Oh I will sweetie pie, knowing that you're my biggest fan — StreetlightX

"Flagged for low post quality. Moved to the lounge."

I do not think that you can support the idea that all white people at all times are benefiting in any calculable way from the oppression of black people. — Pro Hominem

How many times does it need to be said before you understand?

The benefit of being white in America is the immunity and/or exemption from being injured because one is not. That is always the case. Regardless of individual particular circumstances, if you are white, you are exempt.

I'm beginning to think that there may be a reading comprehension issue at hand.

Understanding and/or becoming aware of white privilege requires knowing about enough of the situations that non whites deal with because they are not white. White privilege is the exemption from just these sorts of specific circumstances and/or situations. Those situations are only thought about when a non white individual tells their own story. Until then, the white individual cannot know about all of the injustices that they are themselves immune to.

— creativesoul
All your consideration is based on the racial premise of skin colour as the most fundamental socio-economic distinction and operator. How can we know that non-white deal with various situations exclusively because they are non-white, and white are exempted just because they are white? — Number2018

I missed this. Would have rather spent my time on this than what I have today.

:smile:

That's a very good question. I appreciate the attention it took.

Unfortunately it deserves more attention than I can give it at the moment, but it will be first on the agenda upon my return. The rest of that post will be given it's just due as well.

:up:

The benefit of being white in America is the immunity and/or exemption from being injured because one is not. — creativesoul

Don't you think this is very convoluted way of talking? Why not just say that the problem is that non-whites are being discriminated and oppressed?

You know, it does kinda raise the question why one goes through all the trouble of framing it in that way if there is a more simple and straightforward way of phrasing it.

The benefit of being white in America is the immunity and/or exemption from being injured because one is not.
— creativesoul

Don't you think this is very convoluted way of talking? — ChatteringMonkey

Not at all...

Why not just say that the problem is that non-whites are being discriminated and oppressed?

Talking about white privilege opens the door for otherwise unknowing and/or unaware(but perfectly capable) white people to much better understand the extent of the problems. It sheds light upon the otherwise unknown reality. It leads to empathy where there could be none prior. It demands attention considerably more than just saying that we have a racial discrimination problem...

... wouldn't ya say?

:brow:

...

It opens the door for otherwise unknowing and/or unaware white people to much better understand the extent of the problems. It sheds light upon the otherwise unknown reality. It leads to empathy where there could be none prior. It gets their attention considerably more than just saying that we have a racial discrimination problem...

... wouldn't ya say? — creativesoul

I dunno, I think different people will react differently, as is evident from these threads I think. Some will maybe react in that way, some will be offended, others will just misunderstand it... I think it's hard to say what the effect will be and if it will be a good one. I generally prefer just plainly stating what is going on, it think clarity has it own merits. For one, it's harder to deny that there is a problem if it's crystal clear...

The benefit of being white in America is the immunity and/or exemption from being injured because one is not. — ChatteringMonkey

What's unclear about that?

I'm not talking about that sentence, although I do think the way I said it is more clear, but it's about the concept of white privilege. This is already an explanation you have to give for white privilege.

ITT: Bunch of people complaining about their own hermeneutic ineptitude while others worry about making it out alive on the other side of a 'routine' traffic stop.

It opens the door for otherwise unknowing and/or unaware white people to much better understand the extent of the problems. It sheds light upon the otherwise unknown reality. It leads to empathy where there could be none prior. It gets their attention considerably more than just saying that we have a racial discrimination problem...

... wouldn't ya say? — creativesoul

Let's just say I don't like politics, and it has adverse effect on me when people try to infuse their language so as to elicit some effect from me. Maybe I'm weird.

I do think... with a fair amount of conviction... that once one becomes aware of the facts when blacks are not treated equally under the law, they can no longer be thought of as innocent. However, I would urge that the expectation placed upon each individual regarding what they ought do, would be commensurate with their ability to effect/affect change. A public official is held to a much higher standard than a poor rural white person living in the rust belt.

Both ought do what they can when they can. — creativesoul

:point: :strong:

With regards to what anyone can do, here is something that's been on my mind.

