"It's OK to be White" campaign hits college campuses.

This is beyond disgusting! As people look to external threats, I’d say these folks spewing hate are a greater threat to our nation.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/post-nation/wp/2017/11/03/its-okay-to-be-white-signs-and-stickers-appear-on-campuses-and-streets-across-the-country/

Looks like they are trying to incite an overreaction that may help them convince more white students that they are a discriminated-against group or some such (the usual selling point of the “alt right”).

I mean…it is OK to be white. But the premise of this is absurd:

I don’t understand the jump between “news reports would draw attention to the posters” and “then white Americans…will discover that American journalists and lefties hate white people.” Not the least because the majority of American jouranlists are white people. But it also assumes that the people looking at these posters aren’t already reading the news.

But is it ok to be white?
My kids, in CA, are being taught otherwise.

How is anyone telling your kids otherwise?

They might as well make signs that say “It’s ok to be stupid and racist.” People who seek that sort of negative attention are soon known to be the fools they are. I’m white, btw.

I do understand how some white people, men in particular, might be under the illusion that they are an embattled group. But nothing could be further from the truth.

If you are white and on a college campus, you have likely enjoyed privileges many people can only dream about. You had parents who valued education. You were in a school that prepared you for college level work. Someone in your family either could afford to pay for your education, or had the knowledge to fill out financial aid and loan applications. If you got into trouble for drinking or smoking pot in high school, it didn’t result in a criminal record. You have been given the benefit of the doubt in almost every situation in your life. If you don’t know you’re privileged, you have a lot of history to learn.

@Massmomm I’m not in favor of a sign like that, but what you say really isn’t true of the lower income white kids I know. I know some with criminal records for minor offiences and with parents who don’t value education and don’t have to money to afford it. My family has been trying to help kid like this so I see it.

I agree it can be much worse for people with brown skin. I see that, too. How dark skinned people are the majority of those pulled over by police. It’s very obvious there’s inequity.

But not recognizing that there are white people who also are at a disadvantage because of their family background and SES isn’t right either and won’t help heal the divisions in our country.

@MACmiracle , I do know what you’re saying. A white kid raised in a trailer park isn’t going to feel very privileged. Perhaps “privilege” isn’t the right term, and that’s why some whites are so angry.

Massmomm i dont how to respond to that politely, but dont call it privelage.

More whites below the poverty line than any other race.

I am white. I grew up in a housing project in the South Bronx and don’t consider myself “privileged” in any way,

There are different kinds of privilege. There is economic privilege, for example, where you never have to worry about where your next meal is coming from. There is also what people like to call “white privilege” which people genrally misunderstand to mean “you are white, so have all of the privelege in the world”. This is false. It means that there has not been centuries worth of oppression against people with light colored skin in this country, and so therefore they never started out “behind” anyone in life simply due to their skin color. Being white, you dont need to worry about people following you around in a store, watching like you are about to steal something simply because you are white. In schools, although it is getting a little better now, you grow up with your textbooks all having examples of white people and white characters with few examples of how POC characters have done great things. That hurts a kid’s progress. These are just examples of what white privilege is more about. It is NOT saying that because you are white, you have all the privilege. It is saying that there are certain things, as a white person, you gain from because you are white and there is a system of institutionalized racism in this country (and I will not be debating the validity of this on this site, go read the literature if you’re truly interested).

As a white person, I have faced many disadvantages in my life. However, they have not been because I am white. Many POC have also faced disadvantages in life, a lot in part because they are not white. There is a difference.

This sounds so much like the Russians on social media sites trying to instill more derision and division in America and we are stupid enough to fall for it. It likely is not a Russian ploy because we are still a large population of stupid in America and anyone can pick up that baton and run with it …but this campaign sounds just like it. The “but me” response to every injustice and the thought that injustices are mutually exclusive…really?

And, while I’m on a rant, I don’t understand why our lawmakers are grilling the social media owners about false articles posing as news on social media instead of lecturing American citizens about the stupidity of getting your news from those sites.

I sound terribly negative, I know that, but I am disappointed in the American citizen today…and I know mine is an isolated viewpoint in my white southern Christian world - but my husband and kids feel the same way. Hopefully this passes quickly and our college kids are smart enough to figure out what it is.

“But is it ok to be white? My kids, in CA, are being taught otherwise.”

My older daughter was required to take an honors college course that she summarized as “white people are bad”. Apparently white people have had a horrible impact on the world (which makes me wonder about the polio vaccine, penicillin, and the telephone, although I have recently read that mathematics is a racist white invention which for me is a little bit personal since I was a math major). My youngest is thankfully going to university outside of the US where she doesn’t have to deal with this (at least not as being taught in her classes, I think).

