<p>Yes, I may have an “inherent advantage” (though I don’t like that phrase, I’m just using it because you did) because as a white woman, I am not as likely as a black woman to be scrutinized in a store or suspected of being up to no good because I’m hanging with friends in a park. I GET that. I’m not sure why I need to be TOLD to check my privilege, though. What, exactly, am I supposed to check, if I myself am not acting in a racist manner towards someone? I’m very sorry some white people aren’t very nice, and shame on them, but I resent being held accountable for their crimes just because of the color of my skin. It’s exactly what the privilege-resenters resent – being stereotyped as something based solely on skin color. </p>
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<p>I did not say you should check anything. Its just about awareness of the realities of society. Why are you so defensive over it? I would never tell someone to check their privilege but there are many times when someone should check their privilege. This has nothing to do with white people’s crimes or anything like that. Its just analyzing how different people are treated in society and the kind of advantages or disadvantages they have because of said treatment. Some people don’t understand they have privilege and believe everything is an equal playing field when thats laughably untrue…</p>
<p>" I would never tell someone to check their privilege but there are many times when someone should check their privilege. This has nothing to do with white people’s crimes or anything like that. Its just analyzing how different people are treated in society and the kind of advantages or disadvantages they have because of said treatment. Some people don’t understand they have privilege and believe everything is an equal playing field when thats laughably untrue."</p>
<p>Hmm. As far as treatment in society…I’m a middle aged, average white woman. I dress rather sloppily because I’m lazy and hate to shop, I rarely wear makeup, and I look like many typical PNW women, quite often in some sort of athletic gear. Most of the time—I am invisible. People don’t see me, don’t make an effort to help me in stores, give me particularly good service. When I finally track someone down, I usually get decent service, but that is because I am very nice to them, not because I am white. When I was younger and blonder, I was treated far better, but now I am invisible. Is this the privilege of which you speak?</p>
<p>When I fly and sit in first class, particularly if the flight attendant is female, I make a particular effort to be friendly and make some pleasant or funny comment when I first walk in. I want them to know I am there. It is amazing how they can serve every single person in the section a drink, even the person sitting next to me, and seem to not even see me sitting there. Particularly if most of the passengers are male. Probably all their fault, they don’t understand their privilege.</p>
<p>“When I was younger and blonder, I was treated far better, but now I am invisible.”</p>
<p>Are you suggesting men are only concerned with looks? I am shocked by your demeaning attitude. Could this be from having too much privilege in your life?</p>
<p>“Some people don’t understand they have privilege and believe everything is an equal playing field when thats laughably untrue.”</p>
<p>Who? That’s just silly. </p>
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<p>I agree with Flossy, that this is just silly.</p>
<p>HOWEVER, I wonder sometimes whether the younger generation has a skewed view of the world, because diversity and equality and non-judgementalism has been drilled into them, and they don’t “see” race, and they do see affirmative action and are personally made to feel bad about what they have, so that when someone then tells them they are privileged, they are shocked and offended. We had this conversation in a thread about affirmative action, and one of the posters on this thread (who vilified Fortgang, ironically) brought up this idea, strangely enough. </p>
<p>“Are you suggesting men are only concerned with looks? I am shocked by your demeaning attitude.”</p>
<p>Hard to believe, I know. They just can’t help themselves…oh no, the sexism of it all!</p>
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<p>Wish I could find those links, but I think it would be extremely difficult for a number of reasons: First, the threads I reference were from at least 5 (or more) years ago, when I was a much more active participant in the forums here. I also cannot recall which particular forum (ie., College Admissions, the Parent’s Cafe, or even the now defunct Political Forum), each of the threads appeared in. What I do remember is that often, the discussions centered around issues of Affirmative Action (a topic which sees a perennially sharp up-tick in expressed outrage around the period when the majority admissions decisions are sent out), the “achievement gap” and what can be done about it, and the topic of race and IQ. For the last 2 or 3 years, at least, I’ve stopped regularly checking-in to CC as a means of passing the time. I realized that the mental and emotional capital I was spending here, especially when I allowed myself to become embroiled in certain heated topics, was having a deleterious affect on my well-being. The shuttering of the Politics Forum was one of the things that helped me unplug. That forum exerted a strangely addictive power…</p>
