Black people have a harder time in the job market, even if they are equally qualified as white people, even if their resumes are identical except for the name - http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html.
@grandscheme it is not the fault black children that they come from single parent households .Get over the exercise of privilege to the underdogs detriment. The access is there to whomever has the money and connections
The divide between the belief in post #459 and that in post #461 reflects the great divide of the two sides of our country.
A million dollar question is where the truth lies? To the left or to the right or neither? Or, is the question the same as the question: Is tiger1307 younger than grandscheme?
This is a gross misunderstanding. First, not only do people not “automatically defer to someone’s opinions and accede to their demands because they claim they’ve been historically oppressed” and rather complain about it, like has been done in this thread, but your perceived “pressure” does not affect your life actions beyond the pressure to not be inconsiderate to other people in fear of other people noticing.
Privilege is about a person’s ability in the world: the ability to feel safe around police and tell your kids that if they get in trouble, they can go to them. That’s a small example. Wage gaps, incarceration rates (drug use versus arrests by race is staggering), public education discrepancies by neighborhood. You’re even more likely to get a job simply for having a white sounding name, and that has been detailed here in terms of college admissions even. All of this partially comprises the concept of privilege. Your ability to feel comfortable telling others they are being too sensitive is not part of privilege.
Pengs Phils, People may not “automatically defer to” the opinions of the historically oppressed, but that seems to be pretty close to what some of these protesters are demanding. When you frame essentially any disagreement on a whole host of issues as a sign of racism, when you suggest that if someone hasn’t shared your experience as a racial minority, they have no right to any opinion other than signing on to yours as an “ally,” you are saying that your opinion is, by virtue of your identity, the only one that should carry weight.
As for privilege, that strikes me as a potentially useful concept that has been turned into a club to be wielded against anyone with a dissenting opinion. Recognizing privilege makes sense to the extent that it fosters empathy for others, allowing members of a majority group to see how much of what they take for granted is actually not universally accessible. But as the term has moved outside the sociology classroom, a few problems have emerged:
- It creates a framework in which being "privileged" on one particular axis (usually race or gender) seems, in effect if not in theory, to be seen as socially determinative. Yes, people who really understand the term recognize that talking about "white privilege" doesn't technically mean that the miner's kid from Appalachia is better off than Malia Obama, but in listening some of the most heated rhetoric of protesters, that distinction can get lost really quickly.
- Invoking it often spells an end to any possibility of free intellectual discourse. "Checking" your privilege almost never means "carefully consider the perspectives of people not like you before making a reasoned decision." Instead, it means "stop talking, because any disagreement with me can only come from your blinkered perspective."
- It assumes that only the opinions of the majority are limited, compromised, and in need of revision, while arbitrarily assigning value to the opinions of traditionally oppressed minorities. The opinion of a white university president from a wealthy family is going to be limited. But so is the perspective of the black protester, and his opinion isn't going to be intrinsically more valid because the issue at hand involves race. Making good policy doesn't, after all, mean listening ONLY to those most directly affected by a proposal. When the government debates raising the minimum wage, we can hope that they're taking into serious consideration the experiences of people actually living on it -- but it would be an awful idea to mandate that only people earning the minimum wage got a vote.
- It conflates active injustice with circumstantial discomfort, and, more generally, fails to acknowledge gradations in things like level of offense, severity of problem, and practicability of solution. A minority feeling alienated doesn't necessarily mean that the majority is at fault - it means that if you are a member of a minority group, there are by definition certain experiences that most people around you won't entirely relate to which will, yes, feel isolating at times. But even when we consider problems that might warrant some action on the part of the majority, the group protesting should acknowledge that there are degrees of bad and degrees of culpability, each of which will warrant different kinds of response. Some injustices are worth a sit-in. Some are worth a petition. And some are worth a pleasant airing of views, with the understanding that it is fully possible that the outcome will be an agreement to disagree.
If I agree with you that traffic jams aren’t really racist, does that mean that Woodrow Wilson wasn’t a racist? Just to bring this back around to the original topic for a second, this particular dispute is bringing to the fore information that lots of people (including me) didn’t know about Wilson. There was an article in the paper this morning by someone whose grandfather lost his job in the federal government after Wilson re-segregated it–along with thousands of others. That needs to be part of Wilson’s story, just as Japanese internment camps need to be part of FDR’s story.
Life isn’t fair. If you know you have to work twice as hard to get ahead, your time is better spent working twice as hard and not complaining about how hard you need to work. That is why the Irish Need Not Apply signs disappeared.
