From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_privilege Male privilege is the system of advantages or rights that are available to men on the basis of their sex. A man's access to these benefits may vary depending on how closely they match their society's ideal masculine norm.
Academic studies of male privilege were a focus of feminist scholarship during the 1970s. These studies began by examining barriers to equity between the sexes. In later decades, researchers began to focus on the intersectionality and overlapping nature of privileges relating to sex, race, social class, sexual orientation, and other forms of social classification.
Overview
Special privileges and status are granted to males in patriarchal societies. These are societies defined by male supremacy, in which males hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege
and control of property. With systemic subordination of women, males
gain economic, political, social, educational, and practical advantages
that are more or less unavailable to women.
The long-standing and unquestioned nature of such patriarchal systems,
reinforced over generations, tends to make privilege invisible to
holders; it can lead males who benefit from such privilege to ascribe
their special status to their own individual merits and achievements,
rather than to unearned advantages.
In the field of sociology,
male privilege is seen as embedded in the structure of social
institutions, as when men are often assigned authority over women in the
workforce, and benefit from women's traditional caretaking role. Privileges can be classified as either positive or negative, depending on how they affect the rest of society. Women's studies scholar Peggy McIntosh writes:
We
might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages that
we can work to spread, to the point where they are not advantages at
all but simply part of the normal civic and social fabric, and negative
types of advantage that unless rejected will always reinforce our
present hierarchies.
Some negative advantages accompanying male privilege include such
things as the expectation that a man will have a better chance than a
comparably qualified woman of being hired for a job, as well as being
paid more than a woman for the same job.
Scope
The term "male privilege" does not apply to a solitary occurrence of
the use of power, but rather describes one of many systemic power
structures that are interdependent and interlinked throughout societies
and cultures.
Privilege is not shared equally by all males. Those who most
closely match an ideal masculine norm benefit the most from privilege.
In Western patriarchal societies this ideal has been described as being
"white, heterosexual, stoic, wealthy, strong, tough, competitive, and
autonomous". Men's studies scholars refer to this ideal masculine norm as hegemonic masculinity.
While essentially all males benefit from privilege to some degree,
those who visibly differ from the norm may not benefit fully in certain
situations, especially in the company of other men that more closely
match it.
Men who have experienced bullying and domestic violence
in youth, in particular, may not accept the idea that they are
beneficiaries of privilege. Such forms of coercive violence are linked
to the idea of toxic masculinity, a specific model of manhood that creates hierarchies of dominance in which some are favored and others are harmed.
The invisibility of male privilege can be seen for instance in discussions of the gender pay gap in the United States;
the gap is usually referred to by stating women's earnings as a
percentage of men's. However, using women's pay as the baseline
highlights the dividend that males receive as greater earnings (32% in
2005). In commerce, male dominance in the ownership and control of financial capital and other forms of wealth has produced disproportionate male influence over the working classes
and the hiring and firing of employees. In addition, a disproportionate
burden is placed upon women in employment when they are expected to be
solely responsible for child care;
they may be more likely to be fired or be denied advancement in their
profession, thus putting them at an economic disadvantage relative to
men.
Scholarship
The earliest academic studies of privilege appeared with feminist scholars' work in the area of women's studies during the 1970s. Such scholarship began by examining barriers to equity between the sexes. In later decades, researchers began to focus on the intersectionality and overlapping nature of privileges relating to sex, race, social class, sexual orientation, and other forms of social classification.
Peggy McIntosh, one of the first feminist scholars to examine male privilege, wrote about both male privilege and white privilege,
using the metaphor of the "invisible knapsack" to describe a set of
advantages borne, often unaware and unacknowledged, by members of
privileged groups.
According to McIntosh, privilege is not a result of a concerted effort
to oppress those of the opposite gender; however, the inherent benefits
that men gain from the systemic bias put women at an innate
disadvantage. The benefits of this unspoken privilege may be described
as special provisions, tools, relationships, or various other
opportunities. According to McIntosh, this privilege may actually
negatively affect men's development as human beings, and few question
that the existing structure of advantages may be challenged or changed.
Efforts to examine the role of privilege in students' lives has
become a regular feature of university education in North America.
By drawing attention to the presence of privilege (including male,
white, and other forms) in the lives of students, educators have sought
to foster insights that can help students contribute to social justice. Such efforts include McIntosh's "invisible knapsack" model of privilege and the "Male Privilege Checklist".
Psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic proposes that incompetent
men are disproportionately promoted into leadership positions because
instead of testing rigorously for competence, employers are attracted to
confidence, charisma, and narcissism.
Cultural responses
Advocates for men's rights and father's rights as well as anti-feminist
men often accept that men's traditional roles are damaging to men but
deny that men as a group have institutional power and privilege, and
argue that men are now victims relative to women.
Some have taken active roles in challenging oppressive sexism and misogyny,
arguing that male privilege is deeply linked to the oppression of
women. They describe men's oppressive behaviors as cultural traits
learned within patriarchal social systems, rather than inborn biological
traits. Advocates within the broader men's movement oriented towards profeminism or anti-sexism argue that traditional gender roles
harm both men and women. "Liberal" profeminism tends to stress the ways
men suffer from these traditional roles, while more "radical"
profeminism tends to emphasize male privilege and sexual inequality. Some men may also be advocates of women's rights but deny that their privilege as a whole is a part of the issue at hand.
In both India and China, male offspring are often favored over female children.
Some manifestations of son preference and the devaluation of women are
eliminating unwanted daughters through neglect, maltreatment,
abandonment, as well as female infanticide and feticide despite laws that prohibit infanticide and sex-selective pregnancy termination.
