White Privilege

I largely agree with your analysis of white privilege and the need for white men to put away the resentment and paranoia. But the most important and insidious aspect to white privilege is that it doesn't depend on personal bias. Systemic inequities disadvantage nonwhites and women in ways that have nothing to do with interpersonal animus.Don't get me wrong, I think it's important for white males to examine their unacknowledged biases and be conscientious about the way they address and interact with nonwhites and women. But the larger problem is that the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration and female disenfranchisement have left the playing field so far from level that being really nice to one another isn't going to improve anything at the deeper social level.Here's what I mean. There's a study going around about the way resumes bearing white-sounding names get picked by personnel recruiters much more often than those with ethnic-sounding names. I don't dispute this finding, and I think there's still a lot of racial bias in hiring and advancement. But the point is that even if there weren't names on the resumes at all, the ones from white candidates are more likely to be chosen because the nonwhite candidates have been disadvantaged in education, experience, credit history, the justice system, and many other factors by which employers assess candidates. Whites have gained advantage in an unfair system, so of course their accomplishments are going to be more considerable.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.

The paragraph of mine you quoted concerned affirmative action, the thrust of which was to try to rememdy systemic inequities in ways that don't hinder the life or welfare of the privileged; in hiring, a white candidate is more likely to be chosen for a job (even in a blind selection process) given the white community's better educational system, access to credit, and less intensive surveillance by law enforcement. If the black candidate is chosen over the white one through affirmative action, the white candidate is still more likely to land a job elsewhere.Do you feel that systemic inequities exist in the USA? If so, what can be done about them?

Um, isn't that the exact opposite of what he's implying? 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. Rrhain said the existence of privilege itself isn't negative, denying it is.