The scary thing that should terrify everyone is we are going to come to a point where being called racist no longer matters or nobody cares, and then your gonna see REAL racism come back with a fury and force you wont like.
These kinds of statements are the result of a wretched game of Telephone. "White supremacists are using the OK sign as an identifying signal" became "Crazy leftists say the OK sign is racist". It's an effective recruiting tool on the uninformed.
I have, however, heard the term 'racist' accurately used to describe people making an inverted OK sign when said people happen to be standing at a Proud Boys rally, or by people who otherwise spend their time hanging out with, or trolling as, white supremacists. [^1]
Same deal with milk. It's only racist when it's being used as a symbol by people who are intentionally being racist:
> "One slide Dr. Novembre has folded into his recent talks depicts a group of white nationalists chugging milk at a 2017 gathering to draw attention to a genetic trait known to be more common in white people than others — the ability to digest lactose as adults." [^2]
That doesn't mean "milk is racist", or that drinking milk is racist; it means unabashed racists seem to enjoy co-opting common symbols as code for their secret clubs.
[^1]: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-h...
[^2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/us/white-supremacists-sci...
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
The circle of life on this sort of thing, I think, goes something like:
Come up with a contrived reason milk could be considered racist, film a video or whatever about chugging milk while making a racist screed, get criticized for being a weirdo, and then some reactionary clickbait site can have the headline "Internet user called 'racist' for drinking milk."
It is dumb, don't worry about it.
They spread the rumor that the OK symbol is racist.
Some people go to racist rallies and make the gesture.
Is it now a racist gesture? A gesture can't really be racist I don't think, it is the intent behind it. In the case of OK, it doesn't provide much extra information, right? If somebody is making it at a racist rally I guess it is a bit redundant. If somebody makes it while scuba diving I guess they are really indicating "OK."
The OK gesture was an effective pick because, it has mostly been supplanted by thumbs up to indicate all's good anyway. So it doesn't have much counter-pressure. I don't think milk consumption is going anywhere.
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
So, milk could become a symbol of this if used within that context. People are paranoid enough today that if a picture of someone enjoying a glass of a milk was published, they could assume it was a signal of this. And it could be, to be sure.
https://theconversation.com/milk-a-symbol-of-neo-nazi-hate-8...
Who says that's not already the case outside of the coastal cities?
Making that into a legal doctrine would be quite tricky.
e.g. The head of the NAACP used the word in 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/opinion/john-mcwhorter-n-...
Privilege is concept that certain attributes a person has confer relative advantages in the ways they interact with the world and the outcomes thereof. Acknowledging that is not and cannot be bigotry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_privilege
Unless you're saying that white privilege is a consequence of racism, which would be correct, but not really relevant to the discussion here.
Related the concept is so terribly named it seems meant to raise conflict. Privledge implies that it should be optional. It invites the previously mentioned abuse.
noun
a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.
It's named perfectly fine, it's just people willfully misinterpret it.
As far as being a "racist rhetorical cudgel", I'm sorry if you've felt that way, but the majority of times I've seen it used, it's to point out that a person's privilege does work to invalidate their opinion on a matter.
Most often, this is when someone is claiming that some form of discrimination doesn't exist, or isn't that bad, or that it happens the same to everyone and the people complaining should just get over it.
Privilege affects one's lived experience in ways that it's difficult to notice, because you have only your own lived experience to rely on. As a man, I was privileged not to experience harassment, and like many men I thought my female friends were exaggerating how bad it was. Then I took a series of subway rides with a friend who was harassed every time, and later got personally harassed by a creepy coworker. My privilege blinded me to the reality of the situation.
The same thing applies to race. I see a lot of white people who never personally witness racism making these broad statements about how, for example, you should just do what the police say and you'll be fine, when they've never had a cop drag them out of a car for no reason because they look like someone who might deal drugs. Because of their differences in societal privilege, their lived experience of dealing with cops has been wildly different, and the people with privilege shouldn't be talking over the people pointing out issues.
[1] https://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116
White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and in-
sulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protec-
tion builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering
the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility.
White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress be-
comes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include
the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such
as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behav-
iors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.Also, while I haven't read DiAngelo's greater oeuvre, that's a pretty poor quote to pull. The symptoms (anger and fear particularly) and strategies he gives of a white person experiencing "white fragility" could just as easily be applied to a black person experiencing racism! Which honestly is in accord with my wider experience with the anti-racist movement. Its most ardent supporters tend to say things that, as a non-American (and non-European before you make that assumption), are almost indistinguishable to me from white supremacy. I find myself agreeing greatly with John McWhorter (https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-po...) over Ibram X. Kendi.
I think terms like white privilege drive resentment and are divisive.
"In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race..." Barack Obama.
As a white (and formerly working class) boy from the UK, I can confidently say that nobody has at any point in my life discriminated against me on the basis of my ethnic background. That is the extent of what this expression means – it does not mean that any individual to whom it applied is in a superior position relative to others, but only that they do not suffer from disadvantage due to one specific thing.
There is a stubborn desire to ignore this distinction, and the reason that these terms become divisive is because people are too often manipulated into misrepresenting them.
That's not the way it's taught to children. They're encouraged to think of their "privilege" entirely in terms of race, which determines whether they win or lose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I3wJ7pJUjg
> There is a stubborn desire to ignore this distinction
Because the distinction isn't made.
It's a fundamentally bad phase to use.
But the lack of discrimination isn't the norm. It would definitely be nice if it was, but that's not the case. White people experiencing better general overall treatment by society compared to those in the same situation who are black is just a fact. Complaining that it causes reverse discrimination doesn't make that untrue.