In India some of these practices have contributed to skewed sex ratios
in favor of male children at birth and in the first five years.
Other examples of privileging male offspring are special "praying for a
son" ceremonies during pregnancy, more ceremony and festivities
following the birth of a boy, listing and introducing sons before
daughters, and common felicitations that associate good fortune and
well-being with the number of sons.
Reasons given for preferring sons to daughters include sons' role
in religious family rites, which daughters are not permitted to
perform, and the belief that sons are permanent members of the birth
family whereas daughters belong to their husband's family after marriage
in accordance with patrilocal tradition. Other reasons include patrilineal customs whereby only sons can carry on the family name, the obligation to pay dowry
to a daughter's husband or his family, and the expectation that sons
will support their birth parents financially while it is regarded as
undesirable or shameful to receive financial support from daughters.
White privilege, or white skin privilege, is the societal privilege that benefits white people over non-white people in some societies, particularly if they are otherwise under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. With roots in European colonialism and imperialism, and the Atlantic slave trade, white privilege has developed in circumstances that have broadly sought to protect white racial privileges, various national citizenships, and other rights or special benefits.
In the study of white privilege and its broader field of whiteness studies, both pioneered in the United States, academic perspectives such as critical race theory use the concept to analyze how racism and racialized societies affect the lives of white or white-skinned people. For example, American academic Peggy McIntosh
described the advantages that whites in Western societies enjoy and
non-whites do not experience as "an invisible package of unearned
assets".
White privilege denotes both obvious and less obvious passive
advantages that white people may not recognize they have, which
distinguishes it from overt bias or prejudice. These include cultural
affirmations of one's own worth; presumed greater social status; and freedom to move, buy, work, play, and speak freely.
The effects can be seen in professional, educational, and personal
contexts. The concept of white privilege also implies the right to
assume the universality of one's own experiences, marking others as
different or exceptional while perceiving oneself as normal.
Some scholars say that the term uses the concept of "whiteness" as a substitute for class or other social privilege or as a distraction from deeper underlying problems of inequality.
Others state that it is not that whiteness is a substitute but that
many other social privileges are interconnected with it, requiring
complex and careful analysis to identify how whiteness contributes to
privilege.
Other commentators propose alternative definitions of whiteness and
exceptions to or limits of white identity, arguing that the concept of
white privilege ignores important differences between white subpopulations and individuals and suggesting that the notion of whiteness cannot be inclusive of all white people. They note the problem of acknowledging the diversity of people of color and ethnicity within these groups.
Some commentators have observed that the "academic-sounding
concept of white privilege" sometimes elicits defensiveness and
misunderstanding among white people, in part due to how the concept of
white privilege was rapidly brought into the mainstream spotlight
through social media campaigns such as Black Lives Matter.
As an academic concept that was only recently brought into the
mainstream, the concept of white privilege is frequently misinterpreted
by non-academics; some academics, having studied white privilege
undisturbed for decades, have been surprised by the recent opposition
from right-wing critics since approximately 2014.
Definition
White privilege is a social phenomenon intertwined with race and racism.
The American Anthropological Association states that, "The 'racial'
worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status,
while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth."
Although the definition of "white privilege" has been somewhat fluid,
it is generally agreed to refer to the implicit or systemic advantages
that people who are deemed white have relative to people who are not
deemed white. Not having to experience suspicion and other adverse
reactions to one's race is also often termed a type of white privilege.
The term is used in discussions focused on the mostly hidden
benefits that white people possess in a society where racism is
prevalent and whiteness is considered normal, rather than on the
detriments to people who are the objects of racism.
As such, most definitions and discussions of the concept use as a
starting point McIntosh's metaphor of the "invisible backpack" that
white people unconsciously "wear" in a society where racism is
prevalent.
European colonialism, involving some of the earliest significant contacts of Europeans with indigenous peoples, was crucial in the foundation and development of white privilege. Academics, such as Charles V. Hamilton, have explored how European colonialism and slavery in the early modern period, including the transatlantic slave trade and Europe's colonization of the Americas, began a centuries-long progression of white privilege and non-white subjugation. Sociologist Bob Blauner
has proposed that this era of European colonialism and slavery was the
height, or most extreme version, of white privilege in recorded history.
In British abolitionist and MP James Stephen's 1824 The Slavery of the British West Indies, while examining the racist colonial laws denying African slaves the ability to give evidence in West Indian
jury trials; Stephen makes a clarifying distinction between masters,
slaves, and "free persons not possessing the privilege of a white skin".
In historian William Miller Macmillan's 1929 The Frontier and the Kaffir Wars, 1792–1836, he describes the motivations of Afrikaner settlers to embark upon the Great Trek as an attempt to preserve their racial privilege over indigenous Khoisan
people; "It was primarily land hunger and a determination to uphold
white privilege that drove the Trekkers out of the colony in their
hundreds". Cape Colony was administered by the British Empire.
Their increasingly anti-slavery policies were seen as a threat by the
Dutch-speaking settlers, who were afraid of losing their African and
Asian slaves and their superior status as people of European descent. In 1932, Zaire Church News, a missionary publication in the Zaire area, confronted white privilege's impact from the European colonization of central and southern Africa, and its effects on black people's progress in the region:
In these respects the ambitions of profit-seeking Europeans, individually and especially corporately, may become prejudicial to the educational advance of the Congo people, just as white privilege and ambition have militated against Bantu progress on more than one occasion in South Africa.
