Does "White privilege" exist? - If so, how and why?

[The Pink Panther]

1. Don't have sex outside of marriage

lol virgin

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

Anybody can be born lucky, well off or privileged no matter who you are or where you come from.
To say that only whites can be privileged is actually an insult to other groups of people or ethnicities that are more lucky and well off than the rest of them.

It doesn’t make me get filled with envy or anger, for it motivates me to try harder and actually make something out of myself.

Spoiler

try telling actual immigrants that want to move to America or any other country legally to make a better living for themselves and call them “privileged” in a stuck-up, smug like tone. they'd be a lot more angry and confused than say the average person that’s lived in their home country their entire life.

 

[Orth]

@The Last Stand

 

[Rafal Gan Ganowicz]

No it does not. Privilege is defined by demographics. certainly Boers in Bantu South Africa have no privilege. The privilege narrative led to the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Cambodian Killing Fields, and the rwanda genocide. Whites need to realise this, and see what the White-Privilege mongers have in store for them.

 

[The Last Stand]

The privilege of being discriminated against for having privilege? Yeah, no, being white is fucking awesome. I love being stigmatized for my race. I love being accused of racism constantly.

Let me flip that back.

I love walking into a convenience store and being monitored just walking in.
I love that saying equality and condoning rioting makes me an Uncle Tom.
I love that being tall automatically means I play sports.
I love being a statistic based on my skin color alone.

Discrimination happens both ways, no matter WHO'S doing it or for what reason.

 

[TFT-A9]

Let me flip that back.

I love walking into a convenience store and being monitored just walking in.
I love that saying equality and condoning rioting makes me an Uncle Tom.
I love that being tall automatically means I play sports.
I love being a statistic based on my skin color alone.

Discrimination happens both ways, no matter WHO'S doing it or for what reason.

1. A lot of people get monitored in stores. Sometimes the shop owner's a racist and only watches black visitors, which is dumb because I've certainly caught a number of other types shoplifting or causing trouble, though definitely not at the same rate I've caught melanin-enhanced people doing it. They're well within their rights to monitor whoever the hell they damn well please.
2. Any time I hear "Uncle Tom" or "coon" I laugh because the popularity and meanings of those terms came straight out of the black community and regardless of origin they have become a weapon leveled against blacks by other blacks on the whole. The fact that certain wypipo have figured out that they can score brownie points with some black people by calling other black people those things is even funnier.
3. Being accused of being athletically inclined? Receiving undeserved flattery? The HORROR!
4. Everyone's a statistic. Some statistics are just distinctly less flattering than others. If you're taking a statistic deeply to heart, well, that sounds kind of like a you problem.

 

[Chad Nasty]

I'm biracial so this affects me both ways.

u dummy thicc bby??

 

[The Last Stand]

You see that Blaxit thing recently? African countries are literally asking Black Americans to come back but is anybody actually going to make the move? Hell the fuck no, that's how you know most of them are just using the race card and don't actually feel legitimately discriminated against

Many hoodrats won't take that opportunity because they like playing the victim card and can't stand to lose the many privileges that are granted to them here. Internet access, welfare, an honest living. Plus, many Africans look down on African-Americans. No way they would be in tone with their African roots, which dates back centuries and has been watered down to entitlement.

Somebody told me this quote which resonated to me: (slightly butchered, mind you)

If you're in the North, a Black person can make it, but can't be close. If you're in the South, a Black person can be close, but can't make it.

Make it, meaning get a promotion or accolade.

Class privilege is a thing, definitely, but I think race plays a part in it. Not the whole thing, but part of it.

 

[RumblyTumbly]

I can only speak for myself.

Little power-levely here, but I'm making a point.

