Explaining "Privilege' to Straight White Male nerds....

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Probably not but how priviledged would a homeless white person compared to a middle class black family?

Not very. In that case, class would have a stronger effect than race. That's where the concept of intersectionality comes in; privilege isn't about what you have right now, it's more about being given the benefit of the doubt by people who don't know you, solely based on being perceived as a member of one group or another.

All other things being equal, a middle class white man is going to be given opportunities - is going to be given the benefit of the doubt - more than a middle class black man, and will be more likely to succeed. He didn't do anything to earn that benefit; he gets it just by being white. Likewise, he didn't do anything to harm or take away that benefit from the black guy, and the black guy didn't do anything wrong to lose that benefit.

All other things being equal, a homeless white guy is going to be harassed by the police less than a homeless black guy. He's more likely to receive social services, and less likely to be perceived as being dangerous.

All other things being equal, a middle-class, teenage white kid is less likely to be shot by the cops or by a neighborhood watch man than a middle-class, teenage black kid; and if he is shot, the perpetrator is more likely to be convicted if the kid is white than if the kid is black.

Probably plenty of times and your not factoring all the effects it can have on someone's entire life. I'd sure as hell would rather be black and gay and come from a loving stable family than be the child of some drunk abuser that couldn't hold down a job. Getting beaten up in the street, murdered, having abusive epithets, or being unjustly fired from a job SUCKS regardless of the reason and trust me it happens to everyone and the vast majority of the time it has nothing to do with your race, gender, or sexual orientation. Playing the 'Oppression Olympics' isn't the point tho, the point is we all face our own unique challenges in life and asserting that these challenges arise because of straight white men receive some imaginary privilege from society is a prejudice of it's own. Replace 'straight white men' with Jews and then maybe you'd see the ridiculousness of this privilege theory. That's not saying there isn't discrimination in the world or where you are in life is entirely your choosing either, it happens and it sucks.

It's pretty funny to even be having this argument on an Asperger's support website(which I'd imagine is majority straight white males BTW), how dare anybody say I'm "playing life on easy mode".

You do make a point and I whole heartedly agree! When it comes to differences in money making status race means nothing!

Its a cute tongue-in-cheek article about speaking to folks 'in their own language'.

The irony is that many of these dorky gamer-guys are aspies who themselves have 'high difficulty settings' when dealing with life away from the play station because of lack of social skills, and such.

You haven't heard about the many experiments where researchers send out otherwise identical resumes with different names? Joe Smith gets called for significantly more interviews than Jane Jones, Jamal Hussein, or Shaniqua Green.

I find it a little difficult to believe that so many commenters in this thread can't understand the difference between easiest and easy. Where's the literal-mindedness?

No. Some forms of racist prejudice can happen irrespective of social class purely because some people are inherently racist.

Even then, a middle class black guy is going to be looked down upon by upper class white men. Its economies of scale.

Last edited by thomas81 on 09 Nov 2013, 10:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

Who do you think would have it easier an African American with a degree and employed making 6 figures a year or a homeless white man whos unemployed? I guess that homeless white man has it easier eh?

No-ones saying that either but the black guy is still going to struggle competing against white guys higher up the ladder or at the same level he is at.
The fact remains that struggle remains there purely down to his being black.

I suppose the question might become, particularly when so many things outside of race and gender switch things on their own from easy to hard or medium to very hard, and when we don't get to control anyone but ourselves, what are we really supposed to say about it? I don't think anyone disagrees that social Neanderthal exist, we can correct them if they say something in front of us but someone has to want to be gotten through to if we're going to have any capacity to change their ways - otherwise they're simply hiding it from us and shifting this behavior to their targets while looking over their shoulders to make sure we aren't around to see it.

