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What Is Privilege? I Don’t Know. And It Doesn’t Matter.
Of all the silliness on the left, “white privilege” may be the silliest. White privilege used to matter quite a lot, of course, the last time the Democrats had real power — in the South before and after the Civil War. But in today’s America, it’s much harder to define.
I saw a talking head on a TV news show claim that white people are often oblivious to their advantages, because they never stop and think about them. So I stopped to think about my advantages. And my disadvantages. And I was struck by the fact that I often couldn’t tell which was which.
I grew up on a hog farm and we lost our farm when I was 16. So just when my sister and I wanted to go to college, our family lost everything. That is certainly a disadvantage. On the other hand, it made me even more determined to succeed, and I realized that I had very little margin for error. So I worked even harder, stayed out of trouble, and pursued my dreams with focus and determination. So perhaps that disadvantage was an advantage? I’m not sure.
Today’s Democrats claim that I had the advantage of white skin. But that also meant that it would be much, much harder for me to get into medical school. No affirmative action for me. And once I got in, I would have none of the special help programs available to keep affirmative action students from flunking out. I was on my own. So perhaps that advantage was a disadvantage? I’m not sure.
One of my classmates in medical school was a black girl from Cleveland. Her Dad was a dentist, she went to the best private schools from kindergarten through high school, and she spent her summers working in her uncle’s office (he was a cardiologist). She had a great education, no money problems, and lots of experience in the medical field.
I was a hog farmer from the second poorest county in Ohio, who went to some of the lowest-ranked public schools in the state. I spent my summers working in fields.
Ok, so who was privileged? I’ll concede that it may be me – perhaps the challenges in my life better prepared me for the difficulties of medical school than her more comfortable upbringing.
Or perhaps not. I don’t know.
What I’m getting at is that even in retrospect, it’s not always clear what privilege is, or what advantages are, or what disadvantages are.
Who can say, really? Life is what you make of it.
So after I took the TV talking head’s advice, and tried to evaluate my privileges, I reached the following conclusion: I don’t know what my advantages were, or my disadvantages. And neither does he. And neither one of us cares.
I’m just doing the best I can with what I’ve got. And that’s it.
He’s just trying to gain power by convincing people that they can’t improve themselves – they need to vote for him for protection. And that’s it.
He and I would probably disagree about a lot of things. But I strongly suspect that we would agree on one thing. In today’s America, racial privilege is imaginary. He doesn’t care who I am, or my classmate from Cleveland, or anyone else. Whatever. He knows that racial privilege doesn’t matter. In the real world, it doesn’t matter.
It certainly doesn’t matter as much as your work habits, innate ability, determination, comfort with risk, ability to handle setbacks, ability to handle delayed gratification, and so on and so forth. Racial privilege, if it exists, is not big enough in today’s America to control your life. I think that Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas would agree with me. Life is what you make of it. And that’s it.
Politicians should be trying to inspire us – especially the downtrodden. Pointing out that all of us can improve our lives, regardless of perceived slights from others. Ignore the naysayers, and reach for your dreams.
But no. Small-minded politicians believe that the only way to gain power is to take power from the citizens – keep them helpless, convince them that they need you to fight against forces beyond their control, and you’ll become more and more powerful. More and more loved. Racial privilege doesn’t have to be real. It doesn’t matter.
In politics, the fantasy of racial privilege is a useful tool. And that’s it.
Perhaps it exists, to a certain degree. Or perhaps it’s so small you can’t measure it. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Racial privilege doesn’t matter nearly as much as the things you can control, like work habits and determination.
It’s a political tool. If a leftist politician’s message of inevitable failure of minorities curses the most vulnerable among us to lives of depression and misery, he doesn’t care. It’s just a political tool.
And that’s it.
Published in General
somehow, you always struck me as a pig farmer :) – lol, I have been struck by a couple of pig farmers!
As usual, excellent post, Doc. Life is so unpredictable. We all have wonderful experiences and horrible experiences. The weird thing is that sometimes those wonderful experiences yield horrible results, while the terrible experiences turn out to be the impetus to move forward and achieve great things. Today, in America, everything is a “RIGHT”, but not really. Most things are just earned. And that is the case no matter if we are born male or female, Caucasian or any other race. Everyone has challenges to overcome. Some might call it “our cross to bear.”
A very wealthy friend was complaining to me about her not-launching, over educated only son (30 years old )
She said, while dismissing advice that she’d asked for, “you were just lucky. You were poor when you raised your kids”
Gee thanks. Lucky me
Chelsea Clinton said she wants her children to ‘erode their white privilege over time’.