In grade school, middle school, and high school, I was bullied, belittled, talked down to, and treated like dirt by various students and even a few teachers. I had to basically go without sleep to work hard enough to make sure I got into college while also holding a part time job to give me myself money to have while I was in college. And if that wasn't bad enough, my counselor forgot to send out my transcripts for my college applications (As far as I know, I was the only one she forgot about) and I almost didn't get accepted into college because of it. I also had a job where I dealt with people all shift long and got told regularly that I was a piece of crap (I won't say what it was, but it was the nature of the job).

Where was my white privilege then? It didn't do me any good there. I wasn't guaranteed a college acceptance. I wasn't well liked or popular, and I had to overcome my own insecurities and all the negativity in my life to make something of myself. I had to sacrifice many many things just to have the chance to get to college, and I wasn't exceptionally athletic or smart. I was not guaranteed success at all. Until I got my college acceptance (which was the first time in my entire life I really felt like I achieved something), I wasn't sure I would even make it to college (and even then, there was a part of me that waited for the rug to be pulled out from under me).

And years after college, I had a job where I wound up being the lowest paid person in the office, even though I was above entry level by that point. It was partially my fault as a I signed a bad deal and should have negotiated better, but still, where was my white male privilege there? I had women and PoCs getting paid significantly more than me even though they had less experience or the same level of experience and education as me.

My point to sperging there is that I've carved a great life for myself now and I'm doing very well...and these fuckers want to push a narrative that I was basically gifted my life and everything came easier for me because I'm a white male. Really?! You sure about that? Because I remember feeling like a total shit stain for the first 18 years of my life and having to overcome that to make a happier existence for myself, and that was anything but easy. And if that was easy, then I don't want to know what the hard road was like.

We can talk about white privilege all day long, but when you use it as a blanket statement that applies to everyone, it just doesn't work. There are poor white people. There are white people that come from broken homes. There are white people in abusive family situations. There are white people that are in and out of jail. And there are white people that completely fuck up their lives through bad decisions. And to say that they are some how privileged and the system favors them and then willfully ignore all other factors is just ridiculous.

 

[TFT-A9]

Make it, meaning get a promotion or accolade.

Class privilege is a thing, definitely, but I think race plays a part in it. Not the whole thing, but part of it.

The allegation that "all other things being equal, black people get the short end of the stick compared to white people" is something that can probably be proven or disproven. As you have put forth the allegation, I eagerly await your proof.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

No, while you can argue some extreme cases where being white is a major factor in a choice, it is nothing compared to privileges from being rich or looking good, the both of which got a black guy to be the president of the United States.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

Define "privilege." What is it? Having overall better statistical outcomes as a group? Lower incarceration rate? Higher income? Longer lifespan? If you quantify "privilege" as any of these things, then "Asian privilege" and "Jewish privilege" are the "problems" we ought to be tackling. Instead, it's treated as this sort of societal dark energy by Critical Race Theorists who attribute everything to it yet can't come up with any criteria better than "I know it when I see it."

Moldbug made an interesting point about the word "privilege" itself, since the etymology is from the Latin "privus" and "lex," or "private law." IOW, the original meaning was "law that only effects an individual person or select group," such as rendering the persons of the Consuls inviolate. In other words, to be "privileged," it's not a matter of being born richer or smarter or better-looking than anyone else, it's a matter of having particular benefits conferred on you by the state, like, say, preferential hiring practices, easier admission to higher education... hey, wait a minute.

Yeah. Like most SocJus terms, "privilege" has had an Orwellian inversion and has been taken to mean it's precise opposite.

 

[Namekian George Floyd]

Plus, many Africans look down on African-Americans. No way they would be in tone with their African roots, which dates back centuries and has been watered down to entitlement.

When Black Africans are telling Black Americans the shit most white people are too cucked to.

 

[Baguette Child]

AFAIK, it's (((White))) people on the television, social media, corporations encouraging all this division.

You made a typo. I corrected it for you, fellow goyim.

 

[The Last Stand]

Yeah. Like most SocJus terms, "privilege" has had an Orwellian inversion and has been taken to mean it's precise opposite.

