White Privilege- Page 2
White Privilege
#25white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:06pmAnd bwaysinger...as a white man you meet all three of the points I posted.
Unknown User
Joined: 12/31/69
#26white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:07pmI'm just being devil's advocate. I don't even like black people.
#27white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:09pm
No, I don't, Erik, as I just proved with my post. I moved into one of the ONLY neighborhoods I, as a white man, could afford and in which I could get an apartment. I constantly hear snide remarks directed at me, some in Spanish (which I understand just enough to know when it's directed at me). Often they're about being gay but one was definitely about being white.
With the exception of my floor, my building is decidedly NOT white.
So how do I meet these points?
Unknown User
Joined: 12/31/69
Kringas
Broadway Legend Joined: 5/27/05
#29white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:13pm
There are exceptions to every rule, though, Bway, and to dismiss this paper due to your multi-culti office does seem a little disingenous.
The gay card is going to through it out of whack anyway, because white privilige pretty much implicitly means "straight white privilge."
#30white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:13pm
If that was directed at me, Chita, then my only response is, "you're darn tootin'!"
#31white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:13pm
Yeah, touchme...I think the author makes more than a few valid points with qualification. First, I think she over-simplifies the social/economic strata of the nation. Privelege exists in many forms, e.g. veteran's preference for gov't employment, disqualification of naturalized citizens to hold the Office of President, etc.
Second, so much has changed over the course of 40 years. I'm a 41 year African American man who grew up in a small vilely racist town in North Carolina who got the Hell out of there a few days after graduating high school making a b-line for the city to attend college. That was when I discovered Americans of all stripes who I had much in common with despite our slightly differing heritage. BTW I still prefer being called what my great-grandma called me while she was still living, "colored" which is another thread for another day.
Third, her position is slightly dated in the context of the US and more applicable to a discussion about the color line in Latin America which is still dancing around the topic and hopelessly in denial that color is very much an issue in its affairs outside of Cuba, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. There's a reason why Venezuela & Bolivia went hard left and it won't Dubya entirely.
Fourth, educated folks of all stripes who work or operate businesses in my hood are quite civil with one another and interact with each other on a number of levels professionally and socially.
Fifth, the whole glamorization of "pimping" is setting back an entire civil rights movement, a subject which deserves its own thread, and last, I'm just too doggone tired to rebuff some of the claims of an 'Ivory Tower denizen' today.
She comes off a bit like some of my colleagues who champion every cause for the 'disenfranchised de jour' just before stepping over homeless people enroute to the gym or latest celebrity book signing. Forgive me for being glib, but I'm more concerned about the plan Dick Cheney's hatching to blow Iran to smithereens right now.
touchme...or anyone else, if you'd like to hit me up offline on this one, PM me at your leisure.
#32white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:17pm
Well, Kringas, I think that's the problem at its core. It's assuming we'll assume "Straight white man." Still, a straight white man with every other socio-economic factor besides homosexuality in common with me is also going to butt heads with her opinions.
Unknown User
Joined: 12/31/69
#33white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:19pm
Javero you will be able to understand this. In the last census taken by the US , Puerto Rico was recorded to have a 80% white population. The actual number is not known beause in PR we are very mixed. But the harsh reality is that even some Puerto Ricans who are not white, listed themselves as caucasian!
Updated On: 3/9/06 at 03:19 PM
Kringas
Broadway Legend Joined: 5/27/05
#34white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:21pmYour office, Bway. I've never worked in an office that wasn't predominantly white, even when I lived in NYC.
#35white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:21pm
Precisamente...de eso tu y yo tenemos que hablar!!!
Y no me hagas hablar sobre esa mierda que se llama Univision.
Gothampc
Broadway Legend Joined: 5/20/03
#36white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:22pm
How can you take this seriously?
"17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color."
I don't know of anyone that would make this a race issue.
#37white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:23pm
Bwaysinger..
Nothing you're saying disproves what she's saying in the article.
Of course not all offices are made up of a majority of white people, that's not the point.
#38white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:23pm
I've never worked in an office without a large representation of other races in NYC, Kringas. maybe I got "lucky." I don't know. I will say the financial world is skewed to white and Asian, though, which is some form of discrimination playing out right there.
Oh, a point I wanted to bring up, and I'm being absolutely serious here. I quote:
"17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color."
Is this seriously some prevailing opinion about some non-white race? I mean, god, I'm from the south. When it comes to the black experience, I've heard every joke in the world and, I thought, every stereotype. Not this one.
Unknown User
Joined: 12/31/69
#39white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:27pmmy family has white and black and everything in between and some of us do talk with our mouths full. It's just we Puerto Ricans can't shut up long enough to finish a meal.
touchmeinthemorning
Broadway Legend Joined: 9/3/04
#40white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:29pm
The issue is that members of minority RACES whose bodies read as different serve as the embodiment of their race for many who do not experience their race often.