And while you are complaining about others privilege, look up top 1% of income in the world. Everyone in the US is privileged.
I haven’t read all 31 pages of this outlandish (oops, sorry, didn’t mean to imply that the protestors were relegated to the worst fields - oops, again, not “fields”!) bit of tripe, so this may already have been mentioned, but this business of attacking the word ‘master’ for its one unfortunate connotation sounds to me like a lot of master ‘bating’!
So you would say that Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, was wasting his time with all that protesting, and should have just told black people to work harder? Interesting.
“Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.”
–Martin Luther King, Jr.
No I did not say that. I do not equate the struggles of the 60’s with today’s struggles. Telling someone they don’t have to work hard to get ahead is the easiest way for them not to get ahead.
Working hard is important. Some sort of personal sacrifice is important too. What the current protesters need to do is find something they can do that would really get under the skin of the school administration. Looking at history, the bus boycotts are a good example. Folks chose not to ride buses, which involved some individual sacrifice, collectively it put the transportation system under a lot of strain, and got under the skin of the city leaders. I challenge the protesters to find something similar. How about a total boycott of the school bookstore? But I doubt it will happen, simply because these kids are protesting from a position of privilege to start with and wont give anything up.
These days, that would probably only hurt Barnes and Noble.
Again, you seem to have the same misunderstanding of what privilege is. I don’t think it actually has much to do with this incident.
- Privilege is not something you "invoke", and it is certainly not invoked by those without it. It is the general trend of a constant advantage to a particular group. You are again discussing the idea that because someone is privileged, they feel uncomfortable talking on subjects with those less privileged who are talking about issues relating to said privilege. Again, your discomfort does not mean privilege does not affect your life.
- Privilege assumes nothing about right and wrong. Again, you are conflating a specific issue or two with the entire concept of privilege. No, people are not right or wrong because of privilege.
- Nowhere in my description did I mention anything about discomfort. We are talking about large, tangible differences in lifestyle that are inherent of your race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc. Where in that list was anything about being offended even mentioned?
Another inherent problem here is that you are trying to set rules on how the minority should protest anything: the reality is, things are escalating in the world because people aren’t paying attention to discourse: nothing gets done. There’s a reason a solid portion of the country is talking about a political revolution while a good deal have no idea it’s even going on.
Representing privilege incorrectly is a good way to start opposing it before you know what you’re actually opposing.
PS: Some of the stuff on college campuses recently has gone a bit too far, but the reaction towards it shows exactly why it’s happening. And in the end, nearly all of this is trivial and has little to nothing to do with privilege: which is why I posted here to help correct the misunderstanding.
Op-Ed in the Times today re someone’s African American grandfather who was demoted from a mid-management position at the government printing office due to Wilson’s overt, and deliberate racist policies.
It brings it home when its personalized.
Princeton, and Wilson helped the perception, has traditionally been the “Southern Ivy,” the one white southern elite would prefer.
I’ll admit people are complicated. Wilson reminds me of Andrew Jackson who was instrumental to making our democracy more universal, if by universal you mean enfranchisement for all white males --while committing genoicide against Native Americans and being a slave owner. At the same time some African Americans looked at Jackson and said, what he did for white men, we want that too. Similarly for Wilson. Self-determination for colonial people? We want that too.
First we are blamed for having privilege and now we are being accused of “misunderstanding” what it is.
I’m a white male. I have the most privilege of most people in our society. That doesn’t mean I can’t educate myself on it and be aware of it. I’m sorry that learning what a term that you’re complaining about means is too much effort. Also, there is no blame in privilege: the problems arise when people outright deny the existence of it and even try to say the oppressed and disadvantaged have more of an advantage because they can complain about it while the privileged actually have a better quality of life.
All these recent threads throw a lot of words around that I think they can’t even define, or know the origins and connotations of. Privilege, “Political Correctness”, and Black Lives Matter are three perfect examples. (yes, I know this is not always specific to this thread, but it’s a general trend here, forgive the slightly off topic). Similar to all lives matter, the phrase politically correct actually came from a comic strip complaining about what it is now defined as modernly. It was always in response to changes in social morality and a distaste for them.
No blame in privilege? That not how it feels to me (middle age white guy). Everything I read that mentions it seems like I should feel bad about it and/or give up some thing because of it.
@PengPhils I think the vast majority of us on this board have the “gray matter” to understand the definition of “privilege.” Your particular nuances are your own.