"White privilege" is a dubious concept and lecturing people about it may be politically counterproductive. It's time to change the progressive approach to white voters.
The presumptive Democratic nominee for POTUS was first selected for VP specifically for the color of her skin. Now she (or D power movers) will select a VP for the D’s who is white, male and likely heterosexual. Suddenly white males are fashionable again to Dem progressives. Why is that?
What a great article, I'm really happy TFP shared this substack.
"A better way to approach white people is to just treat them like people."
Other than some of the most aggressive intersectionalists, I imagine this is how all races and ethnicities feel. The public narrative preaches the opposite, so I sympathize with the white progressives who think they're doing the right thing because that messaging has been amplified for so long. But if they just stepped back and thought rationally about how it feels to be treated differently because of your race then I think they would realize how absurd it all is.
I think to be labeled a progressive relies mostly on a person’s ability to chant a common refrain without giving it any scrutiny. Progressives will march with whatever seems to go against the right even if that thing is common sense and should be adopted by them so they can appeal to a broader electoral base.
You mean like the way the MAGA has raved about “Stolen election,” “Communism,”and circulated misinformation about the recent Lankford-Murphy bipartisan immigration bill? Or what about when MAGA trolls called the mayor of Baltimore of “DEI mayor” for no reason besides his race?
Two sides of the same delusional mindset. We have lost the adult drivers and the wheels are coming off the bus. We desperately need old school liberals and old school conservatives, but all we keep getting are more stooges. I do not know what is worse, the fact that the Democrats put forth the two worst presidential candidates imaginable, or that the Republicans put Trump on the ticket three times.
That said, it is a testimony to our Federal system that we have had a clown and a senile men as presidents and they did not break anything. Too bad Biden lost his marbles. Times would have been better had he been in control. There is no way a sane Biden would have allowed so much destabilization (uncontrolled border crossings are at the top of the list), and I am terrified that the minions who controlled the Biden White House are unaware that their policy decisions on the border cost the election.
We need new parties. At least two, ideally three new ones (social democrats, greens, liberals).
And the rhetoric seems completely disconnected from itself. For example, queers for palestine. Islam is not a desperately progressive religion, certainly not interested in women's rights, and they're definitely not super liberal when it comes to gender queer insanity. But the progressives are so desperate to hate the United states, as they really believe they have a horrible life, that they idealize hell holes. Zero hint of irony.
Whataboutism is an argument when smug people like the first commenter give their tribe more credit than it deserves.
Quite the choice to follow up:
“People on both sides see the other as an existential threat and act as if this will be the final election if the other side wins.”
with:
“Progressives seem to want to remake America into something ugly and angry with the elites firmly holding the levers of power. That’s not every Democrat but it an increasing share. MAGA people love America and want it to be for all Americans. Their rhetoric is sometimes strident, particularly from their leaders, but they are afraid to lose this country and its exceptional greatness.”
Most tribes believe the country would be great and everyone would be happy if not for those pesky people outside the tribe who get in the way. There’s nothing special about that. It’s routine.
If only there were a dislike button, I suspect I am not the only one here who would hit it for your posts above. In fact if I get several likes for this point and you get none, that will rather prove my point.
Yes there is this weird deference white liberals make. You can hear a white liberal woman talking about abortion access and often they will go into this thing about how it’s really important to black women. What? They feel this compulsory obligation to push black women to the front. They have been educated to “center” black womens needs ahead of their own. Democrats have a marketing strategy now to brand Trump/Vance as weird. I think Democrats are quite weird in their rhetoric around social justice. We will see how it works out.
Abortion as particularly important to black women is an interesting argument to make. It brings to mind the arguments that abortion disproportionally affects black women and black babies thereby reducing the number of black babies born and the overall black population. That is one of the original arguments that the founders of Planned Parenthood used to justify their existence. To be fair, Sanger was talking about increasing birth control for black people as a means to decrease their population. Still, one has to wonder at why most Planned Parenthoods are in largely minority areas. I am not saying I am for or against abortion and certainly don't want to debate that issue. I am furthering the case of Jilani that arguments for or against issues should be made based on what they will do for the individual and not for the group. Especially with arguing for abortion, talking about disparate impact on minority groups actually goes against those who would support wider access to abortion.
