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There was a discussion thread from earlier in the week that disappeared before I could add this. Not that what I have to say is so important, but for general clarity to avoid misunderstanding.
White privilege has nothing to do with our individual circumstances and it certainly doesn't mean all white people have it easy. The best analogy I can come up with is that of a river. White people are moving with the current. Some have rickety rafts, some have fiberglass motor boats and some have luxury paddle wheels all to themselves. There are also those who have nothing and are barely keeping their heads above water. While technically, the river is helping them move down stream, it's also killing them. For people of color it's the same, except they have to get upstream, i.e. racism.
One example: There was a study done (I think) at the University of Pittsburg in the late 90's that looked at assault arrests and showed that black people were more prone to commit assault. It was a well done study and made it through peer review. But some (maybe grad students maybe from Penn State) thought it deserved a second look. Using the same data, they did a little digging. It turned out that calls to the police about assaults were exactly even per capita between black and white. The difference was that police were twice as likely to make an arrest if the person was black. With white people they tended to take a "no harm, no foul" approach. There is no way for a guy licking his wounds at home after a drunken brawl to know that he was saved from an arrest record by his skin color. He may have a very hard life, but this was a free gift and probably made a big difference in his life.
White privilege has nothing to do with our individual circumstances and it certainly doesn't mean all white people have it easy. The best analogy I can come up with is that of a river. White people are moving with the current. Some have rickety rafts, some have fiberglass motor boats and some have luxury paddle wheels all to themselves. There are also those who have nothing and are barely keeping their heads above water. While technically, the river is helping them move down stream, it's also killing them. For people of color it's the same, except they have to get upstream, i.e. racism.
One example: There was a study done (I think) at the University of Pittsburg in the late 90's that looked at assault arrests and showed that black people were more prone to commit assault. It was a well done study and made it through peer review. But some (maybe grad students maybe from Penn State) thought it deserved a second look. Using the same data, they did a little digging. It turned out that calls to the police about assaults were exactly even per capita between black and white. The difference was that police were twice as likely to make an arrest if the person was black. With white people they tended to take a "no harm, no foul" approach. There is no way for a guy licking his wounds at home after a drunken brawl to know that he was saved from an arrest record by his skin color. He may have a very hard life, but this was a free gift and probably made a big difference in his life.
