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White privilege, or White Skin Privilege, is a term of analysis used to denote a particular kind of alleged social relation, one which typically involves a right, advantage, exemption or immunity granted to or enjoyed by white persons beyond the common advantage of nonwhites. Those employing the term include historians, legal scholars, philosophers, opponents of the Eugenics Movement, and sociologists of racism. In the view of those using the term, it is the primary benefit of racism expressed as preferential treatment within a society. As racism is usually understood to be punitive towards people of color, white privilege is claimed to be the pattern of social benefits accruing to members of the socially privileged and oppressing group, at the expense of members of the socially disprivileged and oppressed group.
White privilege can be used to explain such phenomena as white boxer Gerry Cooney receiving an very large amount of money for his 1982 fight with African American Larry Holmes, even though he was an untested contender. Examples from popular music include Elvis Presley, credited with popularizing "black music" with white audiences, as well as Eminem's popularity as a rap singer. It is also put forward by scholars as an explanation for why social groups have used racism as a form of social control and oppression: namely, to benefit themselves at the expense of others. It is also used by some historians to explain the historical trajectory from exclusion to acceptance of Irish and Jewish émigrés in the United States.
Parallels are often drawn between white privilege, male privilege and heterosexual privilege.
Advocates of white privilege theory may be supportive of black nationalism, reparations and other forms of ethnic nationalism and identity politics. However, some advocates of the white privilege theory make the claim that white privilege is the only significant form of oppression in society and, in fact, homophobia, sexism, labor, homelessness, and other issues are all but irrelevant because white gays and lesbians, white women, the white working class, white homeless people etc. all allegedly have a built-in advantage of "whiteness" and thus cannot truly be considered members of any oppressed group. At the most extreme, this view manifests itself in calls to "abolish the white race."
Critics of the concept of white privilege from the political left, particularly the Radical Left, sometimes point out that focusing on 'white privilege' as a self-contained concept undermines or ignores the class and socioeconomic nature of racism —i.e., that racism ultimately hurts all working class people, including whites. They also contend that the white privilege view runs the risk of branding all white people, regardless of economic stature (including, presumably, working-class whites) or social or cultural history, as "beneficiaries" of racism, when in fact such a classification is often not valid. Those pursuing anti-racism along this class-based analysis criticize the white skin privilege analysis as just a more sophisticated form of identity politics, and instead advocate multi-racial unity as the true anti-racist solution.
When faced with such criticism, proponents of the white skin privilege concept often counter that white people are unaware of how their racial privilege actually affects them and the way it operates on a daily basis. Thus, they may consider themselves anti-racist, but are not proactively conscious of what proponents claim are white people's own unfair advantages. Because it has a tendency to be invisible to the very people that benefit from it, these proponents argue that white privilege is a particularly insidious and effective form of social control, and that ultimately, only by acknowledging and accepting the white skin privilege theory as valid can such "beneficiaries" help to dismantle it. Most class-based leftist critics, however, remain unswayed by this argument, with the exception of a few individuals and groups that have come to accept it (see identity politics).
Conservative commentator Steve Sailer argues that, while white privilege may be real, "t's not 'unearned.' It was earned for you by the hard work and self-discipline of your ancestors and relatives"1. Whiteness studies is an emerging field of academic inquiry that has emerged from the desires of some to accept the white skin privilege theory as valid and to understand it more thoroughly as a means of countering it.
See Also
References
- WhitePrivilege.com, an anti-racism resource
- Allen, Theodore. The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control (Verso, 1994)
- Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 1996)
- Lipsitz, George The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Temple University Press, 1998)
- Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso, 1999)
- Rothenberg, Paula S., ed. White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism (Worth, 2004)
- Williams, Linda Faye. Constraint Of Race: Legacies Of White Skin Privilege In America (Penn State, 2004)
- Wise, Tim. White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull, 2005)