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Is being born white a privilege? [W:357]

Is being born white a privilege?


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Re: Is being born white a privilege?

I'll ask you what I asked X above.


Question 1: Do you think you (or your children) are more privileged than a kid born into poverty in Bangladesh?
Question 2: Does that detract from your achievements in life?

Well said ...
 
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.

South Park: The Fractured but Whole's difficulty slider changes the colour of your skin • Eurogamer.net
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

I'll ask you what I asked X above.


Question 1: Do you think you (or your children) are more privileged than a kid born into poverty in Bangladesh?
Question 2: Does that detract from your achievements in life?

No, I don't think I, or my children, are more privileged than a kid born into poverty in Bangladesh.

I consider all of us fortunate we weren't born there.

Being born here doesn't mean any of us can't fail. It doesn't mean we will automatically be given anything more than we will attempt to earn in our life times.

White Privilege is a Culture War invention of identity politics, meant to divide and enrage those looking for excuses.
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

I suppose it depends a lot on where you live and how the majority treats itself vs the way it treats minorities
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

You're not able to answer in your own words?

Errr I agree with her, I think she knows that. I was just commenting to show that South Park's new game is doing basically what she's describing. Which is hilarious and pissed off a lot of fragile ego gamers.

S+M's description long predates the South Park game tho.
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

No, I don't think I, or my children, are more privileged than a kid born into poverty in Bangladesh.

I consider all of us fortunate we weren't born there.

Being born here doesn't mean any of us can't fail. It doesn't mean we will automatically be given anything more than we will attempt to earn in our life times.

White Privilege is a Culture War invention of identity politics, meant to divide, and enrage those looking for excuses.

So you consider yourself fortunate to have been born here and not there.

Why? What reasons are there for you to think that?
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

Wording is everything.
Is being born white a privilege? Only if you're a white racist.
Does society treat whites as privileged? Yeah, maybe. I don't know for sure but lots of people say 'yes'.
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

Errr I agree with her, I think she knows that. I was just commenting to show that South Park's new game is doing basically what she's describing. Which is hilarious and pissed off a lot of fragile ego gamers.

S+M's description long predates the South Park game tho.

I quoted you before you edited. You originally had me and someone else in there too.
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

If you think being born white is a privilege, there's a trailer park I want you to visit....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

White people in trailer parks still benefit from white privilege. Even if they don't benefit from class privilege.

The two often correlate but, like in your example of trailer parks, sometimes don't.
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

I quoted you before you edited. You originally had me and someone else in there too.

Yeah I was going to reply to some other people but it was regarding a different topic so I edited it out.

The obvious ones.

Such as? Be tangible.
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

White people in trailer parks still benefit from white privilege. Even if they don't benefit from class privilege.

The two often correlate but, like in your example of trailer parks, sometimes don't.

How so Nilly? How do White people in trailer parks benefit from this invented White Privilege thing?
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

A conversation about white prvilege got me thinking about what it means. If it is, indeed, a privilege to be born white in the US, what does that say or mean for people who aren't white? What would be the appropriate characterization of their births? Attaching poll.

I view this topic like I've described below:

Circumstance of birth = certain immutable physical characteristics = CAUSE

Social status, privileges and/or advantages associated with certain immutable characteristics = EFFECT

I think it would be naive to believe that Caucasians haven't historically had superior social status, privileges and advantages over other races and/or individuals with other types of immutable characteristics.
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

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.

Well, I think you're assuming I mean to say that one advantage decides an outcome. But it doesn't.

Even the white poor have white privilege because of the factors I mentioned. But they can simultaneously have DIFFERENT disadvantages, that affect enough parts of their life to still create an overall Hard Mode situation.

Having privilege basically means you don't experience a TYPE of disadvantage.

To return to the analogy...

Let's say that in racial Hard Mode, you have a higher risk of being robbed by bandits.

Let's say that in disability Hard Mode, you have a higher risk of failure when you use an attack.

Those two disadvantages are still true even if every other factor you have is in Easy Mode. If you're playing on disability Hard Mode and have high attack failure, that doesn't mean your racial privilege doesn't still exist by the fact that you won't experience high risk of being robbed by bandits.

That doesn't mean your overall game is Easy Mode. But it does mean that you still aren't dealing with a particular type of disadvantage that other people are, and that you may have a blind spot to other people's experiences who do have that disadvantage.

Privilege in an area doesn't mean your game is inherently easy. It means you don't experience a specific type of disadvantage.

Let's also keep in mind that some of these factors tend to go together: white people are less likely to be born into poverty, and also less likely to have a chronic disability due to increased access to healthcare.

That doesn't mean all white people get those advantages. But they are more likely to. And those reduced odds of having other disadvantages is also part of white privilege.

