Being black in America today is an advantage, not a disadvantage. Those who think otherwise are stuck in a 1950s or 1850s mindset, thinking we still live in some white supremacist nation when nothing could be further from the truth. All the powers-that-be in media, academia, entertainment and corporate boardrooms are incredibly eager to promote black people, black voices, black stories, black achievement and, by contrast, myths about ongoing white guilt and white racism.
The main source of confusion about this issue is that when we look around, we see black people are still disproportionately poor and still suffer disproportionately from all the attendant pathologies of poverty (poor education, high crime, etc.). The causes of that disproportionate black poverty are manifold, some rooted in slavery and Jim Crow while others are rooted in counterproductive “Great Society”-era programs that incentivized the devastating breakup of the black family, which is the #1 factor leading to so many of the problems experienced by black males in particular.
So if it’s true that being black still correlates with being at the bottom of the socioeconomic latter in America in 2019, doesn’t that mean “white privilege” is real? No, absolutely not. “White privilege,” if it has any meaning at all, means that being white still gives you a leg up in our society today. It means, in effect, that all other things being equal, if you take a black person and a white person who start out on roughly the same socio-economic terms, the white person will be more likely to get ahead. And that’s the part that’s no longer remotely true. The main forms of perfectly legal institutional discrimination — affirmative action and corporate “diversity” policies (i.e., minority hiring and promotion quotas )— actually favor blacks. For that reason, someone like myself — a white person who came here from a history of poverty and oppression — obviously did not benefit at all from America’s historical discrimination in favor of whites and, moreover, has to face the additional obstacle of America’s present-day discrimination against whites.
Now if you want to trot out tired, old nags of cops killing unarmed blacks or mass incarceration that supposedly show continued systemic bias in whites’ favor, these are myths that have been repeatedly debunked. You can read my own synopsis of the actual evidence about cops killing unarmed blacks here:
And you can read about the myth of mass incarceration of blacks here:
The last thing I’ll say is this: if you want to talk about “privilege,” there are far more obvious privileges than “white privilege”: there’s “rich privilege”; there’s “beautiful privilege”; there’s “educated privilege”; there’s “smart privilege.” These surely result in a lot more benefits in every aspect of life than being white does. Why don’t you talk about those instead? Why all the focus on the overbroad sociological fiction of race?