The one thing that I do not understand is why anyone is surprised by this reaction.

I may be a bit unusual in that I am highly educated and work in high tech, but I have a lot of respect for and spend a lot of time talking to working class people. I am the son of a farmer, and know quite a few farmers. I talk to the guy who pumps out my septic system once a year (the system is old), the guys who were clearing large trees off the power lines yesterday in coastal Maine (I assume they are probably still out today), the engineer who designed my replacement septic system, small landlords, random people on the next tread mill in my cardiac rehab class which happens to be in a working class neighborhood, and so on. My college roommate had a father who was an alcoholic who couldn’t hold a job, and a mother who worked for minimum wage in a factory in New Hampshire. I don’t think that the family felt all that privileged when the factory shut down. Looking at the famous video of Carrier announcing that they were shutting down their factory and moving it to Mexico, I don’t think that those workers felt all that privileged either (regardless if their race which obviously varied between workers, but all of whom were being put in the same bad spot).

I might also be unusual in that I get upset when I see actions that are inevitably going to result in a bad reaction, but I get somewhat less upset when the inevitable reaction actually occurs. I just figure that we already knew it was going to happen.

If the US continues with such a large emphasis on “identity politics” then this is just going to get worse.

“My kids are being taught otherwise” says parents that were not in the classroom to hear what was being taught.

Recognizing white privilege is not a denouncement of the other struggles that individual white people face (SES, gender discrimination, etc.). Nor is recognizing the ways that white supremacy has shaped/skewed the way we approach various fields, which seems to be what those classes have focused on in my experience.

People that internalize being called “privileged” and then claiming that it’s discrimination against white people, tend to be the same ones that minimize the discrimination that minorities face.

Being privileged doesn’t mean that your life is perfect. It means that a certain aspect of your identity has not been a hinderance to your ability to progress.

But if the response to “I’m struggling” is “You have white privilege. Other people have struggles worse than you. So shut up!”, how does that solve anything? And yes, a lot of people apparently feel that this IS the response to their own struggles.

@sylvan8798 Obviously it solves nothing. I never said those responses were valid/appropriate.

The fact that some people rudely dismiss the struggles of others does not justify ignoring the ways that racism functions in society. Nor does it mean that posting “it’s ok to be white” posters is the proper recourse.

A few fringe examples do not make an overall trend, especially given the widespread rise of “white identity” politics that both far eclipses any other identity politics these days and is focused on making life worse for non-white people, rather than doing anything better for white (or any other) people (particularly those who are most disadvantaged).

Many other countries have similar problems.

Much of the past affirmative action overreach has been rolled back, though some may still exist.

So the answer is to increase racism against minorities?

Of course, racism against minorities is not just past history, since it still exists.

Example 1: white people in Chicago and Detroit rated neighborhoods (controlled for SES) in desirability order white > mixed > black, while black people rated them in order mixed > black > white; see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3704191/ and http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/05/whites_prefer_to_live_with_whites_why_integrating_america_s_neighborhoods.html . So it should not be surprising that “white flight” and housing discrimination against black people still occurs.

Example 2: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399 found that black and Latino persons were much more likely to encounter non-lethal use of force in encounters with police.

@Massmomm I agree with some of what you said, but not the ‘valuing education’ part. Valuing education is a choice families make (not a privilege afforded by skin color) and is a choice available to anyone regardless of skin color, religion, economic status etc. Yes - the schools that poorer children have access to is a big issue, and that needs a big fix, but you don’t have to be in a good school district to read to your kids every night, to check that homework is done, to make sure their school attendance is good, to check in with the teachers every now and then.
Before Bill Cosby was a pariah, he often spoke to communities about this very thing. Now it feels as the tide has turned to merely placing blame on other people/things/institutions rather than controlling what you can control.

@ucbalumnus says
“Example 1: white people in Chicago and Detroit rated neighborhoods (controlled for SES) in desirability order white > mixed > black, while black people rated them in order mixed > black > white; see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3704191/ and http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/05/whites_prefer_to_live_with_whites_why_integrating_america_s_neighborhoods.html . So it should not be surprising that “white flight” and housing discrimination against black people still occurs.”

Why don’t we look at this another way. Let’s rate desirable places to live based on safety.
Low crime > moderate crime > high crime
Now plug in the races and see how that works. I’m not saying black neighborhoods have more crime but everyone I know chooses their neighborhoods based on safety. I don’t know a single person who left or moved to a neighborhood because of race.