Scholar João Ferreira Duarte, in his jointedly written Europe in Black and White,
has examined colonialism in relation to white privilege, suggesting its
legacy continues "to imprint the privilege of whiteness onto the new
map of Europe", but also "sustain the political fortification of Europe
as a hegemonic white space".
Early 20th-century
A nicer water fountain for whites next to one for colored people in North Carolina (exhibited in Levine Museum of the New South).
What infinite cruelties and injustices have been
practiced by men who believed that to have a white skin constituted
special privilege and who reckoned along with the divine rights of kings
the divine rights of the white! We are all glad to take up the white man's burden if that burden carries with it the privilege of asserting the white man's superiority, of exploiting the man of lesser breed, and making him know and keep his place.
In his 1935 Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois
introduced the concept of a "psychological wage" for white laborers. He
wrote that this special status divided the labor movement by leading
low-wage white workers to feel superior to low-wage black workers. Du Bois identified white supremacy as a global phenomenon affecting the social conditions across the world through colonialism. For instance, Du Bois wrote:
It must be remembered that the white group of laborers,
while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of
public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and
titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely
with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and
the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the
courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to
encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while
this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect
upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White
schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed,
and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the
colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the
poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and
ridicule.
In a 1942 edition of Modern Review magazine, Ramananda Chatterjee accused Winston Churchill of hypocritical policy positions, in his support, as Chatterjee viewed it, of racial equality in the UK and US but not in British India;
"Mr Churchill can support white privilege and monopoly in India whilst
opposing privilege and monopoly on both sides of the Atlantic." In 1943, during World War II, sociologist Alfred McClung Lee's Race Riot, Detroit 1943 addressed the "Nazi-like guarantee of white privilege" in American society:
White Americans might well ask themselves: Why do whites need so many special advantages in their competition with Negroes? Similar tactics for the elimination of Jewish competition in Nazi Germany brought the shocked condemnation of the civilized world.
In the United States, inspired by the civil rights movement, Theodore W. Allen
began a 40-year analysis of "white skin privilege", "white race"
privilege, and "white" privilege in a call he drafted for a "John Brown
Commemoration Committee" that urged "White Americans who want government
of the people" and "by the people" to "begin by first repudiating their
white skin privileges". The pamphlet "White Blindspot", containing one essay by Allen and one by historian Noel Ignatiev, was published in the late 1960s. It focused on the struggle against "white skin privilege" and significantly influenced the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and sectors of the New Left. By June 15, 1969, The New York Times
reported that the National Office of Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) was calling "for an all-out fight against 'white skin
privileges'". From 1974 to 1975, Allen extended his analysis to the colonial period, leading to the publication of "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race" (1975), which ultimately grew into his two-volume The Invention of the White Race in 1994 and 1997.
In his work, Allen maintained several points: that the "white race" was invented as a ruling class social control
formation in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century
Anglo-American plantation colonies (principally Virginia and Maryland);
that central to this process was the ruling-class plantation bourgeoisie
conferring "white race" privileges on European-American working people;
that these privileges were not only against the interests of
African-Americans, they were also "poison", "ruinous", a baited hook, to
the class interests of working people; that white supremacy, reinforced
by the "white skin privilege", has been the main retardant of
working-class consciousness in the US; and that struggle for radical
social change should direct principal efforts at challenging white
supremacy and "white skin privileges".
Though Allen's work influenced Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
and sectors of the "new left" and paved the way for "white privilege"
and "race as social construct" study, and though he appreciated much of
the work that followed, he also raised important questions about
developments in those areas.
The modern understanding of 'white privilege' developed in the late 1980s, with Peggy McIntosh being considered one of the earliest exponents of the idea.
The concept of white privilege also came to be used within radical circles for self-criticism by anti-racist whites. For instance, a 1975 article in Lesbian Tide criticized the American feminist movement for exhibiting "class privilege" and "white privilege". Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn, in a 1977 Lesbian Tide
article, wrote: "... by assuming that I was beyond white privilege or
allying with male privilege because I understood it, I prepared and led
the way for a totally opportunist direction which infected all of our
work and betrayed revolutionary principles."
In the late 1980s, the term gained new popularity in academic circles and public discourse after Peggy McIntosh's 1987 foundational work "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack". In this critique McIntosh made observations about conditions of advantage and dominance in the US.
She described white privilege as "an invisible weightless knapsack of
assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes,
compass, emergency gear, and blank checks", and also discussed the
relationships between different social hierarchies in which experiencing
oppression in one hierarchy did not negate unearned privilege
experienced in another. In later years, the theory of intersectionality also gained prominence, with black feminists like Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
arguing that black women experienced a different type of oppression
from male privilege distinct from that experienced by white women
because of white privilege. McIntosh's essay is still routinely cited as a key influence by later generations of academics and journalists.
In 2003, Ella Bell and Stella Nkomo noted that "most scholars of
race relations embrace the use of [the concept] white privilege". The same year, sociologists in the American Mosaic Project at the University of Minnesota
reported that in the United States there was a widespread belief that
"prejudice and discrimination [in favor of whites] create a form of
white privilege." According to their poll, this view was affirmed by 59%
of white respondents, 83% of Blacks, and 84% of Hispanics.
21st-century popular culture
The concept of White privilege marked its transition from academia to more mainstream prominence through social media in the early 2010s, especially in 2014, a year in which Black Lives Matter formed into a major movement and the word "hashtag" itself was added to Merriam-Webster.
Brandt and Kizer, in their article "From Street to Tweet" (2015),
discuss the American public's perception of the concept of privilege in
mainstream culture, including white privilege, as being influenced by
social media.