Like I said, you can still win or lose the game no matter what mode you're playing on. But privilege basically lowers the odds of you having certain other disadvantages. When we talk about white privilege (or able-bodied, or male, or whatever), we're talking about a systemic social issue, not a specific individual. A specific white individual can still lose luck of the draw on other connected factors, like poverty. But white people as a whole are less likely to.

Also, by the by... I have to say I have never met a trans person who gets mad if you mess up their pronouns... once. I HAVE heard of people getting in trouble for doing it over and over again, for purely malicious reasons. So I can't say I feel very sorry for those people. That's harassment.
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

Jesus was not born in a manger in central Pennsylvania.

He was a man of color.

And the fact that we have represented him for centuries literally as a white man speaks to the entire history of white supremacy.

~ Tim Wise
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

How so Nilly? How do White people in trailer parks benefit from this invented White Privilege thing?

It's a way to mock and judge them for not doing better in life while excusing others.
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

I view this topic like I've described below:

Circumstance of birth = certain immutable physical characteristics = CAUSE

Social status, privileges and/or advantages associated with certain immutable characteristics = EFFECT

I think it would be naive to believe that Caucasians haven't historically had superior social status, privileges and advantages over other races and/or individuals with other types of immutable characteristics.

Really? How so? Did Caucasians just suddenly decide they had superior social status? How far back in human history are you going with your "historically" claim?
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

A conversation about white prvilege got me thinking about what it means. If it is, indeed, a privilege to be born white in the US, what does that say or mean for people who aren't white? What would be the appropriate characterization of their births? Attaching poll.

If you mean now in America, certainly there is a certain white privilege, but it evolves from a subtle racism perpetuated by people who do not see themselves as the least bit racist but who demand that we all see black people as different from all others.

If you are white, nobody insists that you are a victim by virtue of your ancestry. You can be lazy and an underachiever without others thinking it is because you are white. If you are involved in violence nobody says that is because you are white. Nobody solicits your opinion as a representative of the white race in a class discussion or on television. And if you excel in something other than sports, nobody thinks or suspects that Affirmative Action or other such initiatives had anything to do with it. Nobody accuses you of thinking white, acting white, talking white, or having a white person's name.

John H. McWhorter PhD wrote a brilliant essay on this subject awhile back expressing these themes. An excerpt:

. . .
. . . the idea (of white privilege) is not to teach white people that White Privilege means that black people are the only group of people in human history who cannot deal with obstacles and challenges. If the idea is that black people cannot solve their problems short of white people developing an exquisite sensitivity to how privileged they are, then we in the black community are being designated as disabled poster children. . .​
The Privilege of Checking White Privilege
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

How so Nilly? How do White people in trailer parks benefit from this invented White Privilege thing?

First, are you going to answer my question about why you feel fortunate that you (and your children) were born here and not in Bangladesh? Or are you running away from that one?

BTW, AlbqOwl's post above mine actually answers your question to me pretty well.
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

“Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.”
― Tim Wise
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

It's a way to mock and judge them for not doing better in life while excusing others.

IMO, it's a meaningless meme used in the Culture War the left is waging in hopes of saving their agenda and maintaining their support.
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

White people in trailer parks still benefit from white privilege. Even if they don't benefit from class privilege.

The two often correlate but, like in your example of trailer parks, sometimes don't.


Gimme some specific "hows", po' white trailer park people benefit from white privilege.
 
Re: Is being born white a privilege?

If you mean now in America, certainly there is a certain white privilege, but it evolves from a subtle racism perpetuated by people who do not see themselves as the least bit racist but who demand that we all see black people as different from all others.

If you are white, nobody insists that you are a victim by virtue of your ancestry. You can be lazy and an underachiever without others thinking it is because you are white. If you are involved in violence nobody says that is because you are white. Nobody solicits your opinion as a representative of the white race in a class discussion or on television. And if you excel in something other than sports, nobody thinks or suspects that Affirmative Action or other such initiatives had anything to do with it. Nobody accuses you of thinking white, acting white, talking white, or having a white person's name.

John H. McWhorter PhD wrote a brilliant essay on this subject awhile back expressing these themes. An excerpt:

. . .
. . . the idea (of white privilege) is not to teach white people that White Privilege means that black people are the only group of people in human history who cannot deal with obstacles and challenges. If the idea is that black people cannot solve their problems short of white people developing an exquisite sensitivity to how privileged they are, then we in the black community are being designated as disabled poster children. . .​
The Privilege of Checking White Privilege

I thought this quote was better:

So let’s start this stage of our “dialogue on race” with a simple question: When our mandated diversity director says, “This is messy work, but these conversations are necessary,” we have every right, as moral persons, to ask: Why, and for whose benefit?
 
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