This Is A Painfully Simplistic Way Of Looking At Privilege

At first glance, it’s hard to understand why some white people get so touchy about white privilege. In a white-majority country, especially a country that has a well-documented history of racism, there are advantages to being white. Just as there are advantages to being Asian in China or black in Zimbabwe. This is so obvious it should be completely uncontroversial. 

The problem is, white privilege is so often presented as the only advantage of this kind that it makes people defensive. 

If you’re white, so the story goes, it doesn’t matter if you’re poor or had a difficult home life as a child. It makes no difference if you grew up in a bad neighbourhood or struggled academically or faced some form of discrimination unrelated to your skin. Instead, being white guarantees you an unfair and insurmountable advantage over everybody with slightly more melanin. And if you have a problem with this, you need to “check your privilege.”

I understand why this feels simplistic and dismissive for white people, but I’d like to highlight how reductive and insulting it is to black people.

In my article, Affirmative Action’s “Race” Problem, I pointed out that in 1964, there was good reason to presume that black people were disadvantaged purely because they were black. But in 2022, the picture in no longer as simple.

Clare felt I hadn’t done justice to the curse of having black skin. She begins with a quote from the article.

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Clare:

“For example, according to Harvard’s figures, 71% of their minority students are socio-economically advantaged. The same is true at most other elite colleges. In other words, while these campuses might look superficially“diverse,” hardly any of their minority students come from underprivileged backgrounds. They’re just privileged kids with darker skin.”

In terms of being Black, I'd argue that the students most certainly do come from underprivileged backgrounds since being Black in America automatically renders one as having less access to socioeconomic opportunities than white and white-adjacent people.

Moreover, by insinuating that affirmative action students must come from the very poorest backgrounds, you are creating impossible requirements because many people from those backgrounds haven't benefited from a basic education, and would struggle in class. Of course, this conveniently plays into the hands of the anti-affirmative-action brigade as illustrated by the racist comments of a Georgetown Law professor last year.

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Steve QJ:

“…certainly do come from underprivileged backgrounds since being Black in America automatically renders one as having less access to socioeconomic opportunities than white and white-adjacent people.”

I think this is a painfully simplistic way of looking at privilege. The idea that every white person is more privileged than I am simply because their skin is lighter is both wrong and insulting. Being black is not a curse.