Let's say you're generally a woke person in terms of systemic racism. You've read stuff that clearly establishes that it's a thing, and that it shows up everywhere. Literally everywhere, poverty gaps, pay gaps, hiring gaps, healthcare gaps, job-with-benefits gaps, precarious vs stable employment gaps, police murders, rates of kids drowning in swimming pools.... .

Let's say you're also aware that systems which are systemically racist also promote (and do not effectively punish/render invisible) racial prejudice against the oppressed group. And you know that racial prejudice is a more complicated mental construct than just being a binary between white supremacist terrorist and tolerant liberal; like where does the hiring gap for equally good CVs come from if there's no way for managers to embody a mechanism of systemic racism? Implicit stereotypes have to play a role. And it makes absolutely no sense to say that someone learns that mechanism the instant they're in a hiring role. So you also know that implicit stereotypes are both a relevant vector of oppression; contributing to the hostility of public spaces, differences in how the oppressed group are treated; and they are fucking everywhere. So panvasive that internalised racism is a thing - like Christians the world over praying to the miracle of a milky white ethnically Palestinian Jesus.

So why not in me? Why not in you? Are we not people affected by the structures we live in? It's one thing to be aware of these things as an intellectual construct, it's another to view your own actions and thoughts under their auspices. That is something that anyone can attempt, so they should attempt it. It's easy to put all the racism "over there" into abstract societal mechanisms, but if "the personal is political" everyone has to do the difficult work of self transformation - to try and be the kind of individual whose thoughts and actions challenge the psychic manifestations of systemic racism. And no, I don't think it's "enough" - emotional labour of that sort is doubtlessly of less importance than social projects, but because we all can, we all should. I think that goes double for the privileged groups like we whites - if we want to live in a world absent systemic discrimination, we should try not to be its racist grandparents.

In relationship to the topic, I think that's what "white privilege" taps into, why it gets so offensive. It doesn't just highlight that whites are beneficiaries of systemic racism, it highlights that the psychic (and other individual embodied) manifestations of systemic racism are there too. It's difficult to stop an ego-defense mechanism when you don't realise that's what it is, and trying to stop it is supposed to be painful. Part of system justification is emotional homeostasis. But how painful struggle is has never touched its moral status; if you can, you should. Are we really to believe that whites are so fragile that our reluctance to do this work is because it is impossible? I doubt it.

The benefit of being white in America is the immunity and/or exemption from being injured because one is not. — creativesoul

This IS ambiguous.

There are several ways to read it, if you have English comprehension skills of grade five equivalent or higher:
The benefit of a white American is that s/he is not white.
The benefit of a white American is the immunity from injury because s/he is not immune from injury.

In either case the ONE IS NOT refers to the only humans mentioned in the sentence, White Americans. It also uses the conjugated form of the verb BE in a negation, so it negates either one of the conjugated forms of the verb BE. One such previous is BEING (White American), the other is the BEING injured. The IS THE IMMUNITY is not the antecedent of ONE IS NOT because ONE is a personal pronoun, it referst to a human being, and immunity and exemption are not human beings.

The sentence in effect negates itself, and is not only convoluted, but it is nonsensical as well. It statest the absurd, by invoking the reduction of absurdum, and the author insists that he had made a point. Whereas in effect his sentence structre is, after removing the ambiguity of the unspecified reference between a choice of two separate antecedents, somewhat equivalent to:

My car is green because it is not.
My son is tall because he is not.

ETC.

Systemic racism is an observable fact. White privilege is an argumentative construct. One exists, the other is a tactic (I've explained many times why I think it's a bad tactic, but that won't stop any of you from continuing to use it). I've acknowledged that some white people have benefited from racial attitudes and laws in all sorts of ways, and that that is a problem that must be addressed. I do not think that you can support the idea that all white people at all times are benefiting in any calculable way from the oppression of black people. I don't even think you can satisfactorily define who exactly all these "white" people are. ((my emphasis)) — Pro Hominem

1. There exists a system that at least intends to divide people according to a criterion it calls "race".
2. That system marks some members of our society as "black" and some as "white".
3. This system legitimizes violating the human rights of those marked as "black" but not of those marked as "white".
4. The system also legitimizes various sorts of unfair or inequitable treatment of those marked as "black" but not of those marked as "white".

I do not believe there is any disagreement here on (1)-(4).

The disagreement is on how to answer the question Qui bono?

