Quote from: Justin Alexander;799881It's a terrible treatment of the subject, but there's definitely institutional factors contributing to these statistics. The studies of how people with "black-sounding" names suffer when applying for schools, getting graded on assignments, and when applying for jobs after school are damnably clear.

Your belief that a white guy and a black guy can both provide the same input to the system and get the same output back is, in fact, exactly what white privilege is.

Can you come up with one example of a student with a 4.0+ grade average whose failed school because of their ethnicity? Because I'm invoking my skepticism right now. And if that is the case, I don't think "privilege" is anything close to the right term.

Quote from: TristramEvans;799884IT'll skew attendance, maybe, but not graduation.

Unless you've got student loans, or a huge nest-egg, college is paid by the quarter/semester.  Scholarships and non-loan financial aid do not always cover everything.  Miss a tuition payment, and you get a hold on your record, preventing you from registering for new classes.  Four years is a long time.  Poorer students may get accepted and have a plan for payment, but over the course of those four years things can go haywire.

Quote from: TristramEvans;799886Can you come up with one example of a student with a 4.0+ grade average whose failed school because of their ethnicity? Because I'm invoking my skepticism right now. And if that is the case, I don't think "privilege" is anything close to the right term.

You keep passing over the fact that it is easier for a white student to maintain a 4.0 grade point average than for black or Hispanic students.

Except that in the USA, a 4 year college degree is the new high school diploma.

While Snowman is right many jobs don't need a college diploma, employers are requiring college diplomas for jobs that don't need them. A high school diploma is equal to a kindergarten certificate in the white collar work force.

As for the skin color dance, let's admit MOST people prefer people who look like themselves, either consciously or unconsciously. Of course, such a preference among "white" people is a thought crime, but called solidarity or brotherhood for other ethnic groups. I had hoped that Obama's election would ease racial tensions, but the clearly the opposite has occurred.
 
That comic is such a joke, but I hope all the self-hating honkies enjoy their unending flagellating.

Quote from: Iosue;799849The comic says, "When it comes to school, I'm 78% more likely to be admitted into a university because of my race."  You see this kind of comment all time.  Some studies find that, all other things being equal, a white candidate is selected over a black candidate X% of the time, and people will say things like, "If you're white, you are X% more likely to be selected."

Since the US University system has Affirmative Action, if you control for grades then whites and east-Asians are much less likely to be admitted than affirmative-action beneficiaries. If you take whites as the baseline, then east-Asians are the ones suffering discrimination, being less likely to be admitted with equivalent grades - http://www.unz.com/runz/asian-quotas-in-the-ivy-league-we-see-nothing/
If you don't control for anything then non-Jewish non-Hispanic whites are the most under-represented group at elite US Universities, being ca 60% of the US population and ca 22% of US elite University membership, per Ron Unz:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
This is because this group is in the ca 66% of the US population that does not benefit from Affirmative Action quotas, along with Jewish whites and east-Asians. Those two groups each take roughly 22% of the pie, leaving a similar slice for the non-Jewish whites. According to Unz this is not purely due to non-Jewish whites scoring lower on test scores.

Quote from: Iosue;799887You keep passing over the fact that it is easier for a white student to maintain a 4.0 grade point average than for black or Hispanic students.

Well, I've seen the statement at least. I haven't encountered a reason to believe it as yet.

Quote from: TristramEvans;799898Well, I've seen the statement at least. I haven't encountered a reason to believe it as yet.

Do you believe, for example, that it is harder for a black person to get an interview because of their race?  Because it is well documented that the exact same resume is less likely to result in an interview if it seems like a black person.

If you do believe this, do you believe that while there might be prejudiced people within HR departments, that teachers are always fair and unprejudiced?

Quote from: Spinachcat;799889As for the skin color dance, let's admit MOST people prefer people who look like themselves, either consciously or unconsciously. Of course, such a preference among "white" people is a thought crime, but called solidarity or brotherhood for other ethnic groups. I had hoped that Obama's election would ease racial tensions, but the clearly the opposite has occurred.

If you look at the data from implicit association tests, Blacks socialized in the U.S. also (but to a lesser extent) show a bias against Blacks and in favor or Whites, which suggests it is a product of cultural socialization.

Quote from: Will;799852I don't like the term privilege mainly because it's one of those words that started in one context (IE: psychology)

You have a cite for that Will? I've seen plenty of psych studies dealing with implicit attitides and implicit discrimination, but they don't use the word "privilege". I'm pretty sure it's from critical theory/PM "sociology". And yes, I meant to put "sociology" in quotes.