The thing I really worry about though, when these conversations get pressed, is that there's a cost/benefit ratio to talking about a particular issue. To put it out there to get through to the hard headed is okay but when we're at a point where most people are not racist/sexist and the message is continually just hitting the people who are already committed in that direction anyway the result is just wear and tare. If the message isn't 'meditate on the fact that racism and sexism still exists' which is about all that one can do when it's pulled as far back as it is right now you may often have someone instead ask people to beat on themselves for being born of a particular race or gender - not to mind if they're even second or third generation from Europe or Russia who could honestly say that most minorities here have a longer US lineage than they do.

I think the rub-people's-nose-in-the-problem and saying "LOOK! SEEEE!" it's a far better policy to instead really push and promote social cohesion. When it's delivered in the take the dog over to it's mess and scold it what happens is every last bit of race/gender anxiety that people have in them, whether fear of fear or fear of fear of fear even, just get's juggled. That doesn't yield healthy changes, rather it yields division and especially so in areas that are - like where I'm at in the US - old industrial towns where things kinda just divided along zoning lines. My point being though - cohesion based politics (probably an oxymoron considering media and Washington DC climate), increased trust to where people know that they can relax and enjoy other people's company and humanity without walking on eggshells, that's what puts humanity first and creed/race/gender distant second. The best way forward I think, as we wait for the people who still think it's 1968 to hit the nursing homes, is for people to feel more and more comfortable around each other and more trust - I see that happening in many places already and it'll be expedited as the news media stops playing division politics. That kind of cohesion would even further the natural impulse people have to, if someone wanted to lip off on some archaic rant about women's right to work or a particular coworker's race, I'd guarantee you get much more heroic responses on impulse than if people are still paranoid which turns people more toward self-absorption, that is they're defending someone whose closer to a dear friend than it being something that they're too numbed by their own concerns to feel as much more than a social obligation on principle which they may or may not have the energy for.


Lol, don't worry - you weren't the target of that book, I just wanted to get that out there at some point in this thread.

Deporting all white people might fix that!

I'm not a supporter of affirmative discrimination either.

What the world, including the USA needs, is meritocracy.

Where is the deductive reasoning that attempt to understand rather than blindly accept. If there is a correlation that skin color has an overall impact of the hardships in life, does that not lead to the question of why? Surely, it is unreasonable to assume that skin color alone is the cause of hardships. A more reasonable conclusion is that there are standards in different groups that set what is the acceptable average. In the male Caucasian group normal appears to be set at middle class to upper middle class. Failure to meet these standards means that you will be bellow average. Alternatively, the Hispanic and African American communities have a set norm somewhere bellow middle class, which is in fact an easier standard to meet than "entitled white males", who must work harder to feel normal. This does not mean that black or Hispanic men are any less intelligent nor are they any different in their ability to succeed. To say contrary is to insinuate an untrue ( if not raciest) argument that they are congenitally predisposed towards a lesser existence.

That argument only makes sense if you deny that racism exists. Again, you make the assumption that people you consider different must want different things out of life. Your circular logic which states that different outcomes must imply different goals only makes sense if you disregard the abundant evidence of discrimination against people based on skin color (and other factors).

Regarding the overall tone of this thread (by which I mean people wallowing in self-pity), it comes across as really unattractive when people reply to a discussion about things being difficult for someone else by talking only about how rough they themselves have had it.

The word "Privilege" (assuming one is not referring to the more narrow legal concept of right vs. privilege), whether it be white, male, heterosexual or [insert category here], is a non-falsifiable term designed to impose collective guilt upon [insert category here] and create a destructive "Us vs. Them" mentality. It is a divisive term by definition, and humanity would be better off if it was to disappear from the English language altogether.

It was bad enough when "Privilege" was just another feminist crap pseudo-scientific term. Must it infect questions of race and sexuality as well?

But the problem with meritocracy is that it disregards the needs of disabled people. In a pure meritocracy, quadriplegics, and other physically or mentally disabled people, would be left for dead because they would be of little use to the system. There probably wouldn't be many hospitals trying revive people either, because it'd be more efficient to just let most ill people die, unless they had special skills that most other people lacked. I don't want to live under a system that tramples people in their times of weakness.