If you think about all the advantages these kids have, seems to me being white is not one of the more significant ones. They will have a fair amount of wealth-advantage. If they want, they can get Ivy-League-advantage. And they have a very rare grandchild-of-a-president advantage. It would be easy to think of more.
Is she really so dumb she doesn’t see this disconnect, or she hoping that by emphasizing the first people will ignore the second?
And yeah, there are certainly disadvantages they will have along with the advantages.
Oh, how times have changed. SNL was funny and kinda sane.
Grandpap’s cows gave more milk because he was white. The hay grew taller too.
I detest the word “privilege” it means that something is gained or inherited without trade or effort.
It is an insidious effort to divide and I reject the concept. It’s actually absurd and we should start treating it that way.
Dr B,
I am always amazed by the typical high quality insightfulness that you expound here on Ricochet.
It makes me think that perhaps I should take up drinking Bourbon in large daily doses so I too can emulate and pontificate like the great Dr B.
Port works too GLD. Not that I can write like Dr. B. No one can. Trying to recall if my white privilege would have gotten me out of the Viet Nam war draft in 1968. Probably not. Since no one knew what it was then. But snuck into the Navy so came out ok.
Brilliant! And funny.
I’ve been trying Jameson’s Irish Whisky, but it doesn’t seem to work. I think Dr. B has another secret or few, including good upbringing, hard work, dedication, and God-given abilities in large measure.
Indeed.
It’s not privilege, it’s advantage and it is made up of things that are available to anyone of any race.
Well here in the glorious state of Massachusetts they make it perfectly clear who is privileged and who isn’t.
In our business in the water industry our bids not only need to be the lowest, they also need to be about 5% lower than a minority or a woman owned business. Sometimes that doesn’t even help. This is outright discrimination against white males. This is called Minority Business Enterprise and Women Business Enterprise, MBE and WBE. (link)
Some of my competitors have the business in their wives’ names to get around this rule. I considered it but just wouldn’t feel right.
Because women and minorities can’t compete with white men — even on a level playing field. That’s the implication of such policies. It’s not the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It’s just “low expectations.” Nothing soft about it.
Progs are bigots and exploiters. If they couldn’t manufacture and then exploit the grievances of women and minorities to gain political power, they’d have no use for them at all.
My advantages:
I’m smart, funny, and incredibly handsome.
My disadvantages:
I actually believe what I just typed . . .
Competency has nothing to do with it. In order to submit bids there is a long list of criteria that needs to be met. If you meet that you can bid. When competing against 3-5 other companies you need to account for every dollar and don’t miss anything. All of us come up with roughly the same number. When MBE WBE enter the mix they can tack on an extra 5% and feel pretty confident of winning the job.
I think that the biggest “privilege” that white people have over black people in America is being members of a group with a higher IQ distribution. Intelligence is not the only characteristic of importance, but as I understand the social science, it is the most important single predictor of success in a wide variety of outcomes.
The data indicates that intelligence is principally inherited. The estimates of heritability in adulthood are in the 60-80% range. The research further indicates that there is little or nothing that one can do to increase intelligence. Various interventions have not worked.
Twin studies, in particular, demonstrate that common cultural or familial factors, the “shared environment” factor in the empirical analysis, have a very small effect. The effect of the “nonshared environment” is larger, though it should be understood that this factor includes any random genetic or biological effect, too.
Average white IQ in the US is around 100, maybe a bit higher in recent years. Average black IQ is about 85-90. The best estimate of the difference in the average is 12-15 points. That’s a big difference, as the standard deviation is 15.
People really don’t like the results of the heritability studies. It seems to offend their worldview, and this seems to be true on the Right and Left alike. People on the Left seem to want everyone to be equal in every way, including outcomes, and attribute unequal outcomes to some systemic injustice or oppression. People on the Right seem to accept unequal outcomes, but only if they are attributed to some virtuous characteristic like hard work or discipline.
Very few people seem to accept the idea that people are born with a wide range of important characteristics and traits, including intelligence. My impression is that this objection is a fairly modern thing, probably arising out of the “Equality” doctrine of the so-called Enlightenment and the French Revolution, though I wasn’t around before these events so I’m not certain of this.
Yes. My problem with the modern idea of “privilege” is that it contains an unspoken inversion of reality that we tend to silently accept when we discuss it.
For the sake of argument, I will grant that there might be people who face disadvantages or challenges in their lives that I have not faced. And maybe some of those disadvantages really are imposed by societal unfairness. I have no problem supporting an agenda that is designed to remove such obstacles from the people who face them.