One answer comes from something like critical theory, which I can clumsily attempt:

Those marked as "white" are the beneficiaries by definition. The system is an asymmetrical power structure, and those marked as "white" are on the privileged side. In fact, what people understand as modern liberal free-market society is constituted by just such asymmetries; the "rights" people marked as "white" enjoy are an artifact of such systems. They are not "universal human rights" and never have been; they are privileges doled out to some along with an ideology that falsely claims they are universal, and the evidence that they are not universal has traditionally been explained away by a further pernicious ideology of "race" which marks some people as less than human and therefore not entitled to the putative "universal human rights". The political and economic system those marked as "white" think of as a universal benefit is just this system of oppressing those marked as "black" and granting what it calls "rights" to those marked as "white". "Whites" only "have rights" insofar as "blacks" don't; this is intrinsic to the definitions of "white" and "black" in such a system.

There are others around here who could do a much better job of that than I did.

But there is alternative answer, and this is my similarly clumsy attempt:

The beneficiaries of this system are those who set it up in the first place for their benefit. In the antebellum South, in particular, slave-owners justified the practice of building wealth by extracting labor from slaves with an ideology of "race" that defined those slaves as less than human and not deserving of the rights and freedoms that intellectuals of the time were promoting as the legitimate foundation of human society. These slave-owners benefited economically and politically, and arranged the theory of "race" to include themselves as humans deserving of rights and freedoms, but non-slave-owning "whites" derived no particular benefit from this classification or from the economic gain of slave-owners. After the Civil War and emancipation, "whites" who had accumulated wealth and status continued to promote the ideology of "race" as a way to maintain their wealth and status; some other "whites" may also have benefited here and there a little by the promotion of this ideology and the racist practices of oppression it justified, but this is largely inconsequential, certainly to those who primarily benefited, as the system was never even intended to help them particularly but merely to paper over the continuance of what are really inequities of power and wealth, i.e. class.

The first answer involves some pretty heavy theoretical commitments and I think, generally speaking, either you buy this sort of thing or you don't. It's a lot of work to find a middle path that finds some genuine insight here while preserving a commitment to Enlightenment ideas of rights and democracy and so on.

The second answer has a very different problem: it's not quite an answer at all, at least not directly. If we made the question Qui bono in diebus nostris?, "Who benefits right now? today?", where is the answer? Are we to trace generational wealth back to slave-owners? Do you count as a beneficiary of systemic racism if and only if your family tree includes slave-owners and if and only if some of the advantage you enjoy relative to others is due to the preservation over time of some of their wealth and power? How do we even approach such questions?

We could instead claim that no one really benefits at all from this system, not any more. Racists, who mistakenly believe an ideology originally created to protect wealth and political power, continue to maintain and enforce the system whether or not they even benefit from it in any tangible way. The current system is thus in some ways just an accident, a pointless holdover from an earlier time of injustice that at least made sense in its own pernicious terms, but today is just stupid and needlessly cruel.

It's just hard to see how to square this second take with the gap between black and white household wealth, the disproportionate incarceration of black men, the various achievement gaps in education and employment and health and, well, everything, between blacks and whites. In short, the second version (of the second answer) is perhaps a reasonable view on racism but has nothing to say about systemic racism. At least nothing I can see. So we're forced back to what look like pretty intractable questions about generational wealth and power, privilege and responsibility.

If we're not going to plump for the critical-theory-type view -- and of course some of us are -- we need something that at least answers the questions it answers.

You do realize that one can know the biological shortcomings of race as a purported biological category, yet still proceed to meaningfully categorize a group of individuals based upon skin color, and continue doing so without ever devaluing them based upon skin color...

Right?

You can superficially categorize people, sure, but here we are applying zero-sum thinking to outmoded taxonomies. Perverted racialist, and I would argue white supremacist, thinking is occurring here.

I have taken the Harvard implicit bias test, at least the one on race -- I assume everyone here has -- and got more or less exactly the result I expected: as a white man of my age who grew up where and how I did, I have a slight but noticeable implicit bias in favor of whites and against blacks. I already knew that -- though I'm not really sure how.