To a progressive, no argument can be made for a social or legal change solely on the basis of a white person or even a white women. It needs an "enhancer" like "will disproprotionaly affect black, disabled, trans gender people."
If you're a modern progressive who happens to be among the societal elite and you strongly care about promoting justice and fighting injustice then you eventually have a choice:
You must either recognize that privilege/injustice is doled out along class lines or that it is done so along identity lines.
If you decide that injustice flows mostly from class, then in order to fight injustice you must either raise everyone to your elite level, or lower your level to the societal average. Both are kind of the same thing really, and will require you to give up on many comforts and privileges that you and your friends/family enjoy.
If, on the other hand, you decide that injustice flows from our racial and gender identities, than all that's required to fight injustice is to not be racist or sexist.
Is it any wonder that so many elites choose to see things though the lens of identity politics rather than along the lines of economic class?
It is far more palatable to the ruling elite to ensure that all "identities" are represented among the elite in the "correct proportions", than to actually take the steps necessary to correct true economic injustice.
example:
The common belief among the elite that it is preferable that most people can't go to/work at Harvard as long as Harvard has the "correct" number of black people, rather than create a world with Harvard-level educations for all.
Harvard does not educate any better. Their prestige comes from the admissions process. They pick winners. Anyone who meets that SAT score and relative achievement and attends another university would be just as good.
If anyone could go, the degree would be worthless.
Harvard level education "for all" will produce different results in all 200 million people who receive it because natural abiliities and upbringings vary wildly.
It’s never been clear to me why white people are not also subject to “intersectionality”. Apparently their whiteness trumps all, so even a short, fat, poor, stupid homeless white person is more privileged than say Barack Obama, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey or z Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
LGBT have run for the hills. Most trans people want nothing to do with the Trans Cult. They simply want to be left alone and free to live their lives. Outside of oppressive university campuses and sex clubs, no one wants queer theory in every day life.
It's so far past time to stop that stopping now won't make any difference. Even if the loudest and most respected voices (whoever they are) called for a stop (and they won't), the new talking point would be exactly as authentic and convincing as the old one: "you'll never be not racist, because I say so". Yawn. Perhaps some decent and sincere people were temporarily bamboozled by this shuck but most of it has been imposed by Kafkaesque HR depts, tenure committees, ESG extorters, and randos; its greatest impact has been to destroy credibility/respect for all who demand everyone else parrot these absurdities and kowtow to skin-based authority.
Keep lecturing or stop lecturing; no one outside the echo chamber cares in 2024, viz. reaction to the latest journolist memo, "everyone not on our team is #weird". I mean, 'weirdo', does even a 5th-grader consider that an insult anymore? And coming from progressives, well. Sure, purple furry with a mutilated dragon tongue - tragic if you label Rs #weird! Right on, dude wearing a dress to flash your genitals at four-year-olds, you're clearly the authority on super normal, well-balanced, ho-hum mainstream non-weirdness. Freak-flag-flyers -- join that team or you're #SoWeird, man. Another cunning plan not thought all the way through.
In the grand scheme of things, the problem with progressives is literal obsession with making the personal political, thus politics consuming all. (Totalitarian is the technical term.) Nowadays there seems to be no capacity on the left to recognize any distinction between personal and political, or private and public. The backlash will be unpleasant for everyone, yet they seem determined to make it worse.
And all this DIE crap is being heavily promoted by the most widely read and powerful progressives. Robert Reich basically gloats about white people being replaced in this article.