A lack of a disadvantage others have is a privilege. The point of calling it a privilege is to emphasize that white people benefit from racism against other groups even when they don't do anything racist themselves. Benefitting knowingly from discrimination against others while doing nothing to end it is complicity. The term "privilege" is not an attack on white people, it is an attack on racism. It absolutely does not imply that we should bring down white people or be racist to them. Privilege will end when discrimination against non-white people ends.
At least set up a monthly donation to an anti-racism organization, or something like that.
Men get harsher sentences than women for the same crimes, but we don't really hear much about "female privilege". If you want to point out discrimination, you don't need any concept for "privilege". The problem was never that one group has something. The problem is that one group does not have something. It's the inequality that needs to be addressed, not the "privilege".
Making blanket assumptions about people on the basis of their skin color is something we should be avoiding, not encouraging. Keep the focus on what needs to be solved and suddenly you avoid all the problems focusing on "white privilege" causes like resentment, defensiveness, blame, and guilt.
It's really hard to get people to realize that, and to see the different types of things they benefit from silently. Do you have better suggestions to get people to notice?
> Men get harsher sentences than women for the same crimes, but we don't really hear much about "female privilege". If you want to point out discrimination, you don't need any concept for "privilege". The problem was never that one group has something. The problem is that one group does not have something. It's the inequality that needs to be addressed, not the "privilege".
People do talk about both sides, but you're right that they don't use "privilege" there.
I think the word privilege is useful to point out when one group has a huge advantage over another, even when there are some advantages or 'advantages' going in either direction.
> Making blanket assumptions about people on the basis of their skin color is something we should be avoiding, not encouraging. Keep the focus on what needs to be solved and suddenly you avoid all the problems focusing on "white privilege" causes like resentment, defensiveness, blame, and guilt.
It's not really an assumption that if you're white you face a tiny fraction of the racism that a black person gets, for example. As far as defensiveness and guilt, etc... I feel like any language used to talk about this will get politicized and twisted that way.
Much of the time it'll have to be hearing from other people and their experiences. Then you can kind of compare that with how things go for you. It's nice in a "count you blessings" kind of way to have a list of advantages you have, but it's not important. What matters is that people understand that differences exist so that when they hear about one person's problems they understand that their own experience isn't representative for everyone. Without that someone might hear someone with complaints against police (as an example) and think back over their own long history of pleasant/helpful interactions with officers and dismiss the other person's complaints as overblown or even made up. We see the same problem with A/B testing. Some user complaints about something in a tweet or forum and other people dismiss them because their experience is different and they don't realize what they see isn't universal.
> I think the word privilege is useful to point out when one group has a huge advantage over another, even when there are some advantages or 'advantages' going in either direction.
Why is it useful? Won't it be more useful and productive to point out when a group has a huge disadvantage compared to another? That's something you can fix. If you are told, that simply because of where you were born and the color of your skin X Y and Z are going to be easier for you that isn't useful. You didn't cause that situation, you can't change where you were born or your skin color, and you probably don't want to make anything worse for yourself even if you could. If you tell someone instead that other people with a different skin color are unfairly treated in X Y and Z that's something people can and will want to change.
> It's not really an assumption that if you're white you face a tiny fraction of the racism that a black person gets
The problem is that it 100% is. An old white man accused of being "privileged" might be a holocaust survivor or come from a country or community where they've faced racism their whole lives. Maybe it wasn't even racism explicitly. The point is that you can't know what struggles a person has had to deal with and when people have suffered the last thing they want is someone telling them how great and easy their lives have been.
If you're going to make an assumption it should be that every person has had struggles and advantages at various points in their lives. What matters is that we identify areas of inequality and correct them to reduce all people's struggles. When you do that you aren't asking anyone to feel bad about how good they've had things, you're just asking them to help bring everyone up to the same place. Guilt. blame, defensiveness... those things aren't inevitable. It's all about framing the discussion constructively around the problem to be solved and not the people who, entirely by chance, don't have that particular struggle.
WRT the white working class boys, They are not being held back by terms like white privilege. They are being held back by the very white house of lords denying them opportunities.
In an American context, how often do you hear about social policies to round up Canadians who overstay work visas in order to deport them?
Now yes, obviously white privilege is not the only axis of oppression and both in the UK and US class privilege is overlooked to a massive degree but pretending white privilege is a racist term is stupid.
Whites were 80-90% of the population during that time, assigning a vague notion of "privilege" to an entire race of people as a basis for reverse racism is not only useless, but misleading, because these "privileged" people were still in competition with other whites (and non-redlined minorities). The implication is that they collectively derived benefit from unfair rules against blacks, but frankly this is a dishonest assertion.
>but pretending white privilege is a racist term is stupid.
>Racist: discriminatory especially on the basis of race or religion
You're playing wordgames to resolve the cognitive dissonance that comes with claiming to be anti-racist while using intrinsically racist terminology. Especially when the implication of "white privilege" is that there is an unfair advantage based on race which needs to be corrected based on race. Reverse racism is still racism, even if merriam-webster tries to redefine the term.
They absolutlely did derive a collective benefit, i'm astounded anyone can deny this. Are you just ignorant of just how badly treated black people were compared to white people in that period?
This is rhetorical sleight of hand, sophistry which conflates mistreatment with collective benefit to justify racial wealth transfer and power mongering, all on behalf of the so called anti-racists.
Your definition of racism is one of many. Today there is a strong push to define racism only as discrimination against historically oppressed racial minorities.
It's a loaded term now, not a neutral one.