White Privilege

Okay. (Note: These numbers are completely made up for the sake of the example.)

The problem isn't that, say, there are 3 Whites employed for every Black employed. The problem is that 75% of Whites are employed compared to 55% of Blacks. We're not trying to even the quantity of employed demographics, we're trying to improve the internal ratio of unemployed vs employed people within that demographic.

You want the incarceration rate for our people to go down while the employment rate goes up, yes?

For everyone would be nice.

But to stop having people tell me, in so many words, "You Are a Credit to Your Race" would be a damn good start.

edited 26th May '12 11:46:04 AM by KingZeal

As long as people keep trying to provide better lives for their children, there will always be inequality, because not everyone is going to be equally good at that, and eventually someone will notice a trend. Right now, it's that blacks are less capable due to historical circumstances. But maybe just random factors will mean that blue-eyed people are statistically the worst group in 50 years. If that happens, will we likewise give affirmative action to children of blue-eyed parents?

The great evils perpetuated against minorities means that we have a moral responsibility to deal with it (including through affirmative action). I just want to know if people would think we'd have such a responsibility if active discrimination had not created inequalities.

Active discrimination by definition of the term creates an inequality.

And to your first question, yes we would.

Whoops, I guess that the second question wasn't really clear, I meant "Had it been something other than active discrimination that had created the inequalities" instead of "had there been active discrimination that hadn't created them." Sorry about the lack of clarity.

Well, we pay taxes to take care of the sick, infirm and physically challenged, don't we? They're as protected under most anti-discrimination acts as racial minorities.

Sure, and I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'll have to think about it before I decide to take a stance on it, but as of right now it doesn't sit well with me that working to give your kids advantages is something that the government has to compensate for.

If the Big Bad in this situation is working to give your kids an advantage, the Bigger Bad is that an advantage is necessary to succeed in the first place.

As an example, let's take financial advice. When I was in college, I visited a relatively small forum community frequented by two posters that had been raised in upper-class American families. They were both very big on exceptionalism and meritocracy. At one point, I stated that I didn't see how a kid being born rich would in any way qualify as "merit". One guy retorted that, as a child, his parents opened a bank account for him, taught him sensible use of money and how to network, as well as simple economics so that he could maximize profit and allow his money to work for him. His parents even hired a financial manager for him to be sure that he saved enough money so that when he finished college, he'd have enough money to start his own enterprise.

That blew my goddamn mind. I had no idea that shit even existed, let alone that parents taught it to their kids. To this day, it is difficult for me to find anything like that where I live. My family didn't teach me shit about finance. As a kid, I got $100 on my birthday and my mother told me to put it in my piggy bank. Then, I'd probably spend it for my birthday. It wasn't until I got to college and started taking career-placement courses that I had even heard of things like internships, resume padding, or building networking groups. I thought somebody gave you a Bachelor's Degree and magical fairies whisked you away to Successland. And even to this day, things like money markets, buying shares, or real estate markets are VERY hard for me to wrap my head around because it's a completely different world from the one I was born in.

And my point is that this goes across the board for most people from my demographic and walk of life. I still have yet to meet a black kid from the ghetto who knows what a "bond market" or "real estate investment" is. The problem, as I've grown older and seen more of the world outside the one I was born into, is that the shit you need to learn to succeed in life and the shit they spoon-feed you in institutionalized learning are so RADICALLY different, it's insane. I didn't learn "put your money into futures" when I was seven. I heard "believe in yourself and you can do anything". Sure, that's beautiful advice and all, but it doesn't impart any actual instruction.

EDIT: As I alluded to in that top line, the problem is that underprivileged kids (like myself a few centuries ago) are set up to fail from the beginning. People are always going to want to compete with each other, and in some cases, competition is healthy and great. But, the fact that people will always compete doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive for a world where the lowest class of civilian isn't eating garbage to have a meal.

edited 26th May '12 9:09:14 PM by KingZeal

Well said.

I'm not even from the ghetto and I've never heard of resume padding and bond markets.

There could be financial privilege as well as racial privilege. But even if a rich black person and a rich white person go for the same job, it's still probably more likely to go to the rich white person.

From my experience, the predominantly black schools get less funding than the other schools. I've been in schools where there weren't enough textbooks for the whole class, so some students had to Xerox (or copy by hand, when the Xerox machine broke) the required pages for homework. Or we had to share books.

Yup. I had a school like that.

Yeah, so did I.

