"White Privilege" is BULLSHIT. Change my mind.

@melovemycats Ice cream please.

@JP1119 I don't owe anyone anything. Affirmative action is not just as I said before what is just is keeping the bar at the same level for everyone not raising it or lowering it based on what a person's skin color is. That's racist and unjust inherently. That's not giving someone what they actually deserve that's giving someone what we think they deserve based on what their skin tone is.

If I'm to take what you are saying seriously then blacks would also be privileged now to be living in America. Am I wrong? Because blacks today were never slaves themselves yet here they are benefitting from their ancestors.

@JohnTaylor Mmmm, not really. Because the US was built into a superpower at the expense of their ancestors, which led them to be born disadvantaged compared to white Americans whose ancestors at least benefited from the exploitation of the blacks' ancestors. Basically, blacks footed the bill for America's superpower status, and they're still paying for it. Affirmative action is a (probably pretty small) part of what's ameliorating the debt they are owed.

@JP1119 Agreed to disagree.

@Abstraction You are right my mind probably won't be changed. If you'd like to have a debate I'd be more than happy.

@JohnTaylor I did debate. I put up facts to show that white privilege is entrenched in American society - whatever your opinion (which is affected by confirmation bias - the tendency to only see what confirms what you already believe.) For example Education: If you are not white, you have less chance of access to good education, good teachers, good schools that deliver results. Employment: whites with the EXACT same resumes as blacks are employed at DOUBLE the rate. (So your opinion that this doesn't happen is worthless and meaningless - these statistics are based on controlled studies by universities or research centres.) This is true at every level of education. Blacks with the same jobs as whites have lower income. etc.
White privilege is firstly, therefore, a head start.

Interestingly so is the 'blame the poor' mentality entrenched in the US. If the poor are poor, apparently it's their fault (- as a Christian I find that mentality disgusting, not at all how Jesus talked about or responded to the poor.) The American dream is social mobility - the ability to be born poor and make it rich. Did you know that now, in the western world, US has very LOW social mobility. If you are born poor, you have very little chance of making it. It's much, much easier in countries like New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Canada, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden (not UK though...)

@Batman Nope. Cause for as much as these people complain about racism, they're pretty racist themselves. I'm sick of it.

Agreed. You can’t complain about how bad you were treated and turn and say it’s cause you’re white!

@JohnTaylor Amen to that.

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@ImperialAerosolKidFromEP what is white privilege as defined by you?

@JohnTaylor the one-liner definition is a no-brainer; you don't need me for that. But the many more subtle questions are much trickier. Is it deserved? How does justice enter into it? Is such a system mutually exclusive to a meritocracy? With what other systems is it mutually exclusive?
Those answers I don't have. And I guess I'm never gonna, since the forum by which we might get to the bottom of it is poisoned

@JP1119 Less blacks also graduate from high school. Explaining why they make less. No one is preventing blacks from graduating high school or telling them not to. It's just not happening. There's a lot of whites living in those same conditions and communities too. Are they anymore privileged than the blacks? No. The fact of the matter is that if you don't want to be permanently poor in America then all you have to do is A: Graduate from highschool B: Get a job and C: Don't have kids before you are married. No one is preventing black people from doing all those things. No one is forcing the single mother epidemic on the black community. No one is making the black community commit a disproportionate amount of crime. It's just not happening.

@JohnTaylor Because their parents were less able to help them with school, because they didn't get good educational opportunities, because Jim Crow and slavery.

I'm pretty sure I've read that it actually is common for high school counselors to have lower expectations for black students, which leads them to more commonly advise blacks to just enter the workforce instead of graduating, but admittedly I haven't taken the time to go back and find a source for that. Anyway, blacks are more likely to come from low-income families (which can be traced back to slavery), which results in them having more stress and lower nutrition, which negatively impacts their abilities to learn; furthermore, schools that mainly service low-income or minority communities have unequal access to funding and experienced teachers.

The problem is not, as you seem to imply, that black women are more likely to be sluts. In many cases the father would be in jail, unemployed, selling drugs, or abusive anyway. Even if the father is a model citizen, single black mothers are way more likely to be poor and uneducated, and being married wouldn't solve those problems. A recent research paper from McLanahan and Jencks says, "Unmarried parents are not that different from married parents in their behavior. Both groups value marriage, both spend a long time searching for a suitable marriage partner, and both engage in premarital sex and cohabitation. The key difference is that one group often has children while they are searching for a suitable partner, whereas the other group more often has children only after they marry." The way to fix those problems then is to provide reasons - educational and career opportunities - to delay motherhood.

And the disproportionate amount of crime is closely linked with the disproportionate amount of poverty, which can be traced back to slavery.

@JP1119 Ok but how long is Slavery and Jim Crow going to be used as an excuse? I'm not saying it isn't a legitimate one but how long is it going to last? How about some personal responsibility for ones choices and ones actions? Slavery and Jim Crow share some blame for the current problems faced by blacks today. However, a lot of what they face now is due to their own choices and their own decisions. No one now is preventing blacks from doing this. I know a lot of black people who HAVE refused to be victims and HAVE overcame their hardships. They have to take the initiative.