Counter arguments – Debunking White Privilege

Grabbing the article in full.  Charitably exploring the topic of privilege and specifically ‘white privilege’ is a contentious topic.  Here is one case against the idea that White Privilege is reasonable concept in our society.

From the Michael Dahlen Objective Standard –

“On his SiriusXM Radio show in 2019, David Webb spoke with civil rights attorney and CNN legal analyst Areva Martin. The following exchange occurred.

Webb: I’ve [worked] across different parts of the media world, done the work so that I’m qualified to be in each one. I never considered my color the issue. I considered my qualifications the issue.

Martin: Well, David, you know that’s a whole ’nother long conversation about white privilege of things that you have the privilege of doing that people of color don’t have the privilege of.

Webb: How do I have the privilege of white privilege?

Martin: David, by virtue of being a white male, you have white privilege. It’s a whole long conversation. I don’t have time . . .

Webb: Areva, I hate to break it to you, but you should’ve been better prepped. I’m black.¹

Martin obviously misused the phrase “white privilege.” But does her mistake reveal a deeper problem with the idea? What is white privilege?

Wellesley College professor Peggy McIntosh popularized the term in her 1989 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”² The influence of this essay is difficult to overstate. Many scholarly journals started using the term, as it gradually spread throughout academia, from psychology to sociology to anthropology. Education professors wrote articles on strategies for teaching the theory of white privilege to students.³ The annual White Privilege Conference started in 2000. By the early 2010s, the notion of “white privilege” had broken into the mainstream. Today, the term is nearly ubiquitous. It’s frequently used on social media and by conventional news outlets. Dr. Phil devoted an entire episode of his show to it. In many schools and in most public discussions of race, you can expect to hear about white privilege.

The theory of white privilege asserts that white people gain unfair, unearned, and undeserved benefits, advantages, and entitlements. According to McIntosh, “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.”⁴ Because these benefits are “invisible,” as McIntosh puts it, white people are unaware of them. In a lesson plan for middle and high-school students, the National Association of School Psychologists declares, “Privilege is not visible to its holder; it is merely there, a part of the world, a way of life, simply the way things are.”⁵

The invisibility of white privilege is allegedly what sustains it. As Andrew O’Hehir (Salon) writes, “the virus of white privilege survives by convincing its host organism that it does not exist.”⁶

McIntosh gives forty-six concrete examples of how she, a white woman, supposedly benefits from white privilege, including, “I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and minority activist programs, or disparage them”; “I can go into a book shop and count on finding the writing of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can deal with my hair”; “I can be reasonably sure that my neighbors . . . will be neutral or pleasant to me”; and “I can go shopping alone most of the time, fairly well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store detectives.”⁷

McIntosh’s forty-six examples fall into four categories: (1) White people can ignore minority concerns and perspectives. (2) White people are widely “represented” in art, media, history, and elsewhere. (3) Goods and services demanded by white people are widely available. (4) White people are not discriminated against on the basis of race.

But are these actually privileges? And how do they unfairly benefit white people? A privilege, keep in mind, is a favor or entitlement. It’s something positive, such as the “special provisions” and “blank checks” that McIntosh mentions.

Category #1 is not unique to white people. Any person, regardless of race, is free to ignore other people’s concerns and perspectives—this isn’t a privilege. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, for example, need not listen to white leftists who relentlessly smear him.

Regarding category #2, white people are the majority, so you would expect them to be widely “represented.” Calling this a privilege is silly. A white person derives no rational benefit from seeing a high percentage of “people who look like himself” on television. As for category #3, you would expect that goods and services demanded by the majority—in any grouping, not just race—will be widely available. That’s how markets work. This is better characterized as a causal, economic convenience than a privilege.

This brings us to the fourth category, which comprises nearly two-thirds of McIntosh’s examples. She and other “social justice” scholars say that privilege is about the unfair advantages some people have—but, in reality, it isn’t. Performing a rhetorical sleight of hand, they deceptively conflate advantages with a lack of disadvantages. “Unearned advantage,” she writes, “can also be described as exemption from discrimination.”⁸ In other words, white people benefit from the “privilege” of not being discriminated against. But is this really a privilege? A privilege, to repeat, is a favor or entitlement; it’s not the absence of a penalty. If someone gives me $1,000, that’s a favor or privilege; if someone refrains from stealing $1,000 from me, that’s not.

