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A White Guy on White Male Privilege
It is high time people throw off old preconceptions of Republicans as the mean descendants of cotton plantation owners, you know, the old diatribe about white male privilege. With Trump’s rising numbers among minorities, maybe we’re all finally seeing people as just people who are all just trying to persevere and build a better life for themselves and their families.
I look at my children. They are half Hungarian blood on my wife’s side; that side came to the US through Ellis Island in the early 20th century and somehow they all found each other. They were not privileged at all; they had nothing. They were the children of simple farmers whose land was confiscated by the communists. They did not come but were sent to America for a better future, which they found in the factories in and around Bridgeport, CT.
On my side, my children can count an Englishman lured here by his brother in the late 19th century. His brother had married well and joined the family business. My great grandfather first served in the Army during the Spanish American war, gained citizenship, and joined his brother. Two of my other great grandparents (Sullivan and Mahoney) fled Ireland during the potato famine. The rest were American mutts, descended from early Puritans, pilgrims, and other unknowns.
I can say this; my great grandparents were all proud, worked hard, and not one left a single trust fund dollar or any kind of inheritance. One of my great grandfathers owned a general store. Another was a doctor. Yet another was a businessman and it is said, profited during prohibition, a scandal. The last worked for his brother in a lumber and quarry business in upstate New Hampshire.
They all lived in rural New England, owned homes, and lived full lives. As for privilege or inheritance, nothing survived to be passed down. My mother was orphaned at 13 when her father died of leukemia and her mother was declared incompetent and relegated to the state mental hospital. The family farm was auctioned to pay the medical bills. In the early ’50s, my father’s father contracted polio. He partially recovered and then lost everything when disease ravaged the local chicken farms leaving his inherited general store with nothing having advanced a season of feed to all the local growers.
My parents married at 18, produced two children (I was #2) before they were 20 and moved to the city to work. We lived in the projects then later moved into a three-decker walk-up. It was a cold flat, which meant there was no central heat, just an oil heater installed in an ancient fireplace in the front room. When I was about five, we moved to Portland, ME, to our own home, a rented bungalow. My dad got a job with the phone company, which was a great thing. He was transferred to the Boston area and there he bought his first house, a small Cape Cod on a ragged, unpaved street, the last in the city, three lots from the commuter train tracks. When the heavy freight trains rode by, the house would convulse with a continued, soft, low-frequency rumble.
My point is, I don’t think any of my progenitors owned a cotton plantation. And though I may be of fair complexion (and that is not necessarily such a good thing, as my dermatologist can tell you) I’ve never felt the least bit privileged. The neighborhood I grew up in was filled with first-generation Irish, Italians, Greeks, Portuguese, and French Canadians. I felt like Schlitz and Wonder Bread in a world of basement Fortissimo and crusty rolls and exotic baguettes. When I had to continually fight my way through the neighborhood pecking order, I never once felt privilege, not once. I felt a few punches to the face, but not privilege.
Even now, with my degrees piled up, my wife the urban choir teacher, my suburban house, my educated daughters, my savings account, my cars, my stuff, I still don’t feel privileged. I may leave some stuff to my kids, but it won’t be enough to do much for the following generation.
My mother’s family was brought up to be staunch Democrats. My father’s dad was a prominent Republican. The only thing I inherited from my forebears besides my complexion was my intellect and my willingness to work and persevere. That’s not privilege. It’s just plain stubbornness. And it’s enough for me.
Published in General
Who cares what the skew is? Racism is not the way to address it.
I am not racist. I don’t judge people on the color of their skin but the content of their character.
In the last fifty years the number of qualified blacks denied admittance to dental school due to their race is approximately zero. So the reason for an underrepresentation of blacks is not racism. Or whiteness, if that’s just another way of saying racism. Regarding the overrepresentation of whites and Asians in dentistry as inherently a problem- now that is racist.
There is no winning the “debate.” There is never a debate. It’s cynical emotional manipulation as a means to acquire and keep power.
And if I I complaining about it, I am racist. Q.E.D.
How come there are so few qualified blacks? Is that about whiteness or is it about something else?
I have a feeling it’s (at least also) about class. Which is no less of an issue, just because it doesn’t hinge on skin colour.
I don’t think these kinds of responses are manipulative, but they strike me as definitely emotional. Why is that a bad thing?
And if you feel emotional about being excluded as a group, why wouldn’t anybody from any group react the same way?
Shouldn’t we have affirmative action for Whites in the National Basketball Association and the National Football League too? They are grossly underrepresented in those sports.
You have my support!!
Also for straight comedians because why not?
Sure it’s about class. So why the chart about ethnicity? Why the focus on race?
A lot of the resentment here stems from white people from modest backgrounds being assigned guilt for “white privilege” when they had to make it without any of the much more powerful “class privilege.”
Can you tell me the Obama girls, or even Obama, ever suffered underprivilege because they weren’t white?
Class envy is no place to go either.