From what is happening now, the SJWs have the privilege. The goalposts of what can be defined as "racist" or problematic out of nothing. You can't write laws based on feelings; as somebody said, it creates a slippery slope.

We can talk about white privilege all day long, but when you use it as a blanket statement that applies to everyone, it just doesn't work. There are poor white people. There are white people that come from broken homes. There are white people in abusive family situations. There are white people that are in and out of jail. And there are white people that completely fuck up their lives through bad decisions. And to say that they are some how privileged and the system favors them and then willfully ignore all other factors is just ridiculous.

You're right. I apologize; I never want to demean somebody because of their race.

The allegation that "all other things being equal, black people get the short end of the stick compared to white people" is something that can probably be proven or disproven. As you have put forth the allegation, I eagerly await your proof.

Here's a source about "wealth inequality." Three and four make a decent point.

 

[soft kitty]

Let me flip that back.

I love walking into a convenience store and being monitored just walking in.
I love that saying equality and condoning rioting makes me an Uncle Tom.
I love that being tall automatically means I play sports.
I love being a statistic based on my skin color alone.

Discrimination happens both ways, no matter WHO'S doing it or for what reason.

So you bring up statistics, but then you're surprised you get profiled? Blacks commit more crime, everyone knows this, you know this, so it really shouldn't surprise you that people are more suspicious of black people.

And yes, I know, it sucks that it's that way but let's be real here, you shouldn't be worried about being profiled if you're not doing anything wrong.

At my store there is this black couple that goes into the liquor department every month or so, steals a bunch of shit and call the person telling them to stop a racist, saying they're profiling them. Well, why shouldn't they? You're fucking stealing.

 

[TFT-A9]

Here's a source about "wealth inequality." Three and four make a decent point.

Families of color will soon make up a majority of the population, but most continue to fall behind whites in building wealth. In 1963, the average wealth of white families was $121,000 higher than the average wealth of nonwhite families. By 2016, the average wealth of white families ($919,000) was over $700,000 higher than the average wealth of black families ($140,000) and of Hispanic families ($192,000).

Put another way, white family wealth was seven times greater than black family wealth and five times greater than Hispanic family wealth in 2016. Despite some fluctuations over the past five decades, this disparity is as high or higher than was in 1963.

There's a what here and no why. You've correctly identified there's a disparity, fantastic. You've failed to explain it.

White families accumulate more wealth over their lives than black or Hispanic families do, widening the wealth gap at older ages. In their 30s, whites have an average of $147,000 more in wealth than blacks (three times as much). By their 60s, whites have over $1.1 million more in average wealth than blacks (seven times as much).

Median wealth by race is lower. Though the dollar gap grows with age, the ratio doesn’t grow in the same way: whites have seven times more median wealth than blacks in their 60s and 70s.

Another what without a defined why.

Let's look at 5.

Why is the racial and ethnic wealth gap so big? People with lower earnings may have a harder time saving. The average white man earns $2.7 million over a lifetime, while the average black man earns $1.8 million and the average Hispanic man earns $2.0 million. The difference in lifetime earnings is lower for women: the average white woman earns $1.5 million, while the average black woman earns $1.3 million and the average Hispanic woman earns $1.1 million. These disparities partly reflect historical disadvantages that continue to affect later generations.

We're starting to get somewhere, though now we have more whats without whys.

Let's keep reading and see if they wrap this up with some solid whys.

Blacks and Hispanics are less likely to own homes, so they more often miss out on this powerful wealth-building tool. Homeownership makes the most of automatic payments—homeowners must make mortgage payments every month—to build equity.

In 1976, 68 percent of white families owned their home, compared with 44 percent of black families and 43 percent of Hispanic families. By 2016, the homeownership gap had narrowed slightly for Hispanics but widened for blacks. Black and Hispanic families were also less likely to own homes than white families with similar incomes.