I'm right there with you. I voted for democrats for my first election in 1992 all the way through 2020. But I work for a large organization and have been forced into so many struggle sessions and forced to swallow so much absurd white guilt narratives that I've decided my vote should be for my own interests instead of the interests of others. I'm a middle-aged, middle class white man. I do not come from prosperity, but from the bottom 2% of the economy. It took me well into my 30s to have any stability in my life at all, and I'm not apologetic for any successes I have achieved. They were hard won. I just voted in my State's primary on tuesday, and it was all for Republican candidates. Even ones that I did not like. And I voted against the democrats. Even ones that I did like. Because as a whole, I am their enemy and they've told me it enough times that I now believe them.
It's cult behavior and self / status protection. People lower on the totem pole cannot let themselves face the mental disintegration of letting any beliefs go, regardless of reality, so must turn ever-more insular to reinforce their mutual 'safety'. Any chink in the armor shatters everything. That's one reason specific words and chants catch on like lightning with them, become creepily uniform, and freakishly insistent. (I mean, there is nothing threatening about "all lives matter" but it became 'red flag to a bull' in a flash. That's bizarre.)
The prominent progs are parasites on top of this mass of fanaticism (again: cult) and have even more at risk, psychologically and in terms of deference & income.
This dynamic among the progs is one reason (but not the only one) I suspect we are at real risk of going back 150-300 years to literally stringing up at least local ringleaders, which will not exactly lower the temperature. People glamorize resistance but it's very very messy and no one should be eager to slide down that slope. Not Gregory Peck in the catacombs (even that was messy) but Reign of Terror and Thermidor reaction. (We're already past throwing open the Bastille.) I'm past patience with instigators who yearn for Year Zero, to unleash every hellish aspect of humanity. They'll be sorry, but so will we.
Great article, but the author argues that the reason Democrats should stop promoting the idea of white privilege is because it is a bad electoral strategy. This is far too flattering. The real reason is that it sets up double standards, as accurately described in the article. (A white woman who has lost her entire family is not deserving of much sympathy because she is white.) Double standards, with a few exceptions, violate the most basic moral principle, that which is arguably the basis for civilization—the Golden Rule.
One underreported trend about the whole “white privilege” framework is that it allows people from very wealthy backgrounds who go to elite schools but happen to be non white pretend they’re underprivileged and oppressed. It’s allowed for the rise of a very privileged non-white elite in universities that insulates itself from criticism by claiming to be the victim of racism.
The biggest offenders in this arena are upper middle class, well-educated black people that cling to this idea of oppression for dear life. Between them and white women complaining about the patriarchy..
Great article, thank you. It's an uphill battle because there is multi-generational, cross-continental and full-spectrum messaging by the establishment media and western governments to teach "white" people to hate themselves, their ancestors and history. I put "white" in parenthesis because it is an artificial identity that, like you mention, generalizes millions of people and attempts to put them into a neat category. Germans, Norwegians, Russians, Americans, Italians, etc, have completely different cultures, languages, belief systems - yet they are simply "whites". It's like trying to group Mexicans, Brazilians, indigenous tribes, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, they are all just "browns". It's unintellectual, and there is a massive push to continue the ridiculousness.
"If you find yourself talking over or speaking for BIPOC individuals, or God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat, and instead we can take our listening ears on."
How long will it be until white progressive women understand that this White Savior Complex bullshit is RACIST to the core?
I admire what you're trying to do with this newsletter, and often find myself agreeing with your larger observations. I'm glad I subscribed. But since you made a point of encouraging critical feedback:
The counterexamples of "Asian privilege" or other benefits associated with being black or brown to emphasize the fallacy of white privilege, while rhetorically appealing, make no sense logically. Things like lower rates of suicide and mental illness, or unique cultural benefits, are outcomes. I have always taken privilege to mean structural advantages in power or access to resources that tend to be associated with inequalities and injustices for others; not the outcomes themselves. In fact, I wonder if this is part of the problem - that all too often we conflate systematic privilege with simply being fortunate in certain areas - hence the gratuitous self-flagellation by white liberals for something that is an accident of birth (and won't offset bad fortune like murder-suicide).
