I'm not a big fan of the BLM movement...

What does white privilege have to do with anything?

It means that in the context of the US (and most of the Western world), white people are seen as the norm, as well as hold most positions of power, and this often results in more respect and better treatment than a non-white person in a similar situation - for instance, if most politicians are white, they're more likely to set policies that address issues predominantly facing white people, not out of intentional racism but because those are the problems they're most familiar with. In a global context, due to the influences of past colonialism and present mass media, white people are also often subconsciously viewed as 'better' than other races.

On an individual basis, it means that being white in the US is likely to make your life easier than it would have been if you were not white - e.g. a disabled white person may have a very difficult life, but it would be even harder if he were black.

Just because I'm white means I have no right to an opinion?

Not that. The problems emerge when for instance a black person is talking about his own experiences with racism, and a white person chimes in to say that he's exaggerating because he doesn't think racism still exists. So the problem isn't with sharing one's opinion, but rather dismissing other people's first-hand experiences based on one's more-limited experience in that particular area. e.g. black people have more knowledge than white people when it comes to what it's like being black, especially when it comes to things like dealing with anti-black racism. I grew up as part of the racial majority in my country and was surprised to hear minorities talk about racism (which I didn't think existed here), but when I was living in as a minority overseas I'd experience racism that other people there likewise assumed no longer existed. There's a lot that goes unnoticed, and ideally we'd listen to other people when they talk about their own experiences, especially those we are unlikely to be exposed to by virtue of our identities.

Very seldom do people want to talk about the issues within the black community, i.e. lack of fathers, poor education, a lack of emphasis on respecting authority and providing for families...

Those things tend to be characteristic of most historically-oppressed racial minorities around the world, and in the US that happens to be black people. It's a cycle that's hard to break out of - poor education leads to poor jobs and poverty, which leads to difficulty providing for families, which hampers their children's education, and so on.

I read an article about this recently which I found interesting: http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/10/a-culture-of-poverty/64854/

EDIT: I think it's also noteworthy that it's the vocal racists who tend to agree that racism exists, probably because they're causing it. Whereas if you have a non-racist white guy whose white friends and family are also non-racist, he's not going to be witnessing much if any overt racism, which would lead him to the conclusion that racism no longer exists or at least isn't very bad. Whereas his hypothetical black friend may not suffer any racism from him, but will still be subject to racism from other people - including random strangers in the street yelling racist slurs at him. When his white friend walks by, those strangers have no reason to say anything and might as well not exist, and he might thus assume his friend is just making a big deal out of nothing.

That's probably closer to what the term 'white privilege' gets at: being shielded from witnessing the majority of racism in a society - either against oneself or others - due to being white.


It's the question that drives us. I know the answer is 42.

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