So, when one eats with a full mouth as a minority, that behavior gets written on every member of that minority.
It's a messy system.
#41white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:32pmok, when goth and bway bring up the same point, it's time to get underground because the lightning bolts are comin'.
...global warming can manifest itself as heat, cool, precipitation, storms, drought, wind, or any other phenomenon, much like a shapeshifter. -- jim geraghty
pray to st. jude
i'm a sonic reducer
he was the gimmicky sort
fenchurch=mejusthavingfun=magwildwood=mmousefan=bkcollector=bradmajors=somethingtotalkabout: the fenchurch mpd collective
#42white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:32pmI don't think the article was meant to be taken so literally point by point.
#43white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:33pm
How am I not disproving her issue that I could, whenever I choose, find a neighborhood in which I would be met with acceptance and, likely, more people of my kind? I cannot, not unless heaven and earth moved to provide me with drastic financial assistance to make it so.
"Of course not all offices are made up of a majority of white people, that's not the point."
What is, exactly, her point then? She's created a thesis statement out of something that, by her very definition, is impossible to define, or very nearly impossible. Therefore, anytime anything happens to me, one way or another, she's saying it's DIRECTLY related to my status as a white man, which I find to be singularly impossible to always be the case.
That is all I'll say further about this subject since you seem to buy it 100%.
#44white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:34pm
I'm guessing that a lot of people just read the "points" of the article...and not the article itself....
The artilce is basically just saying that if you agree minorities are opressed that mean others are reaping the benefits of that opression..whether they realize it or not.
Updated On: 3/9/06 at 03:34 PM
#45white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:35pm
Chita, peep my reply above when you get a chance. I spent some time down in PR years ago. On that island nobody and I mean nobody would dare make an issue of another boricua's color. It’s just not done and color is not the all consuming social issue there. However, as you know 1 year off the island for a soujourn in the Big Apple and some folks succumb to pressure and fall into file.
I have a neighbor who's a native of Honduras who had the nerve to tell me a few years back that in his country a black person like me in Central America would never be as 'mobile' in society as I am. When I inquired further, he pinpointed on the map the spots that dark-skinned Hondureños are relegated to in that country and described the menial jobs they are stuck in for a lifetime. If those “trigueños” don’t excel at football/soccer or bludgeon each other to near death in a boxing ring, in terms of upward mobility they are ****outtaluck. It ain’t perfect here, but its paradise compared to other parts of the Americas.
#46white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:38pm
I read the article, but how can we NOT take what she's saying literally? That's a VERY specific thing to say that, if I see a black woman eating with her mouth full, I'm going to naturally assume that all black people do so and tsk tsk and shame on her family and what a discredit to her race she is.
Bull.
I definitely buy that many things in our society are skewed towards being white. Even moreso towards being a white male.
Touchme, I get that. But perhaps even my prejudiced a$$ is far more enlightened than I think I am, because I wouldn't look at someone's actions like that and assume that everyone in that race does it.
Except for the Dominicans who play loud music outside my window all night. They all do that (it's a joke, people).
Papa. I saw that. I almost died, too. But, in all seriousness, I don't get how you can write such a specific article with such specific points where white preference is given and she herself points out how she doesn't even realize being white is an advantage in these situations until she wrote them down and not take them literally. There is no such thing as figurative open-mouth chewing, is there? Did she mean it as a metaphor and I'm just being too literal-minded?
SorryGrateful
Broadway Legend Joined: 5/10/05
#47white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:39pm
papa, can I hide away with you?
*starts packing bottled water and dehydrated meals*
#48.
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:45pm
You're being too literal minded...
How many times have we all heard "black people are loud at the movies" or some such thing. The point really has nothing to do with your mouth being full. It's about the fact that I know if I'm talking in a movie people aren't going to look at me and think "oh that's how white people are."
And can't you relate to some of this as a gay man? I know co-workers have spoken to me like I'm the spokesperson for the gay population.
colleen_lee
Broadway Legend Joined: 8/16/05
#49white privilege
Posted: 3/9/06 at 3:46pm
"That's a VERY specific thing to say that, if I see a black woman eating with her mouth full, I'm going to naturally assume that all black people do so and tsk tsk and shame on her family and what a discredit to her race she is.
Bull. "
It is not to say that YOU are doing that, but that someone somewhere is doing that, and that as a white person you don't have to worry that your actions/behavoiors/etc. are used to represent your race as a whole as the actions of minorities are sometimes categorized by bigots.
The idea is that even though you're not participating in discrimination/bigotry, that you indirectly benefit by not being the subject of it (again, this refers to the average hetero white man, so you would probably be excluded from this "privilege" idea).
Sorry, been having the urge to say this "Everyone's a little bit racist sometimes...."
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