White privilege is more coherent than Asian or black privilege for obvious historical reasons whose ripple effects continue to reinforce certain disadvantages, despite incidental advantages like the ones you mention. Even height privilege or attractiveness privilege - which I think are quite real and arguably as influential as any other kind - don't involve a unique history and set of institutions designed to keep short and ugly people down; they simply reflect genetic disadvantage and we do our best to navigate around them. So totally aside from the strategic arguments (which I totally agree with!), to dismiss the very notion of white privilege risks false equivalencies and whataboutism.
That said, I agree that white privilege should not be emphasized or treated as special, a priori. I do think *privilege* broadly conceived is an important and valuable concept, which is generally a good thing to be aware of. But this can take hundreds of different forms, and only becomes meaningful in local context. What matters more than privilege is the injustice, dysfunctional institutions and avoidable bad outcomes it serves to obscure.
Those systems aren't in place anymore. The only exception would be that Asian students have to have higher grades and test scores to get into college because they are Asian.
"Redlining" was decades ago and it affected white home buyers as well as blacks.
Because of the higher percentage of whites to blacks in the US population there are twice as many whites than blacks living in poverty despite blacks having a greater rate of poverty. Many either don’t understand this or choose to ignore it.
Until "progressives" start judging me not by the color of my skin, but by the content of my character, I will never vote for a Democrat.
The presumptive Democratic nominee for POTUS was first selected for VP specifically for the color of her skin. Now she (or D power movers) will select a VP for the D’s who is white, male and likely heterosexual. Suddenly white males are fashionable again to Dem progressives. Why is that?
Yes, and I find it laughable that we’re supposed to think history is being made when in fact it’s being manufactured.
History is always manufactured. And it gets remanufactured on a regular basis.
Understood, but when Democrat policies are much more likely to help people it would make sense to vote for them.
What a great article, I'm really happy TFP shared this substack.
"A better way to approach white people is to just treat them like people."
Other than some of the most aggressive intersectionalists, I imagine this is how all races and ethnicities feel. The public narrative preaches the opposite, so I sympathize with the white progressives who think they're doing the right thing because that messaging has been amplified for so long. But if they just stepped back and thought rationally about how it feels to be treated differently because of your race then I think they would realize how absurd it all is.
I'm afraid rational thought is not in their toolbox
I think to be labeled a progressive relies mostly on a person’s ability to chant a common refrain without giving it any scrutiny. Progressives will march with whatever seems to go against the right even if that thing is common sense and should be adopted by them so they can appeal to a broader electoral base.
You mean like the way the MAGA has raved about “Stolen election,” “Communism,”and circulated misinformation about the recent Lankford-Murphy bipartisan immigration bill? Or what about when MAGA trolls called the mayor of Baltimore of “DEI mayor” for no reason besides his race?
Two sides of the same delusional mindset. We have lost the adult drivers and the wheels are coming off the bus. We desperately need old school liberals and old school conservatives, but all we keep getting are more stooges. I do not know what is worse, the fact that the Democrats put forth the two worst presidential candidates imaginable, or that the Republicans put Trump on the ticket three times.
That said, it is a testimony to our Federal system that we have had a clown and a senile men as presidents and they did not break anything. Too bad Biden lost his marbles. Times would have been better had he been in control. There is no way a sane Biden would have allowed so much destabilization (uncontrolled border crossings are at the top of the list), and I am terrified that the minions who controlled the Biden White House are unaware that their policy decisions on the border cost the election.
We need new parties. At least two, ideally three new ones (social democrats, greens, liberals).
You're the enemy. It's not your enemy's job to make you feel good your being their enemy.
It's better to be racist than to be a crime statistic.
It's better to be racist that be a victim of emotional blackmail.
There's nothing for Whites in accommodating the feelings of non-Whites, especially negros.
And the rhetoric seems completely disconnected from itself. For example, queers for palestine. Islam is not a desperately progressive religion, certainly not interested in women's rights, and they're definitely not super liberal when it comes to gender queer insanity. But the progressives are so desperate to hate the United states, as they really believe they have a horrible life, that they idealize hell holes. Zero hint of irony.
