Kemi Badenoch appointed new Minister for Women and Equalities

I believe that white privilege exists. It is a thing that white people have.

I see no contradiction between saying "that woman has white privilege" and "that woman overall has very little privilege". I am increasingly coming to the view that in the real world white privilege is less important than I previously thought, and in terms of debate and policy change the focus should be on economic privilege / class privilege which is MUCH MUCH more important. I am increasingly coming to the view that I will be very careful in future before bringing up the concept because it is unlikely to be part of a constructive conversation.

In an ideal world no black or white parent would give their kids "the talk." In the real world I suspect the problem might be that only black kids get it.

I'm sure that's true. But it's got nothing to do with the discussion we were having or the point I was making.

Yes - my point was about victim blaming, to the pp saying that white people got killed because of their entitlement, whereas black people were killed because of police brutality.

Actually, now I think about it, were you saying that it's their 'white privilege' that gets white people killed @YouSirNeighMmmm ? Again, this seems like not much of a privilege...

I cannot reference it, but I am absolutely certain that there is mountains of anecdotal evidence to back up my "theory" that in general black parents in the US teach their kids lessons about how to deal with the police when they approach you, because of fears of racist treatment, whereas white parents don't teach the same lessons because they don;t have the same fears.

A Black Mother Reflects On Giving Her 3 Sons 'The Talk' ... Again And Again

www.npr.org/2020/06/28/882383372/a-black-mother-reflects-on-giving-her-3-sons-the-talk-again-and-again

I don't believe that there is the same equivalent white phenomena.

In an ideal world no black or white parent would give their kids "the talk." In the real world I suspect the problem might be that only black kids get it.

I do believe in male privilege. I can observe it

therefore I think it is reasonable to think that white privilege exists, and that I as a white person find it hard to see

I also think it’s of limited use. Being male or white doesn’t make you a bad person, and trying to imply that it does just sows division

and as previous posters have said, a far more reliable indicator of opportunities and outcomes in the UK is class. But the people whose class has brought them opportunities most people would never see don’t really want to talk about that

but people who are upper class still aren’t bad or wrong for the way they were born

our urge to condemn people for things outside their control does seem to be a big part of the problem

No - the discussion is about white privilege. I haven't got an answer to the problem of police violence or police racism in the US - have you? I feel that's a derail, if I'm honest.

I'm making these points by way of showing that your example of 'white privilege' isn't really a good example. It's way more complicated that simply asserting that white people have a benefit by virtue of their whiteness. You picked the example of US police, so I ran with that.

Interestingly Glenn Lowry uses this hypothesis to explain why black men experience more police brutality and urges black parents to instill the need to comply completely with police at the point of any interaction.

He gets a lot of hate for suggesting this.

The flaw is you are using a scenario you’ve made up in your own head to fit your chosen theory, rather than look at statistical evidence or actual case studies (including evidence presented by black men living in the USA)

Spot on.

@beastlyslumber [To draw a parallel] I genuinely don 't know what is worse.

The absolute misogynists who accuse the drunk teen in a mini skirt of asking for it.

Or the people who should know better who focus 100% on how women should have a right to roll around in the gutter drunk at 2 am on a Sunday morning whilst not coming to any harm, ever.

Of course the drunk teen was not asking for it. Of course sexual assault is always wrong. But in between those things is something called the real world that needs navigating by reference to how things are not how they should be.

Young black people in the US have police racism (true or otherwise) drummed into them, and I am sure that plenty of black kids are alive today because they bit their lip, did what they were told, however innocent they were and however much of an arsehole the cop was. Meanwhile I suspect that there are some dead white kids whose parents did not teach the same lessons as their black neighbours.

Just a theory, maybe I am wrong.

Sam Harris does a really careful analysis of the statistics around black and white people's interactions with the police in the USA.

#207 — Can We Pull Back From The Brink? on Podbean, check it out! www.podbean.com/ea/dir-ws6t4-92b8749

Black men have a much higher proportion of interactions with police as they commit a higher proportion of violent crime.

They are also more likely to experience police brutality than white men during interactions with the police (from black and white officers) but less likely to be killed than white men during interactions.

It's not clear at all what's going on within these statistics but it's clear it's not as straight forward as just racism.

It's also clear that the number of unarmed innocent black people murdered by the police is very rare, which is not the narrative BLM were promoting.

They actively wanted law abiding black people to feel in mortal danger from the police on a daily basis, and they succeeded in getting many people to believe this.

It's such dangerous decisive manipulation.

I get your point. What is your solution, black parents stop giving their kids advice on how to avoid getting killed by the police? Pretend that behaving like an arsehole when stopped by the police in the US doesn't increase the chances of a bad outcome?

