The arguments against the existence of white privilege are stereotypically represented as originating primarily from right-wingers and grounded in conservative notions about American meritocracy. But there is a stronger argument against the concept, which comes from the very philosophical tradition that its supporters claim as their intellectual heritage.
White privilege is a flawed paradigm, which ascribes racism to a process which does not contain it. But, more importantly, it’s an ultimately self-defeating notion, which negates some of the most fundamental principles of equality and human rights.
The term was brought into the mainstream by Peggy McIntosh’s essay, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. It is essentially a list of statements about the author’s life, which she argues are privileges accrued by virtue of her race, to her and, by extension, to all white people.
Let us take two of these items:
- If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.
- I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.
We will come back to #19 in a moment, but for now let’s examine item 20. The fundamental issue with white privilege is that it is very difficult to prove that such situations are due to theoretical oppression rather than simple demographic overrepresentation. Much of McIntosh’s essay is devoted to the difficulty of finding products and services tailored to racial minorities.
It is puzzling to consider the abundance of pale-skinned dolls, for example, a societally conferred privilege. No central committee has decreed this and we have no evidence that the decisions underlying it were racially motivated at all. We are talking about an advantage which accrues to the majority group in any culture, one which can be found among black people in African countries, Muslim people in Middle Eastern countries and, yes, white people in America. A demographic mismatch does not in itself prove unfair discrimination.
McIntosh identifies the second issue herself, towards the end of her essay:
But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups. We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages, which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantages, which, unless rejected, will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally, it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power which I originally saw as attendant on being a human being in the US consisted in unearned advantage and conferred dominance.
McIntosh’s terminology is wrong. The characteristics described here are rights—not privileges, unearned advantages or conferred dominance. To use her own example, not being stopped by the police randomly or being subject to government scrutiny on the basis of race-based suspicion is a human right.
As Lewis Gordon argues in the collection, What White Looks Like: African American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question:
A privilege is something that not everyone needs, but a right is the opposite. Given this distinction, an insidious dimension of the white-privilege argument emerges. It requires condemning whites for possessing, in the concrete, features of contemporary life that should be available to all, and if this is correct, how can whites be expected to give up such things?
The dictionary defines privilege as “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.” But Gordon is correct that a privilege is universally thought of as an unnecessary allowance and most of our discourse is defined by the connotation of our words and phrases. We rarely stick absolutely to their denotation. If we did, then, for example, the conservative argument against homosexual marriage (that the strict denotation of marriage refers specifically to the heterosexual variety) would be valid. I, for one, strongly disagree with this position.
Consider how the legal system treats freedom of speech versus driving a car. The former may not be denied us, even as a criminal punishment. Felons may not be stripped of their right to speak. However, one must earn the privilege of driving a car by passing a test. From a legal perspective, freedom of speech is a right, available to all, whereas driving is a privilege, which may be restricted.
If we want equality for people of all races, we must embrace the paradigm of human rights. To do otherwise paradoxically undermines the most valuable and powerful argument against racism that has ever been employed by human society. Were they privileges that Martin Luther King was fighting for or basic human rights?
Why are progressives who are theoretically supportive of equality so quick to disparage humanistic individualism—seemingly the best defense of equality? The best manifestations of anti-racism, feminism and all philosophies which seek to represent the oppressed have taken as their fundamental presuppositions the supreme value, worth and dignity of the individual, as guaranteed by the rights owed her by the state and by society at large. This is not a minor terminological distinction, motivated by obsessive pedantry or a fundamental animus towards anti-racist thought. It is of paramount importance, and though seemingly subtle, has practical real world consequences.
Radical left-wingers insist that white people are complicit in the system of oppression in America because they are exercising their privileges (such as not being stopped unfairly by the police) to the detriment of those who don’t have them. That’s a logically coherent argument if we accept these as privileges and not rights. This worldview assigns collective guilt on a racial basis. That is not a path we should walk again.