It makes as much sense to conclude that white people are privileged because they’re not victims of racism as it does to hold that a bystander at a robbery is privileged because the thief did not demand his wallet. Equating privilege with the absence of disadvantage leads to absurdity, for it means that everyone is privileged in countless ways. On this perverse conception, I’m “privileged” because I haven’t been assaulted, poisoned, or murdered.

Despite this, McIntosh advises, “Do not get trapped in definitions of privilege and power. They lack nuances and flexibility.”⁹ In other words, ignore whether she’s using the concept “privilege” properly; she and other peddlers of the phrase “white privilege” want the “flexibility” to use it in a way that taints all white people.

Of course, race-based privileges can and have existed. From the 1930s to the 1960s, for example, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured mortgages for white people but not for black people. It also subsidized builders on the condition that they sell new homes only to white people.¹⁰

Race-based privileges such as this, however, are not the basis for McIntosh’s theory. None of her examples of privilege include actual privileges. She doesn’t cite government policies that favor white people while excluding minorities, probably because such policies no longer exist in the United States.

The FHA policy, moreover, privileged some white people. Yet white privilege, we are told, is everywhere. As professor Paula S. Rothenberg says, “it is woven into the fabric of society.”¹¹ Or as professors Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo put it, “one automatically receives privilege by being a member of a dominant group (e.g., cis-men, Whites).”¹² In this view, a white person’s privilege sets the context of his life, influencing all of his decisions. If he doesn’t think about race, that’s white privilege. If he speaks, that’s white privilege. If he remains silent, that, too, is white privilege. If he ignores, denies, or confesses his privilege, that’s white privilege. As Chauncey DeVega (Salon) explains, white privilege is “hegemonic and omnipresent.”¹³

This underscores the fundamental doctrine behind the theory of white privilege: collectivism and, more specifically, racism.

What matters, on this premise, are not individuals but racial groups. A white person’s individual context and circumstances are irrelevant. All white people “automatically receive privilege” simply and only because they’re white.

McIntosh’s racist-collectivist framework is what precludes her from defining privilege, using the concept properly, or highlighting actual, legitimate examples of privilege. Her theory, in other words, must distort the concept of privilege in order to ensnare and defame all white people.

Because the theory is rooted in collectivism, one perverse consequence is that it diverts our attention away from the individual victims and perpetrators of racism. If a racist “store detective,” using McIntosh’s example, groundlessly follows a black person, we should focus on those two individuals, not on the innocent bystander: the unfollowed white person, a person irrelevant to the situation. By contrast, the theory of white privilege tells us that we must focus not only on the bystander, but on all other white people, including those not in the store. The proper question here is not: Which racial group is privileged? The question is: Is the detective’s treatment of the black person unfair? If a black man is followed because of his race, that’s unfair. The unfairness is not that the bystander and all other white people aren’t followed.

As this example shows, McIntosh’s conception of white privilege amounts to little more than the idea that white people don’t treat other white people negatively because of their race—and that this is somehow bad.

Yet scholars, activists, and pundits say white privilege is much worse than this, equating it with “unjust enrichment.” All white people, they argue, are privileged because they benefit from racism. As Ella Alexander (Harper’s Bazaar) argues, “white privilege means actively benefitting from the oppression of people of colour, whether being the dominant representation in the media or not being questioned about your citizenship.”¹⁴ “Their oppression lifts us up,” Sensoy and DiAngelo write; “because the minoritized group has less, we necessarily have more.”¹⁵ According to professor Lawrence Blum, “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.”¹⁶

These claims are patently false. Only by dropping context and ignoring the consequences of living in a society with racist norms can people regard racism as benefiting anyone. In truth, no one benefits from racism. White people don’t benefit when “store detectives” unfairly follow black people. Their lives are not enriched when minorities are groundlessly questioned about their citizenship. Their well-being is not improved when other white people spew racial slurs. They are not “lifted up” by racially motivated police brutality.

According to a Citigroup study, over the past two decades “$13 trillion [was] lost in potential business revenue because of discriminatory lending [policies against] African American entrepreneurs, with an estimated 6.1 million jobs not generated as a result.”¹⁷ Like any counterfactual economic estimates, these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. But the underlying point is valid: Racial discrimination harms not only minorities; it harms everyone. Excluding individuals from economic opportunities because of their race deprives others of the goods, services, capital, and innovations that those excluded would otherwise have created. Racial discrimination is not a zero-sum game but a negative-sum game.

