Re: Is being born white a privilege?
The best anology I've ever heard is playing an RPG game where your stats are randomly generated.
Some people get Easy Mode: a combination of life factors that are going to tilt the odds of fortune in your favor. White, male, able-bodied, straight, born into a well-off family.
Some people get Hard Mode: a combination of life factors that are going to tilt the odds of fortune against you. POC, female, disabled, queer, poor.
There's more, of course.
The point is, the game is still theoretically winnable or losable either way. There's still dragons in both versions and they can still kill you. There's still gold and you can still get it. But people playing Hard Mode have to work more, roll the dice more frequently to get a good number, etc, in order to win. There's a lot more ways to die, and a lot more ways to fall short of the stats you need for success.
Most people are some sort of combination of these factors, with both Easy and Hard variables. Few people get pure Easy Mode, or pure Hard Mode. But being born white is definitely a big tick in the Easy Mode category.
Essentially, being born white means you're probably in a better school district, you're less likely to be stopped by the police, and less likely to go to jail if you're stopped and they find something. You're less likely to experience hate crime, more likely to have better access to state resources, more likely to be successful in college (due to the better K-12 school district you went to). All of those things are big advantages in life.
It means you got lucky, in that respect. It also means that the people playing racial Hard Mode are experiencing stuff you don't, and therefore stuff you can't see. And that's why it's important to be a good listener and to be open to doing the research on the evidence when talking about racial issues. As a white person, they are invisible to you.
This is a pretty good analogy except for one thing: simply being born white isn't, in and of itself, a major Advantage.... just a Feature, mostly.
FAR bigger advantages are not necessarily race-dependent... that is, your birth race isn't itself a determining factor in whether you are:
- born into prosperity or wealth
- born into a family that values and encourages education
- born in an area where substance abuse, crime and gangs are uncommon.
- grow up where the schools are good.
Seriously... visit a few trailer parks. Lotta poor white people; lotta substance abuse and petty crime.
Visit some nice subdivisions: lots of black folks there these days. Some new subdiv's I worked last year had upscale houses well beyond anything I could afford and were at least 50% black families.
At the local state university I saw more black female students than any other demographic. Locally black folks are about 25-30% of the general population, at the college they were more like 50-60%.
Seems to me that here in the heart of Dixie, as many black folks are doing well for themselves as white folks.
Mexicans not so much; the language barrier is a problem, but there are plenty of classes for them to improve their English and in their neighborhoods I see businesses specializing in helping them in various ways.
As for being gay, trans, etc.... well a white male can get fired from his good job for saying a single ill-considered sentence that might be construed as disparaging same so pardon me if I don't feel much advantaged. You can bash white males all day long and get away with it, but heaven help you if you forget that Bob is now Roberta and say "he" instead of "she".... be lucky if they just send you to Sensitivity Boot Camp instead of firing your ass.
So I'mma say no, whiteness in and of itself isn't much of an advantage.