Clarity and precision matter because words express ideas, and even people who have a tenuous grasp on those ideas will find themselves playing out the set of assumptions which come pre-packaged within them. When one builds a linguistic, logical or political system on a flawed set of assumptions, those flaws will inevitably become manifest in the real world.
Consider the case of Bret Weinstein, as described by Bari Weiss in her article for the New York Times “When the Left Turns on Its Own”:
Day of Absence is an Evergreen [University] tradition that stretches back to the 1970s. As Mr. Weinstein explained on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, “in previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus—a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning.” This year, the script was flipped: “White students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave campus for the day’s activities,” reported the student newspaper on the change. The decision was made after students of color “voiced concern over feeling as if they are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.”
Mr Weinstein thought this was wrong. The biology professor said as much in a letter to Rashida Love, the school’s Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services. “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles,” he writes, “and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away.” The first instance, he argues, “is a forceful call to consciousness.” The second “is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.” In other words, what purported to be a request for white students and professors to leave campus was actually an act of moral bullying— “to stay on campus as a white person would mean to be tarred as a racist.”
For this act of heresy, Professor Weinstein was mobbed by student activists, and his class was threatened so severely that he was forced off campus to teach his next class, because his safety couldn’t be guaranteed. The actions of these student activists, while reprehensible, seem to be a logical conclusion of the white privilege paradigm. Why should minority students tolerate white people exercising their privilege of feeling safe on campus when others clearly cannot? Why should this privilege be allowed on campus in any form if it can be renounced?
This is the sort of odious behavior that can result from a seemingly small terminological error in a complex idea/system. So, while it’s likely that many people do not use this term with any specific malice in mind, it is important to question the essential underpinnings of our systems of thought, especially when we see so much evidence that they are being misused.
The consequences of this line of thinking were on full display during the last election cycle. The idea of white privilege seemed insulting and inaccurate to many white people in communities hit very hard by poverty, obesity, the opioid epidemic and a thousand other horrors. The coal miner who drags himself home every day, having worked himself one step closer to black lung, returning to a family for whom he has failed to provide, is understandably annoyed at being called privileged. He would not be similarly outraged to hear that some of us who are still discriminated against due to our race are having our human rights violated.
By making that simple transformation of language we enter an entirely new frame of reference. Suddenly, instead of focusing on all the things some of us have which others do not, we’re talking about perversions of justice being perpetrated on the vulnerable. We’re pointing to the black man who had his loan application denied due to his skin color and being justifiably outraged on his behalf rather than pointing to the white man who had his accepted and condemning him as a privileged oppressor. Truly, this is the best path forward for us, as a society.
I am in complete agreement with this: “. . . we cannot ever under any circumstances condemn someone for the crimes of his forefathers. White people, to the degree that they benefit from the oppressive actions of their ancestors (and not all do) are not guilty of those crimes. What we must do, as rapidly as possible, is eliminate any impediments that are placed in people’s way that have anything to do with their ethnicity, sex, identity, or any such immutable characteristic because these are clearly wrong.” The paradigm of “white privilege” aggravates whites who have struggled throughout their lives to earn a living and feed their family; it aggravates those whites who, through their personal struggles and hard work, have achieved economic success; it is not helpful to finding solutions to our societal problems and bringing people together; indeed, it has driven people apart and, to some extent, explains… Read more »
[…] first was brought to my attention by this article in Areo Magazine, and the fact that it took an undergrad — a freshman, no less — to introduce a (to me) […]
[…] white people almost certainly would have remained unmolested. But as the editors of Areo noted in The Progressive Case Against White Privilege, it isn’t necessarily productive to describe this situation in a manner that casts whites as […]
[…] According to Whiteness scholars, racism permeates every interstice of the social fabric. DiAngelo writes, for example, that the “body of research about children and race demonstrates that white children develop a sense of white superiority as early as preschool.” She only cites two sources, one a study on dolls, the other a book on how to teach anti-racist principles to children. In an article for Areo Magazine, Jacob Derin elaborates on Peggy McIntosh’s idea that one example of white privilege is the ability to “easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.” Derin writes: […]