Hua Hsu, a Vassar College professor of English, opens his New Yorker review of the 2015 MTV film White People by suggesting that white people have become aware of their privilege. Hsu ascribes this to generational change, which he considers a byproduct of the "Obama era".
The documentary White People, produced by Jose Antonio Vargas,
follows a variety of white teenagers who express their thoughts and
feelings about white privilege on-camera. Vargas interviews a white
community college student, Katy, who attributes her inability to land a
college scholarship to reverse racism against white people; then Vargas points out that white students are "40 percent more likely to receive merit-based funding".
According to Fredrik deBoer,
it is a popular trend for white people to willingly claim
self-acknowledgement of their white privilege online. deBoer criticized
this practice as promoting self-regard and not solving any actual
inequalities.
Michael J. Monahana argues that the rhetoric of privilege "obscures as
much as it illuminates" and that we "would be better served by beginning
with a more sophisticated understanding of racist oppression as
systemic, and of individual agents as constitutively implicated in that
system."
A 2022 study found that mentioning white privilege results in
online discussions that are "less constructive, more polarized, and less
supportive of racially progressive policies."
The concept of white privilege has been studied by theorists of whiteness studies
seeking to examine the construction and moral implications of
'whiteness'. There is often overlap between critical whiteness and race
theories, as demonstrated by focus on the legal and historical
construction of white identity, and the use of narratives — whether
legal discourse, testimony or fiction — as a tool for exposing systems
of racial power.
Fields such as history and cultural studies are primarily responsible
for the formative scholarship of critical whiteness studies.
Critical race theorists such as Cheryl Harris and George Lipsitz have said that "whiteness" has historically been treated more as a form of property
than as a racial characteristic: in other words, as an object which has
intrinsic value that must be protected by social and legal
institutions. Laws and mores concerning race — from apartheid and Jim Crow
constructions that legally separate different races to social
prejudices against interracial relationships or mixed communities —
serve the purpose of retaining certain advantages and privileges for
whites. Because of this, academic and societal ideas about race have
tended to focus solely on the disadvantages suffered by racial minorities, overlooking the advantageous effects that accrue to whites.
Eric Arnesen,
an American labor historian, reviewed papers from a whiteness studies
perspective published in his field in the 1990s, and found that the
concept of whiteness was used so broadly during that time period that it
was not useful.
Whiteness unspoken
From another perspective, white privilege is a way of conceptualizing
racial inequalities that focuses on advantages that white people accrue
from their position in society as well as the disadvantages that
non-white people experience. This same idea is brought to light by Peggy McIntosh,
who wrote about white privilege from the perspective of a white
individual. McIntosh states in her writing that, "as a white person, I
realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others
at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary
aspects, white privilege which puts me at an advantage".
To back this assertion, McIntosh notes a myriad of conditions in her
article in which racial inequalities occur to favor whites, from renting
or buying a home in a given area without suspicion of one's financial
standing, to purchasing bandages in "flesh" color that closely matches a
white person's skin tone. According to McIntosh:
"[I see] a pattern running through the matrix of white
privilege, a pattern of assumptions which were passed on to me as a
white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own
turf, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color
was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think
of myself as belonging in major ways, and of making social systems work
for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to
anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main
culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.
Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek argued that one reason
whiteness remains unstated is that whiteness functions as the presumed
and invisible center of communication; it is only by making this center
visible that the effects of white privilege can be examined.
Unjust enrichment
Lawrence Blum
refers to advantages for white people as "unjust enrichment"
privileges, in which white people benefit from the injustices done to
people of color, and he articulates that such privileges are deeply
rooted in the U.S. culture and lifestyle:
When Blacks are denied access to desirable homes, for
example, this is not just an injustice to Blacks but a positive benefit
to Whites who now have a wider range of domicile options than they would
have if Blacks had equal access to housing. When urban schools do a
poor job of educating their Latino/a and Black students, this benefits
Whites in the sense that it unjustly advantages them in the competition
for higher levels of education and jobs. Whites in general cannot avoid
benefiting from the historical legacy of racial discrimination and
oppression. So unjust enrichment is almost never absent from the life
situation of Whites.
Spared injustice
A
protester holds a sign reading "They don't shoot white women like me"
at a Black Lives Matter protest in the wake of the non-indictment of a
New York City police officer for the death of Eric Garner
In Blum's analysis of the underlying structure of white privilege,
"spared injustice" is when a person of color suffers an unjust treatment
while a white person does not. His example of this is when "a Black
person is stopped by the police without due cause but a White person is
not".
He identifies "unjust enrichment" privileges as those for which whites
are spared the injustice of a situation, and in turn, are benefiting
from the injustice of others. For instance, "if police are too focused
on looking for Black lawbreakers, they might be less vigilant toward
White ones, conferring an unjust enrichment benefit on Whites who do
break the laws but escape detection for this reason."
Privileges not related to injustice
Blum describes "non-injustice-related" privileges as those which are
not associated with injustices experienced by people of color, but
relate to a majority group's advantages over a minority group. Those who
are in the majority, usually white people, gain "unearned privileges
not founded on injustice."
According to Blum, in workplace cultures there tends to be a partly
ethnocultural character, so that some ethnic or racial groups' members
find them more comfortable than do others.
