White Privilege

When the affirmative action program was instituted to try to rectify this unfair advantage, white men raised holy hell over the same perception of "reverse discrimination" that people have mentioned here. Part of white privilege is the resentment of admitting that the white man's supremacy hasn't been earned through fair competition in a meritocracy, but because of inequities which have been constantly reinforced over the course of centuries.

wiki writes:At issue in affirmative action cases is whether the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment can be employed to advance the welfare of one class of individuals for compelling social reasons even when that advancement may infringe in some way upon the life or liberty of another. The continuing existence of affirmative action laws and programs suggests that so far, the Supreme Court's answer has been yes.

RAZD writes:Do you feel entitled to maintain the status quo even though it is not just?

Tangle writes:It's not wrong for any class of people to aspire to that kind of freedom and those that have should only be criticised if they pull up the ladder and discriminate against those that haven't got there.

Tangle writes:I'm simply making the point that those enjoying the full freedoms of society should not be regarded as having a negative value in that society; calling it a white privilege as though it's a status granted by decree to an elite few is both wrong and divisive.

How is taking away an artificial construct a wrong?

Rrhain writes:Privilege doesn't mean your life is perfect. It means that your life is likely to be better than someone in the same situation who doesn't have your privilege. Poor white people don't have political parties calling them "welfare queens" in order to win elections, for example. You are trying to say that because there are successful black people, that means there is no privilege; that because there are poor white people, this means they aren't privileged. Nobody is saying that all white people have it better than all non-white people.It's that if you have two people who are in the same situation, the privileged person will likely have a better outcome than the non-privileged person. Not because the privileged person is deliberately trying to keep the non-privileged person down but because society is set up to give the privileged person more help, the benefit of the doubt, the break. A black person is more likely to be stopped, more likely to be questioned, more likely to be detained, more likely to be arrested, more likely to be charged, more likely to be prosecuted, more likely to be tried, more likely to be convicted, and more likely to receive a harsher sentence than a white person. That doesn't mean there aren't any white people in prison. It's that if you're white, the system is going to treat you better than if you're black.

Mr.Hambre writes:Like the two-legged man who's not going around deliberately trying to keep amputees down, the white man reaps the benefits of an unfair system, whether or not he's even aware of it.

White privilege is NOT meant as a positive to whites but as the description of a major problem in our society. As with any problem, the first step to correcting it is to acknowledge it is there, that it exists.

White privilege in this society is not some wrong-headed anachronism foisted by egghead liberals onto the political scene but is a reality on the ground that needs to be acknowledged and changed if all peoples are to share, as equals, in the benefits of our society.