This article is nearly a year old now, but as I have been reflecting on it I realize that I want to clarify a section of it that may lead to some confusion as to what I’m really trying to say: “But Gordon is correct that a privilege is universally thought of as an unnecessary allowance and most of our discourse is defined by the connotation of our words and phrases. We rarely stick absolutely to their denotation.” Denotation vs connotation isn’t really what I’m trying to capture here. What I’m really trying to say is that dictionaries are not the final word on how language is used. The word “privilege” is, like Gordon says, used by most people to refer to something which one is granted but which one doesn’t need. This is the purpose of my reference to freedom of speech vs driving a car. A right is… Read more »
I’m not entirely sure what the author hopes to accomplish with article. It’s very amateurish, with comments that appear from the author’s base of college frat buddies. Denying the existence of something but arguing that they aren’t responsible for the very thing they deny – the plight of their fellow human – it’s non sequitur. It’s fear. It’s anger. It’s privilege. And that suggests you don’t even see yourself as a work in progress. I would think that someone in their early 20s would have an outlook of change, not denial. We ALL have an obligation to the FUTURE, to fix what has been done wrongly in the past, because we are part of that legacy. That is the wisdom you lack. Face it, the ONLY thing you have done to be here was have the luck to be born white, male, and American. It could have gone a lot… Read more »
[…] The Progressive Case Against White Privilege – I don’t agree with almost every single word in this but it is worth reading to see what people think. […]
There are some logical problems of causation in the debate. For example, while it is nice to not be pulled over for no reason, I personally did not CAUSE that and that fact does not make me complicit in racism, nor can I renounce not getting pulled over. Similarly, while I may have been aided by having 2 parents, this does not harm anyone else nor did my situation cause their parents to divorce or never marry. One of the complicating factors also is that people disagree violently on what causes what. For the Left, shoveling money at the poor and punishing the rich is the solution. For conservatives, growing the economy, reducing occupational licensing barriers, lowering barriers to building homes in cities, etc is how you help the poor. These two things are not the same. If you tell a leftist that you have data showing that raising the… Read more »
About the demographic overrepresentation argument for explaining the presence of people of your own race in magazines, maybe that applies to Europe and perhaps the US and Canada, but I found it very eye catching in my travels to some Latin American countries how the people featured in magazines and advertisements were clearly different from what you could see in the streets.
While I understand the annoyance at poor whites being told they’re privileged, that of itself doesn’t refute ‘Privilege theory’. If the theory was true, and something called ‘structural whiteness’ was a meaningful descriptor of how society operates then the coal miner should just suck it up and then complain to the riches whites for denying them their rightful share of someythey had no right to. What makes the theory nonsense is that ‘structural whiteness’ is nothing more than linguistic wibble, that the theory relies on an almost childishly simplistic view of human identity, and as the article beautifully points out relies on a confusion between rights and privileges. If you listen to McIntosh speak what strikes you is the narcissism. She seems far more interested in the virtue gained from a self flagelating self loathing about her ‘whiteness’ than she is about challenging injustice. It’s a theory which can only… Read more »
“The coal miner who drags himself home every day, having worked himself one step closer to black lung, returning to a family for whom he has failed to provide, is understandably annoyed at being called privileged.” It is from that sense of entitlement that white privilege grows. Why would the coal miner think he is entitled to a job that provides for his family? It is only because of the access he has to that job by way of his privilege. Furthermore, the “forgotten” American, aka fat white middle America, has been hit hard by poverty and opioids because they were complicit in their own demise; for 200 years they pillaged resources, took land, trees, coal, minerals, oil, anything they could get their hands because they felt entitled to the benefits from it all. And they didn’t get it fair and square. They put arbitrary barriers in place so that… Read more »
Excellent article! Especially this section:
“The idea of white privilege seemed insulting and inaccurate to many white people in communities hit very hard by poverty, obesity, the opioid epidemic and a thousand other horrors. The coal miner who drags himself home every day, having worked himself one step closer to black lung, returning to a family for whom he has failed to provide, is understandably annoyed at being called privileged.”