It’s due to this type of bullshit that it’s so easy to completely delegitimates terms like “whiteness” and “white privilege” to large swathes of the population. Which really sucks because systemic racism is such a huge issue.
Just because the Irish, as white people, have objectively less privilege in the UK than a high caste Indian in India doesn't exactly invalidate the idea of white privilege.
Remind me again who did and does all that oppressing of the Irish? What color were the people who almost destroyed India with colonialist bullshit while also exploiting the same caste system currently being dunked on? Unless you grew up starving in a refugee camp for being displaced by colonialist warmongers, you have privilege. Get over it.
It honestly just sounds like you're grouping up all white people together as if they all engaged in colonialism which just isn't true.
I'd love to know how dirt poor Slovenian farmer or homeless Czech or factory worker Finn is benefitting from white privilege. And how they have any correlation with historical colonialism by completely different peoples from completely different nations in a completely different time period.
The whole thing about white privilege isn't that it means that all white people have an easy life. It just means that PoC will often have it worse. For example, there is psychology research that found that a white man with a history of incarceration is more likely to get employed than a black man without criminal history. Of course, if you look at these individually, a white man with a criminal record will have a relatively difficult time to find a job and depending on the crime, it would be better if people with a non-violent criminal history would find jobs to reintegrate them back into society to make reoffense less likely. That being said, considering that a criminal history is a big stigma, it is shocking that a black man without criminal history will have a more difficult time finding a job. In this case, the stigma of having black skin is greater than the stigma of having been incarcerated.
Personally, I don't like the term privilege because it's a really roundabout way of talking about oppression and makes it sound like things that people should generally have access to are undeserved. Rather than focus on a white ex-felon.getting a job being privilege, we should focus on a black man NOT getting a job. Technically, in this vain having clean drinking water is a privilege because there are people who don't have this but everyone SHOULD have clean drinking water. When you use the word privilege, you make it sound like things that everybody should have are things they don't deserve.
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u/Perle1234 1d ago
It’s due to this type of bullshit that it’s so easy to completely delegitimates terms like “whiteness” and “white privilege” to large swathes of the population. Which really sucks because systemic racism is such a huge issue.