooted in Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and even some from parts of northern/eastern Africa, none of them shared this peculiar Western outlook that an entire race should somehow be expected to atone for their sins indefinitely.
You suggest I immerse myself in the minutia of Amrican political history to reach enlightenment, but my concern is a much more global and philosophical one, that likely won't be answered by mere history books. Also, being lectured about the utmost importance of American history after living in the country for decades doesn't help the stereotype that Americans are self-centered and oblivious about anything beyond their borders. Not that I'm one to buy into stereotypes, but this trope of ignoring the forest for the American trees is fairly common in my experience.
If you have studied America's history of race, you give very little indication.
You then shift your objection to modern activism. I think you're also wrong about its aims and methods. Since offering you resources on the previous topic didn't seem to prompt much but a change of topic, so I won't bother here.
I suggested you immerse yourself in America's history and present of race to understand America's present situation because you said you couldn't fathom that situation. That you now disdain the details as "minutia" [sic] goes a long way to explaining not only why you can't fathom it, but why you probably never will. Your choice, of course, but you shouldn't expect anybody to take your wilful ignorance as somehow meaningful.
I'll again suggest you read DiAngelo's book on white fragility, though, as she covers a lot of the points you explicitly raise here.
> I think you're also wrong about its aims and methods.
I once again very well might be, but I should highlight the fact that "good intentions" alone are not enough to produce beneficial results, and my statements about peoples' aims were to reflect the mismatch between many of these peoples' intentions and the practical outcomes of their actions.
I recommend looking into the work of Paul Bloom to see the arguments for why such endeavors tend not to work out, and to get an idea of the possible implications of relying too heavily on methods/ideologies whose central goals tend to revolve around empathy and good intentions.
> That you now disdain the details as "minutia" [sic] goes a long way to explaining not only why you can't fathom it, but why you probably never will.
It could be that, or it could be that I simply disagree philosophically with the entire premise, and opt instead to take a broader scale look at the dynamics involved. Surely you can acknowledge that would lead to the same outcome, and you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell the difference without looking for it; just as surely as you wouldn't be able to immediately deduce the cause of a fire simply from observing the fact that something is on fire.
If these theories were simply lenses for literary analyses of history that resulted in something akin to movie reviews, then it wouldn't be a big problem, but people like yourself seem to be holding up these philosophically unsound theories as "truths". And all this simply because these ideas are promoted by academics, despite them originating from questionable fields of social science that have suffered the most from the ongoing replication crisis and publication bias. Racial politics have always been justified by "credible" sources in the past, whether it be from biologists or theologians, so I don't see why modern sociologists would be any different.
There's a relevant saying that goes "the map is not the territory", and it implies that there are serious consequences when you start believing that your map is literally an accurate description of reality. Similarly, the saying "all models suck, but some are more useful than others" also applies here, except I'm failing to see the use of this particular model of 'white fragility' and the 'progressive stack', because if anything, it seems to have mostly served to drive racial tensions in this country to an all-time high, and most of it only within the last decade.
If we start finding "white fragility" an acceptable concept, what's to stop anyone from claiming "black/hispanic/asian/etc fragility" later? The problem is that the whole idea is founded upon things that aren't philosophically rigorous enough to prevent it from devolving into a slippery slope, and history has shown that murphy's law is very applicable in these cases. For example, what if I were to frame what's happening here as you "whitesplaining" to an oppressed minority, and that in reality you just can't handle the idea of being wrong because of your own "white fragility"? Would that not simply foment strong feelings of resentment in you, because it implies that you're simply belittling my views because you unconsciously view me as being part of an inferior race? If everything else I've read here goes, I'd think that interpretation would actually be perfectly valid. And if that pattern happened enough times, soon enough my own race would be labeled as "fragile", because that would be a perfectly natural human response to feeling attacked. Luckily, I don't feel inclined to label you a racist here, but realize that this is a power that's completely and arbitrarily under my control, and has been granted to me in this country simply because of the way I was born.
> I'll again suggest you read DiAngelo's book on white fragility, though, as she covers a lot of the points you explicitly raise here.
I watched the talk you linked from her originally, and I found it completely lacking in rigorous explanations. I'm a personality psychology researcher myself, so from my perspective, the whole argument hand-waves away too many individual psychological phenomena/dynamics (actually, worse, she doesn't even cite/reference any to build up her theory), and doesn't seem to propose any falsifiable claims, nor did it even seem to make any cases for its explanatory power at all either. It rather reminded me a lot of astrology: a lot of speculation and projection of ambiguous grand theories onto observable entities, to "explain"/predict various mysterious phenomena in the world. Instead of elaborating about why or how the worldview is derived, she just plainly asserted "this is how the world works" with no justification or possible alternative explanations whatsoever. If that kind of research doesn't scream "replication crisis", I'm not sure what does. As a "scientist of color", this strikes me as pure pseudoscience.
And this isn't even getting into the fact that she seemingly can't help but speak for the views of us "people of color" in completely warped terms. Not everyone that isn't white thinks about (or wants to think about) white people in racial terms, nor attribute all their flaws to their skin color. She literally promotes viewing minorities as harboring resentment, and prejudiced, bigoted thoughts, like it's just our natural state because we're non-white, as if it's some kind of casual fact. Yet she simultaneously claims to "not speak for all of humanity". That is incredibly disgusting.
I'll check out her book anyway, if only to try and understand it the same way I tried to understand Mein Kampf, but my expectations are even lower now after having watched that talk.
It could be all sorts of things. But given your absurdly voluble dodging of points, and give that you're now on to "the anti-racists are the real Nazis", I think stick with my previous understanding.
A particularly striking example is around perceptions of wealth. In asking about wealth, they ask how much the average black household has if for every $100 the average white household has. The average answer was $85; the reality, $5.
It's easy to think white privilege doesn't exist if one focuses, as here, only on the white experience. But both currently and historically, there are huge differences that aren't much talked about. For those up for a read, I recommend Loewen's Sundown Towns: https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...
> A particularly striking example is around perceptions of wealth. In asking about wealth, they ask how much the average black household has if for every $100 the average white household has. The average answer was $85; the reality, $5.
I don't think this was for the average wealth, but for the richest 20%, by race.
The survey question from the study: “For every $100 in wealth accumulated by an average White family, how much wealth has the average Black family accumulated in 1983/2010?”
The problem I have with the narrative you advance is that you, like so many others I've seen in the past few years, seem to just ignore the existence of poor white people. This country has entire towns and cities of poor white people who are facing the same sorts of situations I described, but you make statements that suggest that it's only nonwhite people who experience this sort of thing regularly. Do you think harsh treatment from a landlord would have been a surprise to all the white people I grew up around as a kid who were on food stamps living in rented trailers? These folks had to move around every few years because they got kicked out or couldn't make rent. A sympathetic landlord would have been the surprise to them.
This is exactly the viewpoint I was trying to deconstruct with my original story -- that having all the white privilege in the world does not stop these things from happening to you, no matter what the narrative is, and that these experiences are simply not exclusive in any way to nonwhite people. You are either unaware of a huge demographic of people in the US, or you willingly ignore their presence.
None of this is to say that white privilege just flat-out doesn't exist, but it does explain why your manner of discussing it is highly unlikely to connect with white people who have regularly experienced all the things you seem to suggest only happen to minorities with high frequency. You appear to be discussing an alternate reality that does not exist for them.
This wasn’t automated, at least not entirely — the notice was signed and hand delivered to my partner at home while I was at work, who then almost cried thinking we were going to be kicked out.