Are you seeing the flaw yet?

I don't see an obvious flaw in the theory that entitled white people would be much less careful around the police

You don't see a flaw in saying that white people are more likely to get killed because they're "entitled"? And they're not "careful"?

So if a black person is killed by the police, is that because he wasn't careful enough, or acted too entitled?

Are you seeing the flaw yet?

The question to DadJoke is men, including those who identify as women, can be legally excluded from women's toilets - do you want that to stop?

Yes an even better way to word it :)

I had no idea if that, Beastly. If possible please do you have a link based on the proportion of the population? (Not questioning you, just interested.)

Cloglady above has some good links. I got this information from Glen Loury and John McWhorter's podcast. Also Coleman Hughes is another good source of information.

Is that not just because there are more white people in America though? What are the statistics on a population percentage level? (Genuine question).

There are more white people, indeed. However, black people are way more likely to have an interaction with the police than white people are, so you need that number too.

I agree completely that the perception of public is completely fucked because the media highlights certain stories and not others.

I don't see an obvious flaw in the theory that entitled white people would be much less careful around the police than black people who have had it drummed into them since birth to take massive care because half of the police are racist and just itching to shoot you.

Quite.

The question to DadJoke is men, including those who identify as women, can be legally excluded from women's toilets - do you want that to stop?

I note that, based on very limited anecdotal evidence, young white people who believe themselves to be great allies to the black community seem to be much more in favour of positive discrimination than black people do. That doesn't encourage me to support the likes of Kendi!

Okay wow. Maybe don't make guesses, because that's fucked up.

Here's a news article about Tony Timpa. He's a white man who died after police pinned him down for 14 minutes, while they laughed and joked. Sounds familiar, I know. But apparently we don't care about what happened to him, for some reason. www.cbsnews.com/news/tony-timpa-disturbing-video-shows-dallas-officers-joking-as-they-restrain-man-who-died/

As I understand things, there are no actual laws around which toilet or changing room people can use (refuges, prisons, hospitals are different and the EA can be applied here).

But single sex toilets etc always existed fairly well on the basis that a) males generally stayed out of them and b) because everyone knew that only women should be in the female toilets, women felt empowered enough to be able to challenge males who did enter the toilets, or go and report them to the manager of the facility etc.

Obviously both of these things are becoming less true by the day.

The stupidity of people comparing the racist situation in Britain to that in America was exemplified by the BLM protests when a black man was killed by a cop in America thousands of miles away. Nothing to do with the situation in Britain but was seized on by activists and of course now it has come out how it was used. The fact is the situation in Britain is very very different.

I don't. I don't find it at all odd that overall people with white skin could be advantaged in society, whilst small sub-groups are disadvantged because (some in) society views their traveller background or jewishness as big negatives that outweigh the white positive.

I am increasingly coming to the view that the concept of white privilege is of limited value.

Now, fortunately that doesn't occur so much here, but in the US where a lot of this comes from, it blows my mind seeing explicitly race-discriminating organisations continue to talk as if their policies had no impact, and they weren't creating "black privilege".

Yes. When universities relax entry criteria for black students (while simultaneously raising criteria for Asian students, as at Harvard) or candidates are given preference on the basis of being black, it's hard to believe that 'white privilege' is the problem. It doesn't seem to be happening in the UK yet, which I'm grateful for. But we are beginning to hear about situations here where white kids in schools are being told they are racist and problematic, or white staff in an organisation are excluded or outside speakers come in and harangue them for being white.

Ibram X Kendi, one of the foremost proponents of CRT, claims that the only answer to discrimination is more discrimation. He thinks that the answer to anti-black racism is to institute anti-white racism. He explicitly says this.

I have no idea. If I were to guess I would suspect that having white privilege makes white people more likely to do stupid shit like reach for their glove box when stopped, whereas black people, fearing a trigger happy racist police (because their parents taught them to), take much more care. White privilege leads some white people into a false sense of security. Just a guess.

perfectly legally. You want that to stop, yes?

It’s not ‘perfectly legally’. This poster is trying to trap others by asking a question where he inserts a falsehood and then demands you answer if you want to stop this falsehood happening, so as to paint you as someone who wants to take away rights.

The actual question is:

Single sex exemptions exist to provide women and girls with spaces that no male can enter, like toilets, changing rooms and single sex wards. You want that to stop? Or do you want to protect the rights of women and girls to get changed and use toilets with privacy away from males?

My answer: I want to continue to protect women and girls and uphold their legal and socially accepted right to single sex spaces.