Framing racial inequality
Dan J. Pence and J. Arthur Fields have observed resistance in the
context of education to the idea that white privilege of this type
exists, and suggest this resistance stems from a tendency to see
inequality as a black or Latino
issue. One report noted that white students often react to in-class
discussions about white privilege with a continuum of behaviors ranging
from outright hostility to a "wall of silence". A pair of studies on a broader population by Branscombe et al.
found that framing racial issues in terms of white privilege as opposed
to non-white disadvantages can produce a greater degree of racially
biased responses from whites who have higher levels of racial
identification. Branscombe et al. demonstrate that framing racial inequality in terms of the privileges of whites increased levels of white guilt among white respondents. Those with high racial identification were more likely to give responses which concurred with modern racist attitudes than those with low racial identification. According to the studies' authors, these findings suggest that representing inequality in terms of outgroup disadvantage allows privileged group members to avoid the negative implications of inequality.
A 2019 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology
had socially liberal people read about white privilege, and then read
about a poor person who was either black or white. They found that
reading about white privilege did not increase empathy for either, and
decreased it if the person was white. One of the study's authors said
that this demonstrates the importance of nuance, and recognizing
individual differences, when teaching about white privilege.
White privilege pedagogy
White privilege pedagogy has been influential in multicultural
education, teacher training, ethnic and gender studies, sociology,
psychology, political science, American studies, and social work
education.
Several scholars have raised questions about the focus on white privilege in efforts to combat racism in educational settings. Lawrence Blum
says that the approach suffers from a failure to distinguish between
factors such as "spared injustice" and "unjust enrichment".
Robin DiAngelo coined the term "white fragility" in the early 2010s, later releasing her 2018 book White Fragility. She has said that "white privilege can be thought of as unstable racial equilibrium",
and that when this equilibrium is challenged, the resulting racial
stress can become intolerable and trigger a range of defensive
responses. DiAngelo defines these behaviors as white fragility. For
example, DiAngelo observed in her studies that some white people, when
confronted with racial issues concerning white privilege, may respond
with dismissal, distress, or other defensive responses because they may
feel personally implicated in white supremacy. New York Times reporter Amy Harmon has referred to white fragility as "the trademark inability of white Americans to meaningfully own their unearned privilege".
DiAngelo also writes that white privilege is very rarely
discussed and that even multicultural education courses tend to use
vocabulary that further obfuscates racial privilege and defines race as
something that only concerns blacks. She suggests using loaded
terminology with negative connotations to people of color adds to the
cycle of white privilege.
It is far more the norm for these courses and programs to
use racially coded language such as 'urban,' 'inner city,' and
'disadvantaged' but to rarely use 'white' or 'overadvantaged' or
'privileged.' This racially coded language reproduces racist images and
perspectives while it simultaneously reproduces the comfortable illusion
that race and its problems are what 'they' have, not us.
She does say, however, that defensiveness and discomfort from white
people in response to being confronted with racial issues is not
irrational but rather is often driven by subconscious, sometimes even
well-meaning, attitudes toward racism. In a book review, Washington Post
critic Carlos Lozada said that the book presents self-fulfilling and
oversimplified arguments, and "flattens people of any ancestry into
two-dimensional beings fitting predetermined narratives".
White backlash, the negative reaction of some white people
to the advancement of non-whites, has been described as a possible
response to the societal examination of white privilege, or to the
perceived actual or hypothetical loss of that racial privilege.
A 2015 Valparaiso University journal article by DePaul University
professor Terry Smith titled "White Backlash in a Brown Country"
suggests that backlash results from threats to white privilege: "White
backlash—the adverse reaction of whites to the progress of members of a
non-dominant group—is symptomatic of a condition created by the gestalt
of white privilege". Drawing on political scientist Danielle Allen's
analysis that demographic shifts "provoke resistance from those whose
well-being, status and self-esteem are connected to historical
privileges of 'whiteness'", Smith explored the interconnectivity of the concepts:
The hallmark of addiction is "protection of one's
source." The same is true of backlash. The linear model of equality
drastically underestimates the lengths to which people accustomed to
certain privileges will go to protect them. It assigns to white Americans a preternatural ability to adapt to change and see their fellow citizens of color as equal.
In Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America, philosopher George Yancy expands on the concept of white backlash as an extreme response to loss of privilege, suggesting that DiAngelo's white fragility is a subtle form of defensiveness in comparison to the visceral racism and threats of violence that Yancy has examined.
Global perspectives
White privilege functions differently in different places. A person's
white skin will not be an asset to them in every conceivable place or
situation. White people are also a global minority, and this fact
affects the experiences they have outside of their home areas.
Nevertheless, some people who use the term "white privilege" describe it
as a worldwide phenomenon, resulting from the history of colonialism by
white Western Europeans. One author states that American white men are
privileged almost everywhere in the world, even though many countries
have never been colonized by Western Europeans.
The apartheid system
in Namibia created the legal environment for establishing and
maintaining white privilege. The segregation of peoples both preserved
racial privileges and hindered unitary nation building. In the period of years during the negotiation of Namibian independence, the country's administration, which was dominated by white Namibians, held control of power. In a 1981 NYT analysis, Joseph Lelyveld reported how measures which would challenge white privilege in the country were disregarded, and how politicians, such as Dirk Mudge, ignoring the policy of racial privilege, faced electoral threats from the black majority. In 1988, two years before the country's independence, Frene Ginwala suggested that there was a general refusal to acknowledge the oppression of black women in the country, by the white women who, according to Ginwala, had enjoyed the white privilege of apartheid.
Registration certificate identifies a person as white
White privilege was legally enshrined in South Africa through apartheid.
Apartheid was institutionalized in 1948 and lasted formally into the
early 1990s. Under apartheid, racial privilege was not only socially
meaningful—it became bureaucratically regulated. Laws such as the 1950 Population Registration Act established criteria to officially classify South Africans by race: White, Indian, Colored (mixed), or Black.