And we want to make better schools for people like you, DG

However, at the same time, we also want to fix people withdrawing support/enrollment when black kids start going to those better schools.

But see, I've made that argument and all it's done is made people call me racist. I'd rather better things for everyone while giving the disadvantaged a boost up at the same time, but that's apparently completely unacceptable.

No-one has called you racist, please stop putting words in other people's mouths.

I think that ... people who are racially disadvantaged have a lot of experience pointing out how racism sucks really bad and really hurts them, and the response comes back that "well, life sucks for me too, how about we work on the issues that we have in common that make both of our lives suck?" and that gets read as "I don't want to think about the things that only make life suck for black/brown/whatever people, all that matters are the things that suck for white people too."

Which is simply self-centeredness rather than outright racism a lot of the time, but it feels awfully like racism from the non-white side of things.

Again, that's bringing up a completely unrelated problem in a discussion about another problem. As I said, it's like someone asking if they smell gas in the house, and the other person starting an argument about not using the stove properly. That is a completely different problem, and it derails the original problem that was presented.

edited 2nd Jun '12 3:20:27 AM by KingZeal

It seems to me like not getting hired because of having a non-white name and the apparent glass ceiling for minorities is a problem for this thread, while stuff related to being poor in general is not.

I have no idea whether I'm privileged or not anymore, apparently now even if you're autistic you're not unprivileged enough unless you're that AND non-white, and a woman, or both...

I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO ABOUT THESE PROBLEMS, I JUST WANNA USE TUMBLR WITHOUT BEING REMINDED I'M A HORRIBLE PERSON FOR BEING BORN AS A WHITE MALE OF ANY KIND AGAIN!

USE TUMBLR

Well, there's your problem.

Seriously, though, the thing is that different kinds of privilege and oppression affect people in different ways. So, for instance, a black guy may not have the same problems as a lesbian or a quadriplegic. They all have problems, of course, but not ones that would necessarily give them a shared experience and help them understand each other. That's where intersectionality comes in, you see - a black lesbian has all the disadvantages of a someone who isn't male, someone non-white, and someone who isn't straight rolled into one.

A black Butch Lesbian/Transmale, even worse.

Ok, so we're winding around again on the whole, "There is a serious disadvantage in not being within one of these groups," issue again. And while it's legitimate, it's also echo-chamber.

So, let's steer this toward a "solutions" conversation if possible.

Thanks.

Anyhow, one of the biggest issues to overcome as I see it is how diffuse and subtle the problem really is. Sure, we can identify institutional discrimination on a large scale by looking at statistical data, but how do we apply that knowledge? It's nigh-on impossible to know when an individual is acting out of prejudice rather than logic; you can suspect it, but you can't really prove it in most cases.

For example; Alice and Bob apply for a job. They are both interviewed by a man. Bob gets it, Alice doesn't. Does that mean that Alice didn't get the job because she is a woman, or was Bob simply the more-qualified candidate? That question is tough to answer without an in-depth examination of both the interviewer and the interviewees, and even then you can't know for sure.

Agreed. And a problem that comes up specifically in job interviews is that sometimes the less qualified interviewee may be selected for seemingly arbitrary reasons that the interviewer was nevertheless looking for. If Alice is slightly (but noticeably) more qualified than Bob, but the interviewer notes that Bob would probably be more productive because he'd be a better fit in the workplace culture (maybe Bob was a funny guy and Alice doesn't seem like she can take a joke), I'd say that's a legitimate reason.

Someone investigating a sexual discrimination claim, however, is going to say, "Ah, you got rid of the more qualified candidate because the other, male, candidate was funnier? Right."

Yes exactly.

The real problem here is that discrimination operates not on reality but the perception of it. A bigoted person perceives that a female/someone of color is somehow less than them, whether or not it is true. And from our last example, Alice might perceive that she was discriminated against, whereas the interviewer might believe that he had acted honestly and fairly in choosing Bob over her. The problem gets worse when one realizes that both Alice and her interviewer can be correct; maybe the interviewer is slightly biased against women and doesn't realize it, and maybe Alice thinks that was far more important in the interviewer's decision-making than it actually was.

And like you said, the choice might have been made for reasons that are not on paper but nonetheless applicable to the situation. The company I work for does consider personality to be just as important as skill-set; we want skilled people, but we also want people who are going to fit in well with the people we already have....indeed, they would rather have a less-skilled person who will add to the team rather than a highly-skilled person who will cause friction.

edited 2nd Jun '12 12:19:44 PM by drunkscriblerian