But the idea of “privilege” turns this on its head and implies that some of us are given unfair advantages. Which carries with it a further implication: that the way to fix this is not to remove unfair disadvantages, but rather to place the same unfair disadvantages in everybody’s way. Achieving “equality” by dragging everyone down to the same level.
That’s why I reject the idea of privilege. Talk to me about removing unfair disadvantages, and I might listen.
Very astute deduction.
It is often amusing to listen to people like the Obama’s, Oprah, LeBron, and Megan Markle discuss white privilege. Each one of these people are multi-millionaires. Each one has all the advantages of wealth. It doesn’t appear that any of them have been materially hampered by some sort of systemically racist environment in America. Meanwhile the life expectancy of a white man in Appalachia is going down. That is apparently how white privilege works in 2023 America.
So, even your livestock was privileged.
Somewhere I have a paper that has an unfortunate title implying that blacks are lacking in intelligence. It has extensive footnotes, references to IQ tests that are non-verbal, relying on flashing lights and patterns. All the tests, according to this paper, confirm the results you describe. The paper went further describing the differences between “sub-Saharan Negroes” and the people of predominately African ancestry in the United States. The same differences were found in South Africa.
The contents of the paper coupled with a presentation by Jordan Peterson on the subject of IQ, the implications are disturbing.
I believe in one chapter of Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, that statistically confirmed this observation. However I would counter that in our culture one does not have to be high, or even average IQ to succeed. Charles has written several other books that dance around this theme, however in personal conversations with him it is not something he will be republishing anytime soon given the excoriation he received both then, and some of the various revivals of the “hate on” fest he has endured since.
I have seen many individuals that have done well in this life, both financially and in the “pursuit of happiness” department, mostly by restraining their id’s, which is not IQ dependent. As we deteriorate from a meritocratic based society, these options for the “not so smart” will devolve to the more traditional Hobbesian level of a dirge existence, but by then most will never know what opportunities that they had in the US’s imperfect, but pluralistic society.
Utopia has never and will never exist, but if they had paid attention in the Western Civilization class (which most these “elites” eschewed) they might have picked up on that two century old observation.
The highlighted sentence is what Peterson addressed. He gave the history of the US Military’s interest in IQ and how those in charge decided that IQ was a measure of one’s usefulness to the military at large. The conclusion was that anyone with an IQ of less than 84 could not be trained in any skill/trade that would contribute to military success. Peterson pointed out that if winning a war is a pressing issue, as it was during the studies, there will be considerable effort put forth to achieve that goal. There would be no time wasted in trying to train the untrainable.
What is the disturbing aspect of the research is that IF current IQ distributions are accurate, then approximately 50% of the black population cannot be educated to achieve success in today’s society IF one assumes that the military’s jobs are reflective of the jobs available in society in general.
A lot of IFs I admit, but still a cause for concern.
I think the emphasis on IQ is a distraction. First, look at all the high-IQ, highly educated idiots in powerful positions –especially in DC. As Prager has said, the important thing for a functioning society and happy individuals is instilled values, not IQ. “Thou shalt not steal” is graspable even to people with IQs below average. As my father-in-law told his grandkids, even if you’re reading meters for a living, be the best dang meter-reader you can be.
But, people who have taken the tests and qualified for MENSA just can’t seem to let it go. . . One of the things we used to value in Christendom was humility.
Thank you for this WC. I agree that the focus on IQ is a distraction. Is IQ a factor? Certainly. But it’s one of many. And I don’t think it’s the most important by a long shot.
I was with a group of moms whom I’ve known for 30 + years; most of our kids are in the 28-40 range. There was an ongoing lament from many of them about their slow-launching, college-educated children. How they’re lacking in so many life skills. One mom of three piped up, her oldest, a daughter now around 36, has lived independently, manages her own finances and been gainfully employed since she graduated high school in 2001. Something the same mom couldn’t say about her two sons. Her daughter is developmentally delayed; no idea what her IQ is, but I’d guess she operates at the level of about a 10 year old. Because of her challenges, her parents made sure she was educated in the ways most needed. The mom was sorry the same type of education wasn’t available to her two “normal” sons.
I would argue that there is one area in American social life where white people do have a privilege not afforded to non-white people in general. As a white heterosexual man I can support any political party under the sun and no one is going to call me out for it based on my race. No matter who I vote for or support, there will be people critical of my choices, but not on the basis of my skin color or where in the world my ancestors were born.
For a lot of non-white people and maybe a few demographic categories outside of race, there is a social pressure to vote for the Democratic Party. There is a mentality among quite a few Democrats that if you are black, gay, Hispanic, etc. your vote is the rightful property of the Democratic Party. To quote Joe Biden, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
And if you vote from Romney he will put you back in chains. What an idiot.