Many scholars say that 'whiteness' still corresponds to a set of
social advantages in South Africa, and conventionally refer to these
advantages as "white privilege". The system of white privilege applies
both to the way a person is treated by others and to a set of behaviors,
affects, and thoughts, which can be learned and reinforced. These
elements of "whiteness" establish social status and guarantee advantages
for some people, without directly relying on skin color or other
aspects of a person's appearance.
White privilege in South Africa has small-scale effects, such as
preferential treatment for people who appear white in public, and
large-scale effects, such as the over five-fold difference in average
per-capita income for people identified as white or black.
"Afrikaner whiteness" has also been described as a partially subordinate identity, relative to the British Empire and Boerehaat (a type of prejudice towards Afrikaners), "disgraced" further by the end of apartheid. Some fear that white South Africans suffer from "reverse racism" at the hands of the country's newly empowered majority, "Unfair" racial discrimination is prohibited by Section Nine of the Constitution of South Africa,
and this section also allows for laws to be made to address "unfair
discrimination". "Fair discrimination" is tolerated by subsection 5.
Asia
Japan
Academic Scott Kiesling's co-edited The Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Communication suggested that white English speakers are privileged in their ability to gain employment teaching English at Eikaiwa schools in Japan, regardless of Japanese language skills or professional qualifications.
According to Japanese sociologist Itsuko Kamoro, White men
represent the "apex" of romantic desirability to young Japanese women.
Many authors have described a widespread fetishization of White men by
Japanese women, and cultural factors within Japan give white males a
kind of 'gendered white privilege' that enables them to easily find a
romantic partner.
According to other authors, many Japanese women are even willing to
consider a white man who earns less money than them for marriage, which
reflects the hegemonic masculinity of white men in Japan.
The same desirability is not given to white women within Japan, who are
stereotyped as "mannish" or "loud", and therefore undesirable by
Japanese men.
South Korea
White privilege has been analyzed in South Korea, and has been discussed as pervasive in Korean society. White residents, and tourists to the country, have been observed to be given special treatment, and, in particular, white Americans have been, at times, culturally venerated.
Professor Helene K. Lee has noted that possessing mixed white and Korean heritage, or, specifically, its physical appearance, can afford a biracial individual white privilege in the country. In 2009, writer Jane Jeong Trenka
wrote that, as an adoptee to a white family from the United States, it
was easier for her to recognize its function in Korean culture.
The culture of US military camptowns in South Korea (a remnant of the Korean War) have been studied as a setting for white privilege, and an exacerbation of racial divides between white American and African American soldiers located on bases, as well as with local Korean people.
In 2019, the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences suspended a man from attending their annual meeting for three years for racially profiling a black Canadian
scholar. The federation stated that it required the offender to
demonstrate that he had taken measures to increase his awareness of
white privilege before he would be allowed to attend any future
congress.
Some scholars attribute white privilege, which they describe as informal racism, to the formal racism (i.e. slavery followed by Jim Crow) that existed for much of American history. In her book Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America,
Stephanie M. Wildman writes that many Americans who advocate a
merit-based, race-free worldview do not acknowledge the systems of
privilege which have benefited them. For example, many Americans rely on
a social or financial inheritance from previous generations, an
inheritance unlikely to be forthcoming if one's ancestors were slaves.
Whites were sometimes afforded opportunities and benefits that were
unavailable to others. In the middle of the 20th century, the government
subsidized white homeownership through the Federal Housing Administration, but not homeownership by minorities. Some social scientists also suggest that the historical processes of suburbanization and decentralization are instances of white privilege that have contributed to contemporary patterns of environmental racism.
Wealth
According to Roderick Harrison "wealth is a measure of cumulative advantage
or disadvantage" and "the fact that black and Hispanic wealth is a
fraction of white wealth also reflects a history of discrimination". Whites have historically had more opportunities to accumulate wealth. Some of the institutions of wealth creation amongst American citizens were open exclusively to whites. Similar differentials applied to the Social Security Act (which excluded agricultural and domestic workers, sectors that then included most black workers), rewards to military officers, and the educational benefits offered to returning soldiers after World War II. An analyst of the phenomenon, Thomas Shapiro, professor of law and social policy at Brandeis University, says, "The wealth gap is not just a story of merit and achievement, it's also a story of the historical legacy of race in the United States."
Over the past 40 years, there has been less formal discrimination in America; the inequality in wealth between racial groups however, is still extant.
George Lipsitz asserts that because wealthy whites were able to pass
along their wealth in the form of inheritances and transformative assets
(inherited wealth which lifts a family beyond their own achievements),
white Americans on average continually accrue advantages.
Pre-existing disparities in wealth are exacerbated by tax policies that
reward investment over waged income, subsidize mortgages, and subsidize
private sector developers.
Thomas Shapiro wrote that wealth is passed along from generation
to generation, giving whites a better "starting point" in life than
other races. According to Shapiro, many whites receive financial
assistance from their parents allowing them to live beyond their income.
This, in turn, enables them to buy houses and major assets which aid in
the accumulation of wealth. Since houses in white neighborhoods
appreciate faster, even African Americans who are able to overcome their
"starting point" are unlikely to accumulate wealth as fast as whites.
Shapiro asserts this is a continual cycle from which whites consistently
benefit. These benefits also have effects on schooling and other life opportunities.
Median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers, by sex, race, and ethnicity, U.S., 2009.
Racialized employment networks can benefit whites at the expense of non-white minorities.