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<p>That I cannot do either, unfortunately—though it certainly has not been for a lack of trying to recall the usernames of the most frequent offenders (like I said, it’s been at least 5 years). What I do remember is that there were, at the time, at least three regulars who denied that their comments were racist, even while making some of the most outrageously generalized statements about race and the abilities/inabilities supposedly inherently linked to it. One of the posters, I recall, claimed to be an engineer of some sort, though he also seemed to be fairly young, and not long graduated from college. He was fond of citing statistics and claiming them to be unassailable proof of the validity of his arguments. He and the others also seemed to be devotees of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s, “watershed” book, The Bell Curve, which they used as a launch pad from which to extrapolate other claims. Of course I DID confront them on some of their more egregious comments. So did one or two other posters. But I would say that, out of roughly 20 or so somewhat frequent participants in such threads, the vast majority declined to challenge anything these usual suspects posted. When I expressed outrage that racist statements were being allowed to stand unchallenged, some posters claimed it was because they felt confronting them only lent credibility to them, and that it was best to “ignore” them. I would sometimes point out that doing so was the equivalent of allowing an elephant to deposit a steaming pile of dung on your living room rug, and then avert one’s gaze, as if doing so somehow made it stink less. Some debates turned to the very definition of “racism” itself, and here again, the dictionary definition was often rejected as being an invalid standard by which to name it, with wholesale revisionism and pretzel logic attached as provisos, and defended with countless tedious examples of “yeah, but…” exceptions to the dictionary’s standard. Thereby, was bold-faced racism sometimes dressed up and called intellectual debate or a mere “difference of opinion”. Some people seemed to invest an awful lot of energy in denying racism, and even more in expressing outrage that one would dare point it out. It turns out, apparently, that the very act of calling a racist a racist is the more egregious act and racist in and of itself. Who knew…?</p>
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<p>Most of the incendiary threads to which I’m referring, were in the adult swim sections of the discussion forums, though some of the participating posters did indeed appear to be kids.</p>
<p>Poetsheart…hmmm…
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<p>Channeling Cobrat…some body, somewhere, said something of vast importance to me while I was attending something somewhere of vast importance…</p>
<p>Dietz, you’re certainly well within your rights to disbelieve and cast aspersions on my recollected experiences and to outright dismiss my perceptions. I’m used to it. Believe or don’t believe. It doesn’t change what is and what isn’t. And anymore, I’ve grown not to, as my friend Dawn is wont to say, “give a flying kitty.” 
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<p>I have no doubt that poetsheart has seen this sort of garbage go unchallenged. It certainly was in places on the e&p forum. But I think many didn’t want to engage with posters saying outrageous things, it wasn’t a worthy argument and seemed that obviously people were trying to be inflammatory or trolls. We shouldn’t have allowed those kind of insulting comments to be ignored.</p>
<p>I’ve been reading along and felt compelled to comment on a few things.</p>
<p>Way back there someplace someone said that people do cry wolf now and again but that doesn’t negate real experiences that people have moving through life. </p>
<p>There have been many references to ancestry and family history and experience. I would argue that while that does certainly influence our status RE “privilege” much of the point is that things happen in real time based on who we are right now regardless of history. I too have cousins, and one of them (a white woman) married an African man from Nigeria who is a scientist and has a PhD from a prestigious university. They have some level of financial status, educational status, and academic status as a tenured professor. However, she is the mother of two African American children who don’t take on the racial/social status us their parents. She has a daughter with black hair that must be styled. She is the mother of a black teenage boy with all the concerns about who people think they see when they look at him. He was born into privilege in many ways and yet to a degree what he looks like puts him into a group that has taken a lot of flack lately. No, his ancestors weren’t slaves but to him in real time that doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>My daughter was an athlete playing an unconventional sport and I can tell you that the “microaggressions” came daily and were not always micro. She was subjected to overt hostility and inappropriate comments even from parents, officials, opponents, some times her own coaches. A person gets tired of the stupidity and I can see others getting fed up after a lifetime of similar interactions. There is more to it than just people looking for a reason to be offended.</p>
<p>There are levels of privilege and we may be on the plus side on one metric and minus on another - there are no absolutes. I think at different times in our countries history different groups have been on the hot seat - a generation or 2 ago it was much tougher to be Jewish in America than it is today. It isn’t static. I think right now in real time it is both way easier and way harder to be gay in America. A few years ago my D couldn’t realistically think about getting married and now she can and it’s getting to be normal. There is so much progress on so many fronts with public figures coming out and yet the progress brings out the ugliness. There is so much talk about throwing it in people’s faces or “shoving it down their throats”. I can’t even imagine existing in the world every day with people openly saying that I didn’t have a right to be here. We have seen the same ugliness around our first family. That is not trumped up indignation that is the truth.</p>