NOW it feels like we're starting to get somewhere. Though another what begging for a why rears its head: if Hispanic home ownership is slightly LOWER than Black home ownership, why are Hispanics slightly ahead on overall wealth?

In 2016, white families had about $130,000 more (or six times more) in average liquid retirement savings than black and Hispanic families. In sheer dollar terms, this disparity has increased more than fivefold over the past quarter-century: in 1989, white families had about $25,000 more (or five times more) in average retirement savings than black and Hispanic families. This gap is becoming more important as liquid retirement savings vehicles, like 401(k)s, replace more traditional defined-benefit pension plans.

Why does this gap exist? It’s not just income differences; even at the same income level, gaps remain. Black and Hispanic families have less access to retirement saving vehicles and lower participation when they have access. But lower access and participation isn’t the full story.

Black workers are somewhat less likely to participate in employer retirement plans than white workers (40 percent versus 47 percent in 2013, respectively) but have much lower average liquid retirement savings. This suggests that simply having more employers offer retirement plans will not be enough to close the gap, especially if lower-income groups contribute smaller portions of their income to retirement plans and are more likely to withdraw money early to cover financial emergencies. Lower-income families may also get lower returns on average if they invest in safer, shorter-term assets.

Very interesting. But why do they have less access to ways to build solid retirement funds? They fly right past that with "but that isn't the full story", but I think that might be an interesting why to ferret out completely. The link provided fleshes out the statement in this article a bit, but raises another what without a complete why.

Since the mid-2000s, black families, on average, have carried more student loan debt than white families. This is driven in large part by the growing share of black families that take on student debt. In 2016, 42 percent of families headed by black adults ages 25 to 55 had student loan debt, compared with 34 percent of similar white families.

Because black families, on average, have less wealth and fewer private resources, they may be more likely to turn to loans to finance their education. White families are five times more likely than black families to receive large gifts or inheritances, which can be used to pay for college.

However, black students also have lower graduation rates than white students. Student loan debt doesn’t always translate into a degree that promotes economic mobility—and income and wealth—in the long run.

Student debt is a very salient point. Another salient point is how they're racking up that student debt. Given we've already covered the fact that whites apparently have greater retirement prospects, it's almost a statement of the obvious that they'd consequently have better prospects for inheritances. That said, I can certainly appreciate diligence. Still, we're adding yet more whats and I don't think we've really got whys for them all just yet. "Gifts" is a rather vague term, but there's a link there, so let's see what we can figure out from that.

We find evidence that financial support goes to people with greater need, with a few exceptions. Families with heads of household or spouses who have lower Do Financial Support and Inheritance Contribute to the Racial Wealth Gap? Signe-Mary McKernan, Caroline Ratcliffe, Margaret Simms, and Sisi Zhang income and are unmarried, younger, disabled, or in school receive more support than their counterparts. One notable exception is that families with a lesseducated head of household are less likely to receive support. We also found that families with more children are no more likely to receive support than their counterparts and that higher-income families receive more in large gifts and inheritances than lower-income families. Living with extended family or adult children reduces monetary private transfers across households, because the transfers are happening within households. The more siblings the head of the household or spouse has, the fewer private transfers a family receives, suggesting that siblings share parents’ assistance.

Now THIS is a very interesting thing. They've found some whys. Level of education for head of household, number of siblings, good, we're getting somewhere.

These findings suggest that programs providing lowincome families with additional income (such as cash welfare benefits or the earned income tax credit) will help poor minorities but will not close the racial wealth gap. More than income-based policies are needed to overcome racial wealth disparities. Large gifts and inheritances play an important role in perpetuating the racial wealth gap. The large intergenerational transfers that the baby boom generation is going to provide may exacerbate racial differences in the absence of an estate tax. Large gifts and inheritances may have a larger effect on wealth than smaller support transfers because they are often used to finance higher education or to make a down payment on a house. Therefore, legislators should consider policies beyond an estate tax to reduce wealth gaps over time. Public policies that subsidize education, for example, could enable families without sources of large gifts to go to college, boosting their earning capacity and, with it, their ability to accumulate wealth. Down-payment assistance targeted to minorities, savings programs for low-income families, and strategies to reduce barriers to homeownership also could help reduce the wealth gap. These policies move beyond income to address the wealth-building benefits many families miss out on.