So now what? I'm not sure eradicating my bias is on the table, though I believe my children have less bias than I do and their children will have less than they do. I have even heard psychologists argue that "sensitivity training" of the sort businesses and schools and other institutions pay experts to provide is worse than pointless: not only does it not reduce implicit bias, it tends to make people defensive, resistant to self-examination, and thus less likely to modify their behavior.

Monitoring my own behavior is what I've opted for. I have decided -- rightly or wrongly I'm not sure -- that racism is acting upon bias, whether implicit or explicit, explicit bias is a failure of the intellectual conscience, but implicit bias you just have to live with, make the effort not to act upon it, be open to recognizing when you have, and improve. Not so different from dealing with other cognitive biases really, except that other people may pay a price for your failings.

All to say, the point about stereotypes and their cultural effect is well taken, but there is a public layer we can readily address, a personal layer we can straightforwardly address, and a further personal layer that we must accept as a process we are responsible for managing throughout our lives.

You're trying to create a distinction where there is no difference. Accomplice and collaborator mean more or less the same thing. Both require direct, knowledgeable involvement in a previously determined illegal act. Neither of them apply in this case, as even creativesoul has been telling you. — Pro Hominem

Explicit vs implicit complicity?

I think a lot of what is characterized as racism is at base cultural bias and/or class bias. Our common unreflective disposition is to mistrust, even fear, those who are different, where the most salient differences are those of cultural ways, general interests and concerns, and language, and I think this goes for almost all people, of whatever culture.

"Flagged for low post quality. Moved to the lounge." — Noble Dust

:grin:

...is Woke Privilege a thing on PF? Is there a structural disadvantaging of other views that some entitled posters find it uncomfortable to confront?

There is a through-line from the practice of chattel slavery in America to contemporary systemic racism. One side of that the story has this form: blacks were oppressed like this, and then like this, and then like this, and nowadays they're oppressed like this. The people involved in this thread seem mostly to agree on that part. What they don't agree on is the other side of the story. Are there any oppressors in this story? Were there in the past but no longer?

I told a story about injustice earlier in this thread that had four characters: a victim, a perpetrator, a beneficiary, and a bystander. Some people get to choose their role and some don't. Do we call that freedom to choose a privilege?

My results suggested “a slight automatic preference for African Americans over European Americans”. Shouldn’t implicit bias force me to unknowingly favor my own category over another?

If people are or were oppressed, then it seems obvious that there are or were oppressors. Although people may be oppressed, not necessarily by any particular individuals, but merely by entrenched social conditions. That said I think it would be reasonable to say that the people enforcing, upholding or even merely failing to recognize and work against those conditions are, albeit perhaps unknowingly, oppressors insofar as they are agents who are enforcing, upholding, or by omission supporting, oppressive conditions.

Having said that I don't see exactly how your response is related to what I wrote.

I told a story about injustice earlier in this thread that had four characters: a victim, a perpetrator, a beneficiary, and a bystander. Some people get to choose their role and some don't. Do we call that freedom to choose a privilege? — Srap Tasmaner

If only some people get to choose anything then that would count as a privelege, no?

1. There exists a system that at least intends to divide people according to a criterion it calls "race".
2. That system marks some members of our society as "black" and some as "white".
3. This system legitimizes violating the human rights of those marked as "black" but not of those marked as "white".
4. The system also legitimizes various sorts of unfair or inequitable treatment of those marked as "black" but not of those marked as "white".

I do not believe there is any disagreement here on (1)-(4). — Srap Tasmaner

Should it be concluded from (1) - (4) that the society of the US is segregational and racist?

Read the stuff on the website. I think the answer is twofold (though I'm no expert):

• "no" because it's not just a sort of theorized in-group preference along the line @Janus was describing;
• you can expect slightly different results each time you take the test.

There are of course some issues and some methodological questions here -- it's science -- but some of this stuff is addressed there.

Is that a semantics question? That is, are you trying to decide whether those points are constitutive of being a "segregational and racist" society, so that by knowing those points to hold we can conclude the label properly applies?

Or would the label you are asking about result from a different sort of inference? That is, those points holding allows you to conclude something more, so that knowing this label applies allows you to say something besides (1)-(4). In which case, I don't know, because I'm not still not sure what you're asking.

What matters is that they are a body (with a skin colour) which is treated with respect, given a place on a society, etc., so it's not a simple matter of ignoring race.