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<p>Yes more attractive members of our society have privilege and are treated better for no reason whatsoever. Your example also segways into feminist thought and how women are only valued for their bodies which is why no one pays attention to you once you aren’t a viable mate for a male because you are no longer young.</p>
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<p>I am sorry I don’t really know what you mean by “Who?”.</p>
<p>poetsheart,
with the tools of this new forum you can search back for old posts. Put your name in the “search forum” box in the upper right and it takes you back to 60 pgs of posts referencing you, back to 2004. You can also click on your “replies” and it lets you search all 4922 (as of this morning). IT does look tedious to have to scroll back to early pages. Maybe there is an easier way.</p>
<p>Poetsheart,</p>
<p>It sounds like you are describing the poster fabrizio. If so, I must take issue with your memory that his posts went unchallenged. He was the “cobrat” of the affirmative action threads, and many of us vociferously argued against his points. His posts were the reason I joined CC in the first place. I couldn’t stand to stay out of that debate, in which by the way, I felt confident our side prevailed. </p>
<p>In some settings being a young, attractive woman does confer certain benefits that start to fade as we age and/or don’t groom and “maintain” ourselves to mimic a woman in her 20s. Of course there are also drawbacks and places that being female and sometimes attractive puts one at a disadvantage. </p>
<p>The dad of one of my D’s teammates was a meteorologist and we got to chatting about it one time. In the course of the discussions he said how hard it is for women in the field who are rarely (in his experience) taken seriously but treated at “weather girls” even when they are scientists. He said the male broadcasters who read the weather but are not meteorologists are given more respect in the industry than a young, attractive smart woman who is an actual scientist because of the power and pay structures in broadcasting. </p>
<p>I find this discussion fascinating–primarily because it’s mostly based on a Fantasy Fortgang who, in my opinion, probably has no relation to the real Fortgang. This Fantasy Fortgang was “silenced” or “shouted down” when he expressed entirely sensible (if conservative) political views. I think that’s baloney. I will point out that in this conversation we have discussed the issue of white privilege (and other privileges) at great length, and I don’t think anybody has been shouted down, despite sharp disagreements. Fortgang’s at Princeton, and is (apparently) a member of a conservative student group. Who is silencing him? Nobody, that’s who. He just doesn’t like what some people (allegedly) sometimes say to him. Boo hoo. He’s so silenced he had to go on national TV to complain about it.</p>
<p>I think this whole controversy shows that college students have become more polite since my day. Back then, if there was somebody in the group who constantly said insensitive things, the phrase most often heard would have been, “Shut up, Fortgang,” not “check your privilege.” But he wouldn’t have shut up, then or now.</p>
<p>Just to add: what’s really funny about this is that Fortgang is really, really mad because he’s being treated as a minority. In his case, he’s in the ideological minority at Princeton, and he really, really doesn’t like being looked down on as a result. There’s a teachable moment in there, somewhere.</p>
<p>“This Fantasy Fortgang was “silenced” or “shouted down” when he expressed entirely sensible (if conservative) political views. I think that’s baloney.”</p>
<p>You know, I don’t think it’s so much “silencing” or “shouting down” as … conversations that are otherwise relatively innocuous have the life sucked out of them by the phrase. I’m serious when I use the example of a Facebook posting of “Hey ladies, come join the XYZ Club to find out what we have to offer” only to have it hijacked by humorless people that need to remind us that not everyone at a women’s college fully identifies as female (which begs the question why they are still at a women’s college, but I digress). So the real point of the conversation - which was hey everybody, come learn about XYZ - is now completely overtaken by self-righteous posturing.
It’s not so much silencing as it is – well, better watch every single thing you say, because no matter what, someone is bound to take offense AND is bound and determined to turn it around to bashing of the heteronormative, white-normative, racist sexist patriarchy. And that just makes life tiresome and humorless. And at one point, if you’re a member of the XYZ Club, you say - why bother? </p>
<p>(And no, I’m not suggesting that the alternative is to tell racist / sexist / offensive jokes and then wonder why no one’s laughing, so don’t even bother constructing that straw man.)</p>
<p>My D’s joke (to me) about receiving a link to a online iPad subscription was “those classist bigots just assumed I had an iPad!” The reason it’s funny (at least in the context of her environment) was that any little thing gets blown out of proportion with the weight of the Big Meaty assumptions behind it. Like someone said upthread - you can’t say a movie is a must-see without worrying that you offended a blind person. Or you can’t use the phrase “left-handed compliment” without worrying that you’ve offended left-handers. </p>