My, that's INTERESTING. Their conclusion is, in short, that we need to start putting more policies in place to enforce "equality of outcome". Wealth transfer, subsidization, and more forms of Affirmative Action. But let's jump back to the first article for a second.

The federal government spends over $400 billion to support asset development, but those subsidies primarily benefited higher-income families—exacerbating wealth inequality and racial wealth disparities.

About two-thirds of homeownership tax subsidies and retirement subsidies go to the top 20 percent of taxpayers, as measured by income. The bottom 20 percent, meanwhile, receive less than 1 percent of these subsidies. Blacks and Hispanics, who have lower average incomes, receive much less of these subsidies than whites, both in total amount and as a share of their incomes.

Low-income families benefit from safety net programs, such as food and cash assistance, but most of these programs focus on income—keeping families afloat today—and do not encourage wealth-building and economic mobility in the long run. What’s more, many programs discourage saving: for instance, when families won’t qualify for benefits if they have a few thousand dollars in assets or when they have to give up rent subsidies to own a home.

So let me stop you right there. We have a safety net in place to try and keep people from starving to death naked on the streets. Are you saying we should let people stay in those safety nets longer as they begin to accrue assets? How much longer? What should the new cutoff on assets be? What KIND of assets would qualify towards this end? And most importantly, do you seriously expect the Federal Government to make people spend smarter and save smarter? It's not a matter if whether they'd want to or not, it's a matter of ability. Something about leading horses to water comes to mind.

 

[The Last Stand]

@Homoerotic Cougar-kun was the issue you had the source itself or me failing to elaborate on whys?

The idea that somebody has an advantage because of their race is a ludicrous one. Anybody can have opportunity to fulfill success regardless of potential roadblocks.

You remember segregation? You remember gerrymandering and redlining. Many Blacks wanted to get away from the Jim Crow laws of the South and venture up North during World War II. The Great Migration, so to speak.

Little did they know that many White landowners made it difficult to rent out to Blacks. Have them segregated in low run areas, and economic prosperity which created some of the ghettos we have today.

Class privilege turned into race privilege for those who controlled it.

 

[TFT-A9]

@Homoerotic Cougar-kun was the issue you had the source itself or me failing to elaborate on whys?

No one involved, you or the source, really answered all those whys. You advanced the question of "does it matter that I'm black?", and posted an article that makes some interesting findings towards that end, but didn't really wrap it up completely.

You remember segregation? You remember gerrymandering and redlining. Many Blacks wanted to get away from the Jim Crow laws of the South and venture up North during World War II. The Great Migration, so to speak.

Good for them. It's been over 50 years now since Jim Crow got taken out back and shot. In pace requiescat and all that.

Little did they know that many White landowners made it difficult to rent out to Blacks. Have them segregated in low run areas, and economic prosperity which created some of the ghettos we have today.

"many"

So you're saying there were white landowners who didn't pull that shit? Interesting. Where were those ones located, exactly?