It's not good enough to say, "Race never matters, ignore it and just think about other things". If there are people of a certain skin colour who are treated badly in a society, it is an act upon them, upon their body, with its skin colour.

The equitable society cannot just ignore bodies different skin colour, as if it didn't matter where they occurred or they were treated. They have to understand a body of any skin colour is to be respected, understood to belong, treated justly, etc.

It must actively understand each individual, with their skin colour, is valued and belongs. It is not colorblind. It gets up and pronounces each person belongs in their own skin: a society in which White, Black, Asian, etc., such that it matters how each of those bodies is treated by society. — TheWillowOfDarkness

It is really quite amazing, how few people on this thread have actually even attempted to deal with the problems that I've brought up. You don't want to discuss the effectiveness of the framing, the ethics of it, the fairness of it. That's fine, puts you in the majority.

All I can say to your response is that you aren't really dealing with the logic of racism, you seem to just want a certain outcome because of its beauty but there are significant disagreements here. First, let me clarify that my goal is not to say "race never matters" but ask "to what degree do we want race to matter?" and to create some clear rules. For me, this means never characterising or describing problems in terms of race unless absolutely necessary, avoid characterising issues in racial terms unless absolutely necessary and never inform yourself about an individual based on their race.

With systemic racism, we agree, that's an area where it is absolutely necessary to talk in racial terms but where that line is drawn from it being necessary to unhelpful is something of a disagreement. "White privilege" crosses a line, it creates divisions rather than merely describes them, it leads to race-based thinking rather than merely describing the race-based thinking of others and it emphasises the importance of race in areas where it isn't appropriate.

When you argue that economic redistribution should aim to achieve racial equity in terms of outcome, you are talking about the state recognising your right to economic privileges based on your race. At this point, It is clear that you are not logically opposed to systemic racism by how it discriminates on race. What you are opposed to is the oppression of a race of people by the state. The way to help make amends for that is to help that race to catch up by giving them economic privileges.

As far as I am concerned, you are not arguing against systemic racism being wrong for the same reasons as me. You are not saying it's ridiculous to discriminate on race in any, least of all, the most important areas such as who occupies positions of power, which "races" have access to wealth and so on. I don't consider such a thinker to be at all aligned with myself at all.

Then consider the matter of reparations, here one is arguing that by virtue of your race, you have a separate history from other Americans, you can be evaluated differently by your race and the correct identification for yourself is your race. Again, the concern here is how this race has been treated horrifically in the past and you want to make it up to (the race of people) who were subjected to past injustices. When one thinks this way, they emphasise the importance of race as something which defines the individual. What they are against isn't race-based discrimination, they are against discrimination which leads to outcomes of oppression and hatred.

This is all relevant for the term "white privilege" because perhaps you were never opposed to giving people important identities based on race which are fine to use to treat people differently in the first place - even if it leads to unpleasant consequences for people. I am free to treat you differently based on your race, you are only opposed to certain outcomes of my treatment. Therefore instances of "black pride" or something are good because feeling pride in yourself is good while "white supremacy" is wrong because feeling superior and devaluing others is wrong.

I am not saying that your position is incoherent but it isn't really anything similar to what I want, which is to devalue the importance of race across the board in any context that it can be done. The solution to "white privilege" for me is to change the policies and institutions which are responsible for perpetuating undesirable outcomes based on race. I am not interested in dismantling a majority of the "white privileges" because I am not interested in assessing outcomes based on race. I am only interested in dismantling the systems which discriminate based on race and unfairly impose, oppress and otherwise negatively impact people based on their race.

I did make a few assumptions here but it would take more than for you to merely deny them for me to rescind them. If I am wrong then please explain how.

"no" because it's not just a sort of theorized in-group preference along the line Janus was describing; — Srap Tasmaner

Not "theorized" , more of a general observation; I was just highlighting what I think is true of most people; that they are most comfortable with what they are familiar with, with what they understand without having to make any special effort.

I have some thoughts but I'm going to mull it over and let other people talk. Also reading Peggy McIntosh's white privilege papers that more or less started this whole thing.

Also reading Peggy McIntosh's white privilege papers that more or less started this whole thing. — Srap Tasmaner

Looks interesting!

I'm paid by the hour, so I wouldn't know.