Possibly:
1 Because it is also about race; and
2 Perhaps the country is more comfortable talking about race [not very??] than it is talking about class [it’s relative].
So talk about class as well.
I have no idea.
If they did in the past they won’t going forward.
That’s where the resentment you mentioned comes from.
In Hawaii, there are far more Asian dentists than White or Hispanic. There must be a systemic bias against Whites and Hispanics by the Asian community in Hawaii, is all I can think.
Maybe the skew is the result of a millions “somethings else”. The chart is a Rorschach test. People will look at it and see what they want to see. All I see is a chart.
That really has no bearing on what your have already said. Yes, people don’t like being excluded. It makes sense. Looking at the make up of a group in 2020 and assuming there are more white people in the group because “racism” does not make sense.
It sounds to me like you are sympethetic to the idea that if a group’s proportion does not match the population, it must be because of an “-sim”. How leftist can you get?
I see we DO agree!
Talk about Race? If *I* talk about race, I am called “racist”.
Really, Z, what world are you living in?
Over the last 50 years, blacks have suffered…at the hands of a generally Democratic majority that told them if they didn’t vote Democrat, if they didn’t sign on to “the program”, if they didn’t stay in “the projects”, they would be nothing. As it turns out, the program and the projects have been far worse for blacks than we could have imagined. We may not have forced them on to actual reservations, as we did to Native Americans, but that is essentially what we have done. We pay them to get pregnant and then abort their children. We make it financially better for young black men to leave their girlfriends and wives rather than support them. And we give them no incentive to do anything different.
illegitimacy is higher in the black community
abortions are higher in the black community
violent crime is higher in the black community
poverty is higher in the black community
And who runs the black communities? The white plantation owners? No. Democrats.
There is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with black people. Nothing. But you treat a people group like they are needy and they will be. That’s what “we’ve” done in particular to black people and Native American people. There’s your racism.
That’s because white men can’t jump.
I know you are not from here, but in the U.S. pundits and politicians talk about race so much that we get tired of hearing about it. Almost all the talk comes from the left. Average people (especially Conservatives) don’t give it much thought.
If you even notice that someone is [fill in your favorite social construct] you are a [fill in your favorite *-ist].
Proof that you are a racist, Steven. If you don’t think, constantly, about your own privilege, and your own role in the subjugation of others, however can you fix yourself and society?
Most likely it’s about their not buckling down and doing their homework in junior high and high school. :-)
Or their schools aren’t requiring anything of them in the first place.
I’ll try to work a little harder on that in the future.
It’s probably better to respond to what I say to you rather than what I don’t say.
??
What’s tiring about it?
Do you think that’s true of average people who aren’t white?
How does it make sense to assume that it has nothing to do with race?
Also: I’m not the person who keeps bringing up racism as a catch all answer or foil.
It might be.
What makes you so sure that it isn’t?
My mind isn’t closed about this. Arguably it’s easier because I have less invested, but fwiw.
Prove it.
I’m not so sure it is, or isn’t. But the other side, they are 100% sure it is. So, as BGS says: prove it.
I’ll give it a go. In the mid-1990s, the Rev. Jackson was in Silicon Valley doing his corporate blackmail, race-hustling schtick. He targeted one major manufacturer pointing out that the workforce didn’t match the racial makeup of the surrounding area. The top-dog, to his everlasting credit, wasn’t intimidated. He challenged Jackson to a public debate which he would fund, so Jackson had no excuse. Lying coward that Jackson is/was, Jackson claimed a prior commitment and got out of town before sundown.
The answer given to Jackson is something I’ll try to paraphrase: I don’t hire from the general population. I hire from the subset of that population possessing the specific skills of value to my company. That is mainly the population of engineers, scientists, and a few financial people. If blacks are under-represented in that subset of the general population, it isn’t my fault. It’s their fault. Tell them to get the training, graduate in the top 10% of their class, and I’ll consider them.
Before you say it, I will: It is possible that the “soft bigotry of low expectations” toward blacks is why they were under-represented. BTW, I’m taking the claim the top dog made as valid.
I am not the ‘other side’. I’m not sure that it is or or isn’t either.
I guess that’s where it hinges.
Is there real equality of opportunity, can there ever totally be, how much if any of this inequality is valid to address and how?
I don’t mean to be condescending, but let me explain something. There is a population that crosses all races. It is the population that doesn’t understand the connection between hard work and success. I came from that population. It took me a while to stop feeling sorry for myself and exert myself. When I quit whining and started working, I got lucky. And the harder I worked, the luckier I got. I use the word “luck” for a reason. I had crammed four years into 2 1/2, and when I got out with a 3.97 GPA and landed a damn good job, the punks I grew up with told me how “lucky” I was. In what passes for their minds, the difference between my situation and theirs was that I had good luck and they had bad luck.
In the words of Brother Dave Gardner, “The Sun shines on them with sense enough to get out in it.”