Whataboutism is an argument when smug people like the first commenter give their tribe more credit than it deserves.
Quite the choice to follow up:
“People on both sides see the other as an existential threat and act as if this will be the final election if the other side wins.”
with:
“Progressives seem to want to remake America into something ugly and angry with the elites firmly holding the levers of power. That’s not every Democrat but it an increasing share. MAGA people love America and want it to be for all Americans. Their rhetoric is sometimes strident, particularly from their leaders, but they are afraid to lose this country and its exceptional greatness.”
Most tribes believe the country would be great and everyone would be happy if not for those pesky people outside the tribe who get in the way. There’s nothing special about that. It’s routine.
“Sometimes strident”? Really?
If only there were a dislike button, I suspect I am not the only one here who would hit it for your posts above. In fact if I get several likes for this point and you get none, that will rather prove my point.
I’m just seeing this now. Looks like I got more likes than you. Either way, keep seething.
Not really. What he is speaking to is double haters. I am one of them.
LOL, a literal double hater, and you "people" have the gall to accuse us of being "haters?
FUCK OFF!
It is not an argument, but it is the reason why I don't find any party I want to vote for.
Yes there is this weird deference white liberals make. You can hear a white liberal woman talking about abortion access and often they will go into this thing about how it’s really important to black women. What? They feel this compulsory obligation to push black women to the front. They have been educated to “center” black womens needs ahead of their own. Democrats have a marketing strategy now to brand Trump/Vance as weird. I think Democrats are quite weird in their rhetoric around social justice. We will see how it works out.
Abortion as particularly important to black women is an interesting argument to make. It brings to mind the arguments that abortion disproportionally affects black women and black babies thereby reducing the number of black babies born and the overall black population. That is one of the original arguments that the founders of Planned Parenthood used to justify their existence. To be fair, Sanger was talking about increasing birth control for black people as a means to decrease their population. Still, one has to wonder at why most Planned Parenthoods are in largely minority areas. I am not saying I am for or against abortion and certainly don't want to debate that issue. I am furthering the case of Jilani that arguments for or against issues should be made based on what they will do for the individual and not for the group. Especially with arguing for abortion, talking about disparate impact on minority groups actually goes against those who would support wider access to abortion.
To a progressive, no argument can be made for a social or legal change solely on the basis of a white person or even a white women. It needs an "enhancer" like "will disproprotionaly affect black, disabled, trans gender people."
Regarding statements of privilege:
If you're a modern progressive who happens to be among the societal elite and you strongly care about promoting justice and fighting injustice then you eventually have a choice:
You must either recognize that privilege/injustice is doled out along class lines or that it is done so along identity lines.
If you decide that injustice flows mostly from class, then in order to fight injustice you must either raise everyone to your elite level, or lower your level to the societal average. Both are kind of the same thing really, and will require you to give up on many comforts and privileges that you and your friends/family enjoy.
If, on the other hand, you decide that injustice flows from our racial and gender identities, than all that's required to fight injustice is to not be racist or sexist.
Is it any wonder that so many elites choose to see things though the lens of identity politics rather than along the lines of economic class?
It is far more palatable to the ruling elite to ensure that all "identities" are represented among the elite in the "correct proportions", than to actually take the steps necessary to correct true economic injustice.
example:
The common belief among the elite that it is preferable that most people can't go to/work at Harvard as long as Harvard has the "correct" number of black people, rather than create a world with Harvard-level educations for all.
Harvard does not educate any better. Their prestige comes from the admissions process. They pick winners. Anyone who meets that SAT score and relative achievement and attends another university would be just as good.
If anyone could go, the degree would be worthless.
Harvard level education "for all" will produce different results in all 200 million people who receive it because natural abiliities and upbringings vary wildly.