Quote from: Daztur;799861There have been studies done with taking a big stack of resumes and changing the gender or ethnicity of the name at the top (for example switching out "John Smith," "Jane Smith" "Jamal Smith, "Lisa Choi," etc. etc.) you get quite different responses often quite massive ones (like "Jamal Smith's" resume being e-mailed to 100 random companies and "John Smith's" resume being emailed to a 100 random companies and John Smith getting twice as many responses despite their being identical except for the name. So there's a real problem here, there are a thousand problems with how "privilege" is used on the internet but there are real substantial biases still at work that can be objectively proven.

The best example of this is orchestras. Once they switched to auditions where the musicians were behind blinds/curtains so the judges couldn't see them the number of female hires skyrocketed. No one thought they were discriminating against women, they really believed they were judging based on merit, but they were discriminating because their implicit attitudes colored their perceptions of musical quality.

Quote from: Will;799865I see it used about perspective a lot, particularly when guys are mansplaining or white people are telling black people what the black experience is.

The thing is, privilege usually does translate to advantage. It's just not simple, because there's a bunch of different privileges that interact, and better odds are just that... better odds.

The fact that, say, a poor white person has more odds of success than a poor black person isn't a great comfort, and it also doesn't seem meaningful if the white person is unlucky and the black person is lucky.


But hey, class and income is ALSO a privilege issue. I see a lot of folks say 'I'm white but I grew up poor and'... well, ok. You got a +20% bonus for being white, a -30% penalty for growing up poor, but the special rules for 'poor' mean that your whiteness bonus is halved unless you get the Swords and Sciences supplement, in which case you have to multiply it by Tan of the geographic location angle...

Will, you (and everyone else actually) really need to stop using that word the way you're using it. Being subject to implicit (unconscious) socio-cultural discrimination or favoritism is not privilege. Being more or less likely to get into med-school because of some demographic variable isn't privilege. Getting into med-school because your parents bought a wing at Johns-Hopkins is privilege. Buying OJ's defense team is privilege. Getting that plum internship because your parents contributed to the Senators campaign is privilege. Meeting with the president because you contributed 2 million to the party is privilege. Getting the laws/tax breaks you want passed by a legislature is privilege.

Having slightly better or worse socio-cultural stats isn't that significant when you're one of the zero-level masses living in a world where there are people with 20 levels of "make the world dance to their tune" material, real, privilege. Class and wealth aren't "ALSO", they are qualitatively different and orders of magnitude more powerful. That's why the word privilege exists, to describe exceptional social power, not run of the mill differences.

Quote from: Will;799866You could try being a more compassionate human being who doesn't insist that people's experiences aren't valid when they tell you about them.

Just a thought.

Firstly, this is a passive-aggressive way of saying "you're an asshole".

Secondly, "more compassionate" is a red herring. There are over 7 billion people on the planet, 55 million of whom die every year, close to 2 per second. No one has enough compassion to care about all those tragedies happening to strangers. And that's what the vast majority of anonymous names on the internet are.

Thirdly, leaving aside the validity of peoples subjective experiences, experiences are not necessarily generalizable. "Denying the experience" is usually "denying the generalizability of your experience".

Fourthly, people's memories are terrible. Every time you remember something you call it up to working memory, which makes it unstable. When it goes back to long term memory it is changed by what you were experiencing while it was in working memory. Which means people's memories of their subjective experiences may well be wrong. There's interesting research that was done during and following 9-11 that showed that what people remembered about their experience of 9-11 months to a couple of years after differed from what they said they experienced when it happened. The longer the time lapse, the more the differences.

So your memories of your experiences may well be false.

Quote from: TristramEvans;799898Well, I've seen the statement at least. I haven't encountered a reason to believe it as yet.

So ask for a citation, or better yet do your own search/research. You shouldn't accept things people say without evidence, but you shouldn't reject them out of hand either.

Quote from: jhkim;799921Do you believe, for example, that it is harder for a black person to get an interview because of their race?  Because it is well documented that the exact same resume is less likely to result in an interview if it seems like a black person.

If you do believe this, do you believe that while there might be prejudiced people within HR departments, that teachers are always fair and unprejudiced?

It's way simpler than that I believe. It's a lot easier to maintain a 4.0 when you don't have to work three jobs to pay for school.

And another thing;

all this "racist, sexist, X-ist" bs is just name calling. I don't give a crap what Malky Mackay believes or feels or even expressed in what he believed was a private conversation; did he engage in discriminatory practice (implicit or explicit) or not? Did he buy or sell players based on race/ethinicity? Did he allocate playing time based on race/ethnicity? Did he treat players better or worse based on race/ethnicity? If not, whatever his actual attitudes are don't matter.

I have a mixed race family.  Anyone who thinks privilege isn't a real problem is grossly incorrect.

But I don't really blame people for not seeing it.  I didn't see it myself until I lived in a country where I was the only white person around.  That's when you really start to see just how many things are impacted by being part of a small minority.  Higher taxi fares, racial/ethnicity jokes that no one else really noticed because they were part of the norm in that society, unfavorable treatment by merchants and vendors, the list goes on and on.  Things that aren't really illegal or major, but they pile up.