Asian-Americans, for example, although lauded as a "model minority",
rarely rise to positions high in the workplace: only 8 of the Fortune
500 companies have Asian-American CEOs, making up 1.6% of CEO positions
while Asian-Americans are 4.8% of the population.
In a study published in 2003, sociologist Deirdre A. Royster compared
black and white males who graduated from the same school with the same
skills. In looking at their success with school-to-work transition
and working experiences, she found that white graduates were more often
employed in skilled trades, earned more, held higher status positions,
received more promotions and experienced shorter periods of
unemployment. Since all other factors were similar, the differences in
employment experiences were attributed to race. Royster concluded that
the primary cause of these racial differences was due to social networking. The concept of "who you know" seemed just as important to these graduates as "what you know".
According to the distinctiveness theory, posited by University of Kentucky
professor Ajay Mehra and colleagues, people identify with other people
who share similar characteristics which are otherwise rare in their
environment; women identify more with women, whites with other whites.
Because of this, Mehra finds that white males tend to be highly central
in their social networks due to their numbers.
Royster says that this assistance, disproportionately available to
whites, is an advantage that often puts black men at a disadvantage in
the employment sector. According to Royster, "these ideologies provide a
contemporary deathblow to working-class black men's chances of
establishing a foothold in the traditional trades."
Other research shows that there is a correlation between a
person's name and their likelihood of receiving a call back for a job
interview. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan
found in field experiment in Boston and Chicago that people with
"white-sounding" names are 50% more likely to receive a call back than
people with "black-sounding" names, despite equal résumé quality between
the two racial groups.
White Americans are more likely than black Americans to have their
business loan applications approved, even when other factors such as
credit records are comparable.
Black and Latino college graduates are less likely than white
graduates to end up in a management position even when other factors
such as age, experience, and academic records are similar.
Cheryl Harris relates whiteness to the idea of "racialized
privilege" in the article "Whiteness as Property": she describes it as
"a type of status in which white racial identity provided the basis for
allocating societal benefits both private and public and character".
Daniel A. Farber
and Suzanne Sherry argue that the proportion of Jews and Asians who are
successful relative to the white male population poses an intractable
puzzle for proponents of what they call "radical multiculturism", who
they say overemphasize the role of sex and race in American society.
Discrimination in housing policies was formalized in 1934 under the Federal Housing Act which provided government credit to private lending for home buyers.
Within the Act, the Federal Housing Agency had the authority to channel
all the money to white home buyers instead of minorities.The FHA also channeled money away from inner-city neighborhoods after
World War II and instead placed it in the hands of white home buyers who
would move into segregated suburbs. These, and other, practices intensified attitudes of segregation and inequality.
The "single greatest source of wealth" for white Americans is the
growth in value in their owner-occupied homes. The family wealth so
generated is the most important contribution to wealth disparity between
black and white Americans.
It has been said that continuing discrimination in the mortgage
industry perpetuates this inequality, not only for black homeowners who
pay higher mortgage rates than their white counterparts, but also for
those excluded entirely from the housing market by these factors, who
are thus excluded from the financial benefits of both capital
appreciation and the tax deductions associated with home ownership.
Brown, Carnoey and Oppenheimer, in "Whitewashing Race: The Myth
of a Color-Blind Society", write that the financial inequities created
by discriminatory housing practices also have an ongoing effect on young
black families, since the net worth of one's parents is the best
predictor of one's own net worth, so discriminatory financial policies
of the past contribute to race-correlated financial inequities of today.
For instance, it is said that even when income is controlled for,
whites have significantly more wealth than blacks, and that this present
fact is partially attributable to past federal financial policies that
favored whites over blacks.
According to Stephanie Wildman and Ruth Olson, education policies in
the US have contributed to the construction and reinforcement of white
privilege.
Wildman says that even schools that appear to be integrated often
segregate students based on abilities. This can increase white students'
initial educational advantage, magnifying the "unequal classroom
experience of African American students" and minorities.
Williams and Rivers (1972b) showed that test instructions in
Standard English disadvantaged the black child and that if the language
of the test is put in familiar labels without training or coaching, the
child's performances on the tests increase significantly.
According to Cadzen a child's language development should be evaluated
in terms of his progress toward the norms for his particular speech
community.
Other studies using sentence repetition tasks found that, at both third
and fifth grades, white subjects repeated Standard English sentences
significantly more accurately than black subjects, while black subjects
repeated nonstandard English sentences significantly more accurately
than white subjects.
According to Janet E. Helms
traditional psychological and academic assessment is based on skills
that are considered important within white, western, middle-class
culture, but which may not be salient or valued within African-American
culture. When tests' stimuli are more culturally pertinent to the experiences of African Americans, performance improves. Critics of the concept of white privilege say that in K–12 education, students' academic progress is measured on nationwide standardized tests which reflect national standards.
African Americans are disproportionately sent to special education
classes in their schools, and identified as being disruptive or
suffering from a learning disability. These students are segregated for
the majority of the school day, taught by uncertified teachers, and do
not receive high school diplomas. Wanda Blanchett has said that white
students have consistently privileged interactions with the special
education system, which provides 'non-normal' whites with the resources
they need to benefit from the mainline white educational structure.
Educational inequality is also a consequence of housing. Since most states determine school funding based on property taxes, schools in wealthier neighborhoods receive more funding per student. As home values in white neighborhoods are higher than minority neighborhoods,
local schools receive more funding via property taxes. This will ensure
better technology in predominantly white schools, smaller class sizes
and better quality teachers, giving white students opportunities for a
better education.
The vast majority of schools placed on academic probation as part of
district accountability efforts are majority African-American and
low-income.
