The only times I have ever experienced "white privilege", it was bestowed by non-white people in Asian countries. Discuss.
I always hear SJW's yelling and screaming about "white privilege", but up until this year, I had never experienced any advantages in life over anyone else; in fact I grew up very poor and could argue that I have been disadvantaged by my own country in most aspects of life due to policies favouring minorities in scholarship awards, job applications, etc. over relevant skills and achievements. This year, I have been traveling all over Asia and have finally experienced this mythical "white privilege" that I keep hearing about, and it wasn't handed down by other white people. Rather, it seems Asian cultures are obsessed with white skin and will treat you better if you are white. For example, I have bypassed security screenings, been pushed to the front of lines, invited to formal grand opening events by complete strangers, had men beg me to allow them to introduce their daughters to me, etc.. Just yesterday I arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and on my way out of the airport there is a security check with x-ray machines for bags; the brown guy ahead of me got immediately stopped and asked by the Malaysian security guy what country he was from, then he looks at me and just waves me through.
So I am thinking, it seems to me from my experiences that "white privilege" only really exists in non-white countries and is perpetrated almost entirely by other races.. So why do I get blamed for this "privilege" by SJWs?
Posted Aug 23, 2015, 1:58 PM UTC
Well, the idea that SJWs have in mind is one your use of the term "privilege" doesn't quite capture—for good reason; they use it in an awkward / irregular way. But that awkward / irregular usage is somewhat immune to your critique.
When the SJW talks about "privilege," they don't mean you've been consciously given direct advantages, which is what your own scenario describes, and how most ordinary people would understand the regular usage of the word "privilege"—they mean that you've not been given disadvantages, whether consciously or unconsciously.
For instance, the fact that you've not been killed by police is a major key form of "white privilege," whether you've ever been in a sotuation that would ever even allow you to possibly notice this or not, because the definition if it is that you weren't treated this way, so it would therefore be easy to never notice.
Of course, they have the statistics wrong; minorities are not in fact more likely, all else equal, to be killed by police—in fact, once contolling for violent crime, because violent crime justifies the rate at which police interact with various groups and renders racism as an explanation for that interaction rate moot, the best evidence shows that any given black individual interacting with police is less likely than any given white individual interacting with police to be shot and killed in the process of that interaction.
And they fail similarly with most of the other facts behind the arguments that they advance at this level, almost always—just for starters—ignoring the relevance of individual behavior in creating disparities like these entirely. But if it weren't for failing at the level of facts and statistics in this way, they'd have a rather more favorable argument here—which is why, IMO, those facts deserve to be addressed and critiqued in the way I've aimed to do in the series of essays linked above.
Without the presence of such empirically ccentered ritiques, I think it's generally easy to see what the intellectual appeal of the "privilege" narratives is, precisely because if it were sccurate it wouldn't be refuted by anyone's individual claim not to have personally seen, felt, or experienced it. The fact that there's no immediately obvious way to soundly debunk it, in and of itself, can make it feel rather more plausible. Those—like me—who feel a compulsion to adopt the most 'intelligent'-sounding critique unless they can debunk them may end up sunk all the way into a fullblown worldview just because no one is putting the right facts out that address these claims at the right level. Every good liberal knows it's a "fact" that whites and blacks use drugs at the same rate—none know of studies performed multiple times over the last few decades where self-reports are given but followed up with drug tests showing that black respondents say "no" on self-reports when they do in fact have drugs in their system at as ignificantly higher rate, or have even had it noted to them that blacks and Hispanics show up in the emergency room for cases related to hard drug use at significantly higher rates, to list just two examples.
No one talks about these kinds of facts or brings them out into public awareness with any kind of confidence or integrity in saying "These are facts, and you can call me whatever names you must, but I stand by them so long as they are facts" because everyone is too scared of being taken down by SJW mobs—and then the cycle repeats and the pattern reinforces itseelf because another new 'generation' of observers once again has no idea about and no access to the relevant facts surprigsingly debunking those narratives at the statistical level.
Shouldn't this be called basic human rights to not be killed by the police? It's not a privilege to be able to lead your own life. It's supposed to be a right.
Basically the way they use the term is an odd way of saying "not discriminated against".
There are positive benefits to being white (or whatever relevant ethnic majority) outside of not being discriminated against
Care to list some of them?
Yeah, but thats a problem of police brutality.
I'm not familiar with the statistics on police brutality, so I can't comment on that, but there are certainly racial disparities in the criminal justice system -- even after controlling for individual behavior. For example, black people serve longer sentences, on average, for the same crimes as white people.
I do agree that social justice would do better to rely more on empirical evidence, but the statistics tend to confirm the existence of racial disparities in health, wealth, etc., although there might be some claims like the gender wage gap that are undermined by controlled studies.
