joeylittle
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You can be oppressed as a poor person alone. You can be oppressed as a black person. Or you can be both poor and black, get oppressed as either, or both.
You can be oppressed as a Jew, or a Lesbian, or both at the same time. Or as a woman alone.
You can be oppressed as a woman, or as a First Nations/Native American person, or as a poor person, or all three together...You could be a poor black paraplegic transwoman and hit the oppression jackpot...
All of the above doesn't mean those of us not in whatever social oppression categories we do not happen to be in had it easy.
I didn't choose to be Caucasian, or choose ***what that skin tone means in our society.***
Quoting for truth.
Just need to say it again: race privilege is an idea stating that the race in power in any given society has an advantage over the races not in power.
Power can be defined in political terms, economic terms, even by population alone.
Advantage should be understood as an absence of racial oppression as it pertains to the minority group.
It's an idea. It is a way of understanding dynamics in a society.
You can say that it is no longer pertinent, but I don't think there can be any defensible argument that it has never existed. Go back 400 years in any society and you will see race privilege.
So: saying 'I disagree with the idea of white privilege' really has to mean, 'I believe the notion of white privilege is no longer applicable to today's society'
The idea that would back that argument would be to say that we have so many disparate groups mixed together now, with so many experiences, that there is, in fact, no majority group.
Personally, I believe that in the U.S. we still have white privilege.
It's hard to argue that affirmative action, etc, really worked great - it was a necessary idea that created new problems alongside solving some old ones. I've gotten opportunities because I'm a woman, and that's sometimes a minority group. I've lost jobs because I'm not the black candidate. Hell, I've lost jobs because I was American, not Canadian.
But I know that I'm never going to be scrutinized as closely in a downtown Chicago store as a young black man would be.
Is it because I'm a woman, white, in my 40s, conventional-seeming...could be any, could be all.
But because I get that LACK of scrutiny, I consider myself to be in
some privileged majority. And my theory - my belief - is that it has to do primarily with my whiteness - not my age or gender.
I'm happy to acknowledge I may be wrong.
But at minimum: it is a possibility. And as long as it's a possibility, then race privilege is possible.