Many commentators, including McIntosh, argue that we must fight to “end,” “remove,” “combat,” or “dismantle” white privilege. In a video for The Root, Felice León quotes Damon Young, saying, “What white privilege means, for white people, is that their whiteness hasn’t been a social, political, professional, financial, or legal hindrance. They have the privilege of the benefit of the doubt, which manifests as the privilege to just be.” León then asks, “So now that you know, are we going to dismantle white privilege, or not?”¹⁸

But shouldn’t all people, whites included, have “the privilege to just be”? Why should a white person’s race be a “social, political, professional, financial, or legal hindrance”? If “white privilege” means white people are not disadvantaged because of their race, then ending white privilege implies that white people should be disadvantaged because of their race.

This is the logic of the argument. But let’s be extra charitable and assume this isn’t what users of the phrase mean when they say they want to end white privilege. If they actually mean that minorities shouldn’t be disadvantaged because of their race, then they should focus on fighting racism, not on the alleged privileges that they falsely ascribe to white people.

So, how is this theory manifesting in practice? Consider how educators are pushing this idea. Professor Blum writes, “Those of us who teach US American White students think it morally and politically important for them to learn to acknowledge their White privilege.”¹⁹ One exercise educators use is a “privilege walk.” This entails lining up students side by side, then instructing them to either step forward if they’re privileged or step backward if they’re not in response to several statements. Examples include, “If your ancestors were forced to come to the USA not by choice, take one step back”; “If one or both of your parents were ‘white collar’ professionals: doctors, lawyers, etc., take one step forward”; “If you had to rely primarily on public transportation, take one step back”; “If your primary ethnic identity is ‘American,’ take one step forward.”²⁰

What is the purpose of ranking students like this? And doing so publicly? We need not speculate, as many “privilege walks” have been recorded. At a primary school in Britain, a young girl said, “It’s kind of frustrating that like me and Sarah are just standing at the back here while the majority of people who may be white are like standing right in the front. That just frustrates me a bit.”²¹ On his television show, Dr. Phil had a group of college students do the “privilege walk.” Afterward, an Asian male said, “I kept stepping forward, and . . . it was like, ‘Am I really that privileged?’ I didn’t feel like I deserved to be up there.” A white male said, “When I turned around and saw . . . everyone behind me, it was like, ‘Whoa.’ . . . It felt like I had done something wrong even though I couldn’t like, pinpoint. It felt like I shouldn’t be here.”²²

This is the purpose of the privilege walk and the theory underlying it: to warp the minds of innocent young people, quashing their dignity and branding them with undeserved guilt because of their skin color. A theory that leads white students to feel like they have “done something wrong” when they haven’t, that leads them to bemoan their nonexistent racial “privileges,” that defines them by their race, undermining their individuality; a theory that leads nonwhite students to feel frustrated that others are not unfairly discriminated against, to resent their white peers, to view white people as walking collections of unfair “privileges”—such a theory is, to put it mildly, toxic.

Consider Steve Majors. He’s a black man so light skinned that others think he’s white. This gives him “an embarrassing advantage,” he writes in the Washington Post. “I am ashamed of the white privilege I carry around. . . . I have the privilege of living in a world where my race simply doesn’t matter.”²³

Shouldn’t living in a world where one’s race doesn’t matter be everyone’s goal for themselves and everyone else? But this is not the goal of those peddling the phrase “white privilege.”

A closer look reveals that “white privilege” is not a legitimate concept; it is an anti-concept, a fallacy identified by Ayn Rand. “An anti-concept,” she wrote, “is an artificial, unnecessary, and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept.”²⁴ What legitimate concept is “white privilege” designed to replace and obliterate? The concept of individual merit (among others). As McIntosh explains, we “must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.”²⁵ In other words, white people’s achievements are not due to merit or virtue, but to white privilege.

If a white person thinks, “I worked hard to get where I am,” Sensoy and DiAngelo say that such a person is “rationalizing privilege as earned.”²⁶ According to professors Stephanie Wildman and Adrienne Davis, “Achievements by members of the privileged group are [falsely] viewed as the result of individual effort, rather than privilege.”²⁷ Professor Rothenberg argues that the invisibility of white privilege “has helped foster the illusion that those who succeed do so because of their superior intelligence, their hard work, or their determination.”²⁸

Such absurd proclamations logically follow from collectivism. Fixating on the group while dismissing individual differences, these intellectuals treat white people as one homogeneous, race-based clump. One’s group membership, in this view, overrides one’s autonomy. Because whites are collectively “privileged” by virtue of their skin color, their individual choices, actions, and efforts are irrelevant.