It’s never been clear to me why white people are not also subject to “intersectionality”. Apparently their whiteness trumps all, so even a short, fat, poor, stupid homeless white person is more privileged than say Barack Obama, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey or z Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
That’s why they’re opting to join the alphabet soup crew so they can be deemed oppressed and therefore ok
Hence the majority of 'LGBTQIA++' being straight white people with a fetish. And why LGB people have run for the hills.
LGBT have run for the hills. Most trans people want nothing to do with the Trans Cult. They simply want to be left alone and free to live their lives. Outside of oppressive university campuses and sex clubs, no one wants queer theory in every day life.
It's so far past time to stop that stopping now won't make any difference. Even if the loudest and most respected voices (whoever they are) called for a stop (and they won't), the new talking point would be exactly as authentic and convincing as the old one: "you'll never be not racist, because I say so". Yawn. Perhaps some decent and sincere people were temporarily bamboozled by this shuck but most of it has been imposed by Kafkaesque HR depts, tenure committees, ESG extorters, and randos; its greatest impact has been to destroy credibility/respect for all who demand everyone else parrot these absurdities and kowtow to skin-based authority.
Keep lecturing or stop lecturing; no one outside the echo chamber cares in 2024, viz. reaction to the latest journolist memo, "everyone not on our team is #weird". I mean, 'weirdo', does even a 5th-grader consider that an insult anymore? And coming from progressives, well. Sure, purple furry with a mutilated dragon tongue - tragic if you label Rs #weird! Right on, dude wearing a dress to flash your genitals at four-year-olds, you're clearly the authority on super normal, well-balanced, ho-hum mainstream non-weirdness. Freak-flag-flyers -- join that team or you're #SoWeird, man. Another cunning plan not thought all the way through.
In the grand scheme of things, the problem with progressives is literal obsession with making the personal political, thus politics consuming all. (Totalitarian is the technical term.) Nowadays there seems to be no capacity on the left to recognize any distinction between personal and political, or private and public. The backlash will be unpleasant for everyone, yet they seem determined to make it worse.
And all this DIE crap is being heavily promoted by the most widely read and powerful progressives. Robert Reich basically gloats about white people being replaced in this article.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-147018640
This kind of attitude turned me from being a hard leftist to a hard rightist.
I'm right there with you. I voted for democrats for my first election in 1992 all the way through 2020. But I work for a large organization and have been forced into so many struggle sessions and forced to swallow so much absurd white guilt narratives that I've decided my vote should be for my own interests instead of the interests of others. I'm a middle-aged, middle class white man. I do not come from prosperity, but from the bottom 2% of the economy. It took me well into my 30s to have any stability in my life at all, and I'm not apologetic for any successes I have achieved. They were hard won. I just voted in my State's primary on tuesday, and it was all for Republican candidates. Even ones that I did not like. And I voted against the democrats. Even ones that I did like. Because as a whole, I am their enemy and they've told me it enough times that I now believe them.
It's cult behavior and self / status protection. People lower on the totem pole cannot let themselves face the mental disintegration of letting any beliefs go, regardless of reality, so must turn ever-more insular to reinforce their mutual 'safety'. Any chink in the armor shatters everything. That's one reason specific words and chants catch on like lightning with them, become creepily uniform, and freakishly insistent. (I mean, there is nothing threatening about "all lives matter" but it became 'red flag to a bull' in a flash. That's bizarre.)
The prominent progs are parasites on top of this mass of fanaticism (again: cult) and have even more at risk, psychologically and in terms of deference & income.
This dynamic among the progs is one reason (but not the only one) I suspect we are at real risk of going back 150-300 years to literally stringing up at least local ringleaders, which will not exactly lower the temperature. People glamorize resistance but it's very very messy and no one should be eager to slide down that slope. Not Gregory Peck in the catacombs (even that was messy) but Reign of Terror and Thermidor reaction. (We're already past throwing open the Bastille.) I'm past patience with instigators who yearn for Year Zero, to unleash every hellish aspect of humanity. They'll be sorry, but so will we.