So yeah, while a black person and a white person might be in the same school with the same access to facilities, imagine being the only white person in a room of black people who most of them don't share any of your interests.  Imagine that everywhere you go, people assume you're up to no good.  Integration is important, and if you feel the outcast, that can impact your success, regardless if you "technically" have access to the same material.

Quote from: TristramEvans;799898Well, I've seen the statement at least. I haven't encountered a reason to believe it as yet.

... Which is privilege. That's... are you really that un-selfaware??

When black people tell you they experience systematic discrimination and an uphill battle to do stuff that white people are able to do, why do you assume they are all lying or exaggerating?

It's shit like THAT that undermines your supposedly reasonable stance.

Look, if people with extensive experience in the military keep telling me 'being in the military is like X,' I don't start telling them how the military really is, or make up excuses for people I've never met and assume those 'other people' are more reasonable than the person I'm talking to.

But privileged people do that constantly whenever disenfranchised folks say stuff, particularly when there's a defensive motive to do so.

Quote from: apparition13;799923You have a cite for that Will? I've seen plenty of psych studies dealing with implicit attitides and implicit discrimination, but they don't use the word "privilege". I'm pretty sure it's from critical theory/PM "sociology". And yes, I meant to put "sociology" in quotes.

A cite, no. But scientifically when you state something is 'privileged' you don't generally mean what a lot of people think about by privilege.

Quote from: apparition13;799923Firstly, this is a passive-aggressive way of saying "you're an asshole"

If I wanted to call him an asshole, I would. Does my behavior suggest otherwise?

But if you are SERIOUSLY ASKING for what to do in the face of issues like discrimination and privilege, that's my answer.

Quote from: apparition13;799923Secondly, "more compassionate" is a red herring. There are over 7 billion people on the planet, 55 million of whom die every year, close to 2 per second. No one has enough compassion to care about all those tragedies happening to strangers. And that's what the vast majority of anonymous names on the internet are.

Um, talking about a red herring, and a bit of an excluded middle.

All I'm suggesting is that when someone looks or acts upset by their lot in life, don't get defensive and tell them how it's all their fault and how stupid they are.
Which is what a lot of this 'reacting against excesses of feminism' sound like.

Quote from: apparition13;799923Thirdly, leaving aside the validity of peoples subjective experiences, experiences are not necessarily generalizable. "Denying the experience" is usually "denying the generalizability of your experience".

If lots of people in a given experience communicate some of the same ideas and worries, why do you predicate your ignorance over them?
If you do that, you are being a colossal pig-headed asshole. (See? I have no problem calling it out)

Quote from: apparition13;799923Fourthly, people's memories are terrible. Every time you remember something you call it up to working memory, which makes it unstable. When it goes back to long term memory it is changed by what you were experiencing while it was in working memory. Which means people's memories of their subjective experiences may well be wrong. There's interesting research that was done during and following 9-11 that showed that what people remembered about their experience of 9-11 months to a couple of years after differed from what they said they experienced when it happened. The longer the time lapse, the more the differences.

So your memories of your experiences may well be false.
So ask for a citation, or better yet do your own search/research. You shouldn't accept things people say without evidence, but you shouldn't reject them out of hand either.

Why do you assume your ignorance about a subject entitles you with more perspective and discernment than people dealing with it?

As I mentioned, I have bi-racial children, so this article hits pretty close to home.  But more importantly, it's all true.  Every last bit.  Privilege is a very real thing that shouldn't just be hand waved away.

Speeches mothers have to give their black children:
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/07/killing_keaton_otis_mothers_of.html

LeVar Burton about his caution dealing with police:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-ckDJ3xTaE


Stress affects lots of things, including health and learning. It doesn't take hippy dippy feelgood crystal magic to see, scientifically, how living like this can have pervasive negative effects.

Quote from: jhkim;799921Do you believe, for example, that it is harder for a black person to get an interview because of their race?  Because it is well documented that the exact same resume is less likely to result in an interview if it seems like a black person.

If you do believe this, do you believe that while there might be prejudiced people within HR departments, that teachers are always fair and unprejudiced?

Yes I'm certain it is harder for visible minorities to get job interviews. I also don't believe that teachers are necessarily "fair and unprejudiced". In this case though, a bottom-of-the-class barely-passing C- average student might have a slightly better chance of passing if they are white than a minority but only to the same extent of an overweight student or any other factors of bias. I don';t believe that under any normal circumstances, a competent student is going to fail based solely on their race.

What I'm saying is "white privilege" isn't something that I'd consider a significant factor over, say, "neurotypical privilege" or "physical attractiveness privilege".