Inequalities in wealth
and housing allow a higher proportion of white parents the option to
move to better school districts or afford to put their children in
private schools if they do not approve of the neighborhood's schools.
Some studies have claimed that minority students are less likely
to be placed in honors classes, even when justified by test scores.
Various studies have also claimed that visible minority students are
more likely than white students to be suspended or expelled from school,
even though rates of serious school rule violations do not differ
significantly by race. Adult education specialist Elaine Manglitz says the educational system
in America has deeply entrenched biases in favor of the white majority
in evaluation, curricula, and power relations.
In discussing unequal test scores between public school students,
opinion columnist Matt Rosenberg laments the Seattle Public Schools'
emphasis on "institutional racism" and "white privilege":
The disparity is not simply a matter of color: School
District data indicate income, English-language proficiency and home
stability are also important correlates to achievement ... By promoting
the "white privilege" canard and by designing a student indoctrination
plan, the Seattle School District is putting retrograde, leftist
politics ahead of academics, while the perpetrators of "white privilege"
are minimizing the capabilities of minorities.
Conservative author Shelby Steele
believes that the effects of white privilege are exaggerated, saying
that blacks may incorrectly blame their personal failures on white
oppression, and that there are many "minority privileges": "If I'm a
black high school student today ... there are white American
institutions, universities, hovering over me to offer me opportunities:
Almost every institution has a diversity committee ... There is a hunger in this society to do right racially, to not be racist."
Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl show that whites have a
better opportunity at getting into selective schools, while African
Americans and Hispanics usually end up going to open access schools and
have a lower chance of receiving a bachelor's degree. In 2019, a National Bureau of Economic Research study found white privilege bias in Harvard University's application process for legacy admission.
Military
In a 2013 news story, Fox News reported, "A controversial 600-plus page manual used by the military to train its Equal Opportunity
officers teaches that 'healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian' men
hold an unfair advantage over other races, and warns in great detail
about a so-called 'White Male Club.' ... The manual, which was obtained
by Fox News, also instructs troops to 'support the leadership of
non-white people. Do this consistently, but not uncritically,' the
manual states." The manual was prepared by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, which is an official unit of the Department of Defense under the control of the Secretary of Defense.
Holly Randell-Moon has said that news media are geared towards
white people and their interests and that this is an example of white
privilege.
Michele Lobo claims that white neighborhoods are normally identified as
"good quality", while "ethnic" neighborhoods may become stigmatized,
degraded, and neglected.
Some scholars claim white people are seen presumptively as "Australian", and as prototypical citizens.
Catherine Koerner has claimed that a major part of white Australian
privilege is the ability to be in Australia itself, and that this is
reinforced by, discourses on non-white outsiders including asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants.
Some scholars have suggested that public displays of multiculturalism, such as the celebration of artwork and stories of Indigenous Australians, amount to tokenism, since indigenous Australians voices are largely excluded from the cultural discourse surrounding the history of colonialism and the narrative of European colonizers as peaceful settlers. These scholars
suggest that white privilege in Australia, like white privilege
elsewhere, involves the ability to define the limits of what can be
included in a "multicultural" society. Indigenous studies in Australian universities remains largely
controlled by white people, hires many white professors, and does not
always embrace political changes that benefit indigenous people. Scholars also say that prevailing modes of Western epistemology and pedagogy, associated with the dominant white culture, are treated as universal while Indigenous perspectives are excluded or treated only as objects of study. One Australian university professor reports that white students may perceive indigenous academics as beneficiaries of reverse racism.
Some scholars
have claimed that for Australian whites, another aspect of privilege is
the ability to identify with a global diaspora of other white people in
the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. This privilege contrasts with
the separation of Indigenous Australians from other indigenous peoples
in southeast Asia.
They also claim that global political issues such as climate change are
framed in terms of white actors and effects on countries that are
predominantly white.
White privilege varies across places and situations. Ray
Minniecon, director of Crossroads Aboriginal Ministries, described the
city of Sydney specifically as "the most alien and inhospitable place of all to Aboriginal culture and people".
At the other end of the spectrum, anti-racist white Australians working
with Indigenous people may experience their privilege as painful
"stigma".
Studies of white privilege in Australia have increased since the
late 1990s, with several books published on the history of how whiteness
became a dominant identity. Aileen Moreton-Robinson's Talkin' Up to the White Woman is a critique of unexamined white privilege in the Australian feminist movement.
The Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association formed
in 2005 to study racial privilege and promote respect for Indigenous
sovereignties; it publishes an online journal called Critical Race and Whiteness Studies.
In New Zealand, a localized relationship to the concept, frequently termed Pākehā privilege, due to the legacy of the colonizing European settlers, has developed.
Academic Huia Jahnke's book Mana Tangata: Politics of Empowerment explored how European New Zealanders, in rejecting the 'one people' national narrative and embracing the label Pākehā ("foreigner"), has allowed space to examine white privilege and the societal marginalization of Māori people. Similarly, Massey University
scholar Malcolm Mulholland argued that "studying inequalities between
Māori and non-Māori outcomes allows us to identify Pākehā privilege and
name it."
In their book Healing Our History, Robert and Joanna
Consedine argued that in the colonial era Pākehā privilege was enforced
in school classrooms by strict time periods, European symbols, and the
exclusion of te reo (the Māori language), disadvantaging Māori children and contributing to the suppression of Māori culture.
In 2016, on the 65th anniversary of Māori Women's Welfare League, the League's president criticized the "dominant Pakeha culture" in New Zealand, and embedded Pākehā privilege.