From an individualist perspective, by contrast, if racist policies hold a person back, we should recognize that he didn’t have the chance to earn what he otherwise could have earned had he not been unjustly discriminated against. But this doesn’t mean that those not discriminated against—those who were not victims of racism—didn’t earn what they have. A particular white person’s success might not have been fully earned for various reasons, but his not being discriminated against isn’t one of them.

The theory of white privilege unjustly foments suspicion toward any white person whose success is earned. “Does this white person deserve his job? Or does he have it only because of his unearned white privilege?” Recall that when Areva Martin was on David Webb’s radio show, she mistakenly assumed that he, a black man, was white and that his success in radio must have been because of his supposed white privilege.

By destroying the concept of individual merit, the theory of white privilege discredits not only white people’s achievements, but also their ideas, shutting down debate. In any discussion of race, we are told, having white privilege automatically taints one’s perspective. The “invisibility” of white privilege means that white people have a blind spot. Their view is limited, for they can’t see what the non-privileged can. Thus, such privilege disqualifies one’s thoughts and opinions. Anyone voicing ideas counter to woke “social justice” ideology in general, or the theory of white privilege in particular, will often hear such snarky responses as, “Your privilege is showing,” or “That’s your privilege talking,” or—most commonly—“Check your privilege.” The subtext here is unmistakable: The privileged don’t know what they’re talking about because they’re privileged; therefore, their views, perspectives, and arguments mustn’t be taken seriously.

An individual, in this view, cannot judge an idea by reference to an objective standard of truth; he can only judge it by reference to the standards of his (privileged or non-privileged) group identity. This is an updated version of the Marxist doctrine of polylogism—the idea that each group has its own logic, and thus its own truth. Just as the proletariat, according to Marx, necessarily think differently from the bourgeoisie, so the non-privileged necessarily think differently from the privileged. But this doesn’t mean that each group’s truth is equally valid. In both cases, the “truth” of the “marginalized” groups (the proletariat and the non-privileged) supersedes the “truth” of the “dominant” groups (the bourgeoisie and the privileged). This is why “the privileged” must “check” themselves.

Some pundits, however, reassure us that “check your privilege” isn’t meant to silence anyone; it’s just meant to be helpful. Christine Emba (Washington Post) writes that it’s “just a reminder to be aware—aware that you might not be able to fully understand someone else’s experiences, or that the assumptions you were brought up with may be blinding you to certain concerns.”²⁹ If that’s what it means, why is it directed only at white people? Wouldn’t such a “reminder” apply to everyone? But this isn’t how activists use the phrase. They use it not to remind people but to browbeat them and shut them up.

Tal Fortang can attest to this. When he was a freshman at Princeton, he wrote an article for a university publication that was picked up by Time magazine. “There is a phrase that floats around college campuses, Princeton being no exception, that threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them,” Fortang wrote. “‘Check your privilege,’ the saying goes, and I have been reprimanded by it several times this year. The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly.”³⁰

It descends recklessly, moreover, beyond college campuses. In Canada, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen proclaimed that the nation’s new budget was historic for “racialized Canadians” because it includes, among other things, a “national anti-racism plan” and a “centre for racial/gender data.”³¹ In response, Member of Parliament (MP) Maxime Bernier tweeted, “I thought the ultimate goal of fighting discrimination was to create a colour-blind society where everyone is treated the same. Not to set some Canadians apart as being ‘racialized.’”³² MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes then stepped in. Replying to Bernier, she tweeted, “Do some research, or a Google search, as to why stating colour blindness as a defence actually contributes to racism. Please check your privilege and be quiet.”³³

Check your privilege—and be quiet. That says it all.

The theory of white privilege is demonstrably false and racially divisive. It’s an anti-concept, based on a collectivist, nonobjective conception of privilege. It subverts individualism, treating all people as interchangeable cogs within their racial groups. It needlessly diverts our focus from genuine instances of racism to white people’s supposed “advantages”—that is, their lack of disadvantages. It wrongly claims that white people benefit from racism. It induces undeserved guilt and shame in those who have supposed privileges while inducing resentment and frustration in those who don’t. Because the theory destroys the concept of individual merit, “social justice” scholars and activists use it not only to discredit their adversaries’ achievements, but to silence them. For these reasons, we should reject this pernicious theory and persuade educators to stop indoctrinating students with it.”