Great article, but the author argues that the reason Democrats should stop promoting the idea of white privilege is because it is a bad electoral strategy. This is far too flattering. The real reason is that it sets up double standards, as accurately described in the article. (A white woman who has lost her entire family is not deserving of much sympathy because she is white.) Double standards, with a few exceptions, violate the most basic moral principle, that which is arguably the basis for civilization—the Golden Rule.
One underreported trend about the whole “white privilege” framework is that it allows people from very wealthy backgrounds who go to elite schools but happen to be non white pretend they’re underprivileged and oppressed. It’s allowed for the rise of a very privileged non-white elite in universities that insulates itself from criticism by claiming to be the victim of racism.
The biggest offenders in this arena are upper middle class, well-educated black people that cling to this idea of oppression for dear life. Between them and white women complaining about the patriarchy..
Great article, thank you. It's an uphill battle because there is multi-generational, cross-continental and full-spectrum messaging by the establishment media and western governments to teach "white" people to hate themselves, their ancestors and history. I put "white" in parenthesis because it is an artificial identity that, like you mention, generalizes millions of people and attempts to put them into a neat category. Germans, Norwegians, Russians, Americans, Italians, etc, have completely different cultures, languages, belief systems - yet they are simply "whites". It's like trying to group Mexicans, Brazilians, indigenous tribes, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, they are all just "browns". It's unintellectual, and there is a massive push to continue the ridiculousness.
My privilege is reading Zaid threads
"If you find yourself talking over or speaking for BIPOC individuals, or God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat, and instead we can take our listening ears on."
How long will it be until white progressive women understand that this White Savior Complex bullshit is RACIST to the core?
I was raised to believe that segregation by race is bad, full stop.
In the past couple of weeks Democrats have proven they’re all in on segregation. They trumpet segregation by race at the top of their lungs.
Yet another reason to never vote for a Democrat.
Sounds like you are a natural social conservative who supports meritocracy, so why are you still associating with hateful progressive jackals?
I admire what you're trying to do with this newsletter, and often find myself agreeing with your larger observations. I'm glad I subscribed. But since you made a point of encouraging critical feedback:
The counterexamples of "Asian privilege" or other benefits associated with being black or brown to emphasize the fallacy of white privilege, while rhetorically appealing, make no sense logically. Things like lower rates of suicide and mental illness, or unique cultural benefits, are outcomes. I have always taken privilege to mean structural advantages in power or access to resources that tend to be associated with inequalities and injustices for others; not the outcomes themselves. In fact, I wonder if this is part of the problem - that all too often we conflate systematic privilege with simply being fortunate in certain areas - hence the gratuitous self-flagellation by white liberals for something that is an accident of birth (and won't offset bad fortune like murder-suicide).
White privilege is more coherent than Asian or black privilege for obvious historical reasons whose ripple effects continue to reinforce certain disadvantages, despite incidental advantages like the ones you mention. Even height privilege or attractiveness privilege - which I think are quite real and arguably as influential as any other kind - don't involve a unique history and set of institutions designed to keep short and ugly people down; they simply reflect genetic disadvantage and we do our best to navigate around them. So totally aside from the strategic arguments (which I totally agree with!), to dismiss the very notion of white privilege risks false equivalencies and whataboutism.
That said, I agree that white privilege should not be emphasized or treated as special, a priori. I do think *privilege* broadly conceived is an important and valuable concept, which is generally a good thing to be aware of. But this can take hundreds of different forms, and only becomes meaningful in local context. What matters more than privilege is the injustice, dysfunctional institutions and avoidable bad outcomes it serves to obscure.
Those systems aren't in place anymore. The only exception would be that Asian students have to have higher grades and test scores to get into college because they are Asian.
"Redlining" was decades ago and it affected white home buyers as well as blacks.
Institutional privileges have been routed out.
Because of the higher percentage of whites to blacks in the US population there are twice as many whites than blacks living in poverty despite blacks having a greater rate of poverty. Many either don’t understand this or choose to ignore it.