 

[Autopsy]

Both "white" and "privilege" alone are too controversial to approach from this sort of objective standpoint, let alone the (unrelated, contrived) combined phrase "white privilege". I'm willing to bet that, of the people who have posted in this thread so far, most or all have very different views of the apriori meaning of the terms from each-other, as well as any number of people who hold an opposing viewpoint. This problem is common in modern politics and exhausting to deal with. Compare these two questions:
"Would you be in favor of a bill that would donate the organs of dead citizens to hospitals, with provisions to 'opt-out'?"
"Would you be in favor of a bill that preserves a woman's bodily autonomy?"
What the fuck is a "bodily autonomy"? In what sense is a woman "bodily autonomous"? In a literal sense, 'opt-out organ donations' would rob ignorant women of bodily autonomy, but that's not even vaguely the first thing to comes to mind with that phrase. A small army of semantics assaults you if you dare try to get to the bottom of what a "bodily autonomy" is, because in the end, modern social theory is all so shoddily defined. In some ways, old-school philosophy was like this too, but in the grand scheme of things everyone defined their terms very well. "White privilege" is the exact same sort of beast, but the people using the term are not on average philosophers, by any stretch of the imagination. It can be interpreted as you please to win whatever pithy argument you're engaged in at the moment, whether for or against the concept or simply using it as a convenient tool to deride the other person's moral integrity, and so little debate of meaning happens around it or its universally accepted meaning (or lack thereof).

There have been "privileges" exclusively afforded to "whites" in the past, if you include Hispanics, Jews, and the Irish as "whites", and you consider "getting loans" and "owning property" a "privilege". Some of these "privileges" continue in some form all the way to today, but in a general sense, systematic differences in treatment appear to be (from the big data perspective) simply the result of preexisting socioeconomic differences and confirmation bias.
The most concrete form of "white privilege" that can be pointed to is the massive gap in family wealth between whites (for convenience, Hispanics, Jews and the Irish will be looped in that phrase from here on) and non-whites in the United States. This is a factor in how your life's trajectory will go, and a big focal point of affirmative action. The goal is always to convert a "long-term lower class" family to a "first time middle-class" family, and hope that they accrue wealth from there. It works on average, and the farther we get away from the legally restrictive decades of US history, the better everyone is doing in family wealth- excluding whites, who have accrued value at a rate lower than the growth of inflation. Growth in black mean family value is particularly impressive, but it's harder to compare that stat due to the preponderance of white billionaires who have so much more than everyone else all together that it throws the stat right the fuck off a modal distribution.
A factor hindering this is the neverending importation of specifically nonwhites into a saturated economy so that they can flounder or take up highly competitive positions, as well as the tidal wave of white hispanics with no ID who inevitably situate into low-paying or no-paying positions that barely cover rent, not finances, if even that. Obviously, first generation immigrants won't have a backlog of "family wealth," and when immigration is factored out, things look a lot better on the curve.
That isn't to say it's the only factor. The explanations are unclear and still being studied to this day (by sociologists, which mean we'll never have an actual explanation), but nonwhites who grow up with wealth are more likely to leave wealth than whites who grew up with wealth. I link the article and not an archive because it has a neat little animation pane with an important takeaway: the turnover for who is rich and who is not in the US is massive, white or not, but preexisting wealth will raise your chances of staying in the top 20% over the baseline 20%- if you're white. In other words, family wealth is a predictor of future family wealth, and not only do whites have it, nonwhites do not benefit from the trend.

Except Asians, because apparently yellow is the new white.

If my sarcasm wasn't clear, this trend is likely more of a black youth cultural effect than a consequence of any sort of stigma, but certain kinds of people tend to cling to racism as a pray-away answer to any odd social phenomenon in the United States, and nobody of that particular political bent is willing to touch the idea of "bad culture" with a ten foot pole (even as they often accuse white rednecks of being deplorable human beings, misogynists, and unmanageable in a civil society). Furthermore, Asians have been free to get loans and own property and work for somewhat longer than blacks, so there's no reason to think that blacks won't see a similar astonishing rise in family wealth eventually; there's even a model to follow: two working parents either running or owning a shop, kids straight to higher education, take the handouts and plant deep roots. After all, singletons of any race have overwhelmingly lower average wealth than families, to the degree that their median isn't even taken into study, last I checked.
...
On second thought, maybe "white privilege" is having a dad?