to think this person has had masses of white privilege

[raspran]

If a white male has grown up in a small house in a poor family (their words not mine) but went on buy their own home, get a good job with a large multinational and be sponsored through university and immigrate to the USA and get their green card then they can't claim not to have had any white privilege?
Yet they are saying that they have had no white privilege.

This thread shows how many people really don’t understand what white privilege is.

then I wouldn’t like to speculate until I’d heard their response

Their view is that black lives matter and white privilege is "left wing nonsense"

@AreYouLocal2

Does a white person with no qualifications who works in Wimpy have more privileges than a black university educated lawyer?

It all depends on their experiences, one has the privileges gained from hard work giving a high income whereas the other doesn't (and might not want them). One might be able to walk down the street without being harrassed and the other might not. They probably both have privilege in different ways and for different reasons.

Merryoldgoat
This thread shows how many people really don’t understand what white privilege is.

Including the OP by the look of it.

Does a white person with no qualifications who works in Wimpy have more privileges than a black university educated lawyer?

No, he has fewer. The black guy is in a more privileged position than the white guy, all in.

But he still has white privilege over the black guy.

I tend to agree that the word 'privilege' is a double-edged sword, as it tends to be misunderstood/get people's heckles up. But I think it's a trifle in the scheme of things. I don't think the priority should be to make sure white people aren't upset.

White privilege and social privilege are not the same. Many don’t understand what white privilege is

It's misunderstanding 'privilege'.

One example is that feeling when you think 'is this because I'm black?' it's similar to when you're in a very male environment and you wonder 'is this because I'm a woman?'. Being a black woman I've thought both.

Another is white people feeling like they're the authority of race. White people decide what is and isn't racist.

Privilege has many guises.

@okiedokieme

I think that Okie has a good balanced response.

I do think the word privilege is unhelpful.

Those who have it, (eg white, male) but were disadvantaged,in other ways seem to be set on an immediate defensive when you try to discuss it.

I had greater success explaining male privilege to a chap,who was a gamer, by comparing, say his career path to,playing CoD on an easy setting and not only not realising that he was on the easy setting , but (crucially) not realising that Harder Settings even existed, let alone that many people were unwillingly playing those harder settings.

I could then make the real life comparison that no one had ever mistaken him for a secretary or receptionist instead of the manager. He hadn’t missed whole swathes of meeting by bing asked to make tea, or struggled to make contributions in technical Meetings because he was also having to take minutes. That was his ‘easy‘ setting. Yes, he had still worked hard, but there weren’t certain additional barriers for him that others did experience on a regular basis.

I’ve never tried to explain white privilege, (nor would i TBH) but I think it’s much the same. No matter how hard I have had to work, a PoC in the exact same situation would have had a whole other set of obstacles that would be utterly invisible to me.

The fact that a large number of people are unable (or unwilling) to acknowledge the meaning of privilege, choosing instead to read it as some sort of classist connotation, is an indicator of how entrenched these views are.

By dint of being white, assumptions which benefit white people are made. It has nothing to do with how hard you work, otherwise all the extremely hard working non-white people would be running the country. Instead, they're likely doing four zero-hours jobs while studying or raising children.

White privilege includes the ability not to bother standing in other people's shoes.

So yes, he has benefited from white (and male) privilege whether he acknowledges it or not.

It's the word 'privilege' that can appear misleading. Racial privilege and economic privilege are completely separate entities. It simply means that whatever demographics hold a Caucasian person back in terms of class, sex and similar demographics, their skin colour will not have been one of them.

One of the ironies of white privilege is that it will be invisible to you, simply by virtue of the fact that you have it.

There isn’t just white privilege though. What about certain communities ( white upper classes also included in this one) that look after their own, dominate certain industries and generally employ people from that community over others? It isn’t just white people that do that.

WelcomeToTheMountaintop

The problem with your gamer analogue is that some white and BAME people can afford in game purchases. meaning that they have it easier than others.

Your analogue assumes (wrongly) that all white people start off at the same level. this is just untrue.

As a white male, he has more chance of walking into a room for an interview and looking and sounding 'right' when all he's said is 'Hello'.
That's the male privilege and the white privilege in action.

Has he had to work hard for everything he's achieved? Of course he will have. But in order to achieve the same, his neighbour BAME girl will have had to work thrice as hard.

All white people have white privilege, regardless of their circumstances or other achievements. It’s an automatic factor of being white.

White privilege doesn’t mean ‘Your life is easy / successful because you’re white’. It means that whatever challenges you face in your life, they are not caused by your colour.

@Darbs76

White privilege and social privilege are not the same. Many don’t understand what white privilege is

@Darbs76 What do you think white privilege is?

@FrippEnos I looked up immigration to the US in 2016 (latest year I could find) and there were c. 43 million immigrants living in the USA of which 4.2 million were described as "black" by Pew Research.

This person obviously does have white privilege because they are white and that’s how it works according to the meaning we are supposed to give it, but if you can’t see that telling someone who actually had very little privilege other than being born in a civilised society is actually quite offensive, then this person isn’t the only one here that needs to open their mind a bit more.

Whoever thought of the phrases Black Lives Matter and white privilege really didn’t do a good job in choosing words that everyone can understand the full meaning of without having it explained.

I looked up immigration to the US in 2016 (latest year I could find) and there were c. 43 million immigrants living in the USA of which 4.2 million were described as "black" by Pew Research.

How many non-whites tried to get in and were turned away?

raspran

That is good to know but what does it mean?

How many BAME people want to emigrate to the USA?

How does it reflect on how hard the person that you had in your OP had to work to get where he is?

How far up the ladder did he have to climb before his privilege kicked in?

Can't we just stop? Why is there a need to add a persons skin colour into everything? I hope one day I'll be referred to as a woman rather than constantly "a black woman". Can't we learn something from the past, educate ourselves instead of slagging each other off because of skin colour?

I’m curious to know your own race, OP, if you are willing to share.

Does it matter?

@HannaYeah

I’m curious to know your own race, OP, if you are willing to share.

Why? One of the advantages of social media is that you don't know the race of anybody posting, we're all equal in terms of race when we're online.

@totalpeas22

You do know that most people really don’t care about this nonsense?

This, a thousand times over.

@WaterOffADucksCrack

Can't we just stop? Why is there a need to add a persons skin colour into everything? I hope one day I'll be referred to as a woman rather than constantly "a black woman". Can't we learn something from the past, educate ourselves instead of slagging each other off because of skin colour?

Agree