Per Sonja Starr's research, which unlike most other studies actually controls for previous criminal record, the racial disparity is around 10%. By those same conservative measurements, the gender gap is actually 60%—in favor of lighter sentences for women with equaivalent criminal records committing equivalent crimes. A white man therefore has more disadvantage in terms of gender in common with a black man in the criminal justice system than he has 'privilege' in terms of race in common with a white woman. And the black man suffers six times more disparity qua 'male' than he suffers qua 'black.' There's a racial disparity that is not attributed to differences in behavior there, yes, but it still doesn't fit the SJW analysis of "privilege" as a central defining feature of social life that goes unanimously in the direction of white/male.
The source cited above puts the number at 20%, and Sonja Starr is actually quoted in the article as saying the number underrepresents total racial disparities because it only accounts for disparities in the final sentencing procedure and not the entirety of the criminal justice process. Even the 10% figure you cite comes from a study that finds black men are twice as likely to have mandatory minimums filed against them, after all things are held equal.
I agree that the studies on the gender gap in sentencing are at least as compelling, and unfortunately that's something you're unlikely to hear about in social justice circles.
Do you know of anything addressing the evidence from all the studies that have been done on sentencing disparities comprehensively? I can't really find any source I consider trustworthy. Some dramatically overestimate by failing to account for previous record, and some strangely find no sentencing disparity whatsoever and no one can seem to clearly explain that. I've gone with the 10/60 numbers up to now as a stand-in pending finding a chance to more thoroughly study it for myself, but my actual standards are almost unreasonably high.
Still, in either case, it seems my underlying point was essentially valid, because that 60% figure rivals or surpasses anything any study of the racial gap has found. And any point about why an isolated analysis ofthre sentencing disparity alone underestimates the overall criminal justice disparity applies just as well to that finding for gender—and David Benatar's The Second Sexism fills in that gap with evidence women are indeed less likely to be arrested to begin with.
To add a little further to my comment, studies have shown for decades that prison rape is overwhelmingly a black-on-white phenomena, and it's plausible that could have something to do with why white men are roughly three times more likely to kill themselves in prison than any other group. All that concern we saw about how jails need suicide watches and so forth when Sandra Bland killed herself barely ever, if ever, makes a sound when it's a white man who kills himself in prison, even though white men are more likely to kill and people generally care so little about this that they never even find out about it and the factoid doesn't even spread like they do when the disparities go in other directions.
And I think it's reasonable to say that having disparities that even merely represent the potential of showing discrimination against your group, whether it will turn out upon further analysis that they actually do or not (as with the Michael Brown case, the gender wage gap, and the supposed racial imbalance of police shootings) is a privilege that whites and men get very little of.
Racial disparities in the criminal justice system are not based on race however, there is no evil racist conspiracy meant to specifically target Blacks. Economic differences lead to a growing gap in sentencing, since Blacks are disproportionately effected by poverty than most other race it's obvious they wouldn't be able to afford a consistent level of quality legal aid to negotiate down sentences or adequately fight their case.
There are also a myriad of other sources that disprove this outdated argument as well:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/21/police-kill-more-whites-than-blacks-but-minority-d/
http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-black-americans-commit-crime/19439
I responded to the slatestarcodex source a while back in this post. It's a rather suspicious blog with a tendency to misrepresent sources.
The Washington Times isn't exactly a neutral source either. Even its own Wikipedia entry describes it as extremely conservative. It's citing a former cop, writing on a blog.
Also, both of the last two sources regard racism in initial encounters with police (police brutality, driving while black, etc.) whereas my comment was about disparities in sentencing when black and white men are arrested for the same crimes. That would control for factors like poverty or disparate crime rates among races.
I'm not claiming there's an evil racist conspiracy, but poverty alone can't account for 100% of racial disparities because they still exist even when those factors are held constant. And even if you do think that the underlying cause is poverty, that doesn't disprove the existence of racial disparities in the US; it proves there are huge racial disparities in economics which have large implications for other spheres of society (like crime), making it all the more important to address.
I respect your opinions related to the article, but the point isn't contested outside of that same realm.
You're correct in the assessment that poverty alone cannot account for every case imaginable, but this also means that the contrary is equally as improbable to be the case as is commonly argued extensively by the 'Social Justice' perspective. I also agree with your second sentence it's a very important issue to address but it isn't an issue to address as a racial issue for Whites alone to overcome. The problem arises when it comes to actually devising a process to remedy the situation, wealth redistribution goes contrary to Western economics and even basic rights of many nations in the West and policies such as affirmative action have strong arguments against them as being inefficient and legitimately prejudiced.
Therefore, it's easy for me to also conclude that the focus on the racial aspect is most likely the result of people being unable or unwilling to discuss it's actual cause - wealth inequality.