A Philosophical Look into "White Privilege"

What exactly is "white privilege?" Does it mean that the privileged have ancestral advantages passed to them by nothing more than their skin color? Does it more specifically mean that anglo-European immigrants invaded America, thereby conferring to their progeny a set of advantages as the alpha group?

Like any ambiguous term, there are surely various ways to define the term. For example, we could start with the question; How white counts as white? The real question, however, is whether some definition is ubiquitous of arbitrarily defined "white people" or not in our day and age, and if not, whether the term is useful at all.

The story of America is filled with examples of various people imposing burdens upon other people. The unjust things that were done are great evils, and if any vestiges of it remain, it is our responsibility to root them out.

But the issue of "white privilege" is far too nebulous to know how to address it. For example, is there a difference between active white abuse (something like slavery) and passive white privilege (something like inheriting a white father's money)? Surely there is a difference between white privilege sought by force or not. Slavery was clearly an effort on the part of certain white people in prior ages to subjugate another race for their own advantage. But am I offending against morality by simply being born mostly Swedish, having never even remotely suggested that others should not have access to the same advantages, and having never unfairly extracted capital from others? No doubt if you trace my lineage back four or five generations, you may find various sinful behaviors affecting others, but how far back must we go to make culpable the children for the sins of their fathers? And can we do the same with all races, in which case our evils may be mutually self-cancelling?

It seems obvious that the kind of white privilege that actively seeks, through force of law, to subjugate others, is no longer systematic, and in some cases laws are passed to make active reparations, or to advantage previously disadvantaged groups by force of law through things like affirmative action. How successful can liberals really be in charging conservatives with coercive white privilege, such as Jim Crow laws or other discriminatory acts of legislation?

No, the kind of "white privilege" people are charged with now is the passive variety, so vague that almost anyone can be accused of it. It basically means this: If you are white, then you have an advantage that no black person, or any person of color, has or even can have. It immediately discredits all accomplishments of white people as expected of people with such advantages, and immediately excuses all people of color for any failure as expected of people with such disadvantages. It is a psychological mood. And how on earth can one argue with a mood. I recently saw an exchange between a black "intellectual" (a lawyer) and a conservative host, and the black man concluded, "You can't understand the plight of the young black man. You can never understand me. That's white privilege!" Indeed! If we cannot in principle understand people of other races or cultures, then I want to know why on earth we are even attempting to talk to each other! Surely such a sentiment can lead only to more animosity. And I think this kind of thinking is rooted in the postmodern insanity all around us. There is no truth! There are only experiences and perspectives. And if that is true, then argument is reduced to power. Whoever is loudest, most emotionally persuasive, has the most guns, wins.

Another point: As a student of history, I'm impressed by the fact that this is not a new story. Every generation has people with various hereditary advantages, and vice versa. Before Europeans arrived on this continent, there were chieftains whose families enjoyed various privileges that others in the tribe didn't enjoy. There were conquests, and dispossessed people, even among the American Indian tribes.

After the civil war, there have been blacks who became rich and blacks who did not. And these rich black families were able to confer those benefits to their children and grandchildren. Success and failure both often increase at compound interest. Did the child raised by rich black parents enjoy "black privilege?"

It seems to me that we need to distinguish "cosmic inequality" and "inherited privilege" from "white privilege."

For example, my great-grandfather was a farmer and my grandfather worked in meat processing. They were white and produced white children, upon whom it is difficult to see any real socio/economic advantages that were conferred. There were many black families that shared a similar social status during both generations, even in my grandfather's own neighborhood. Being white did nothing more for them than being black did for their neighbors.

The brilliant Thomas Sowell, in his discussions of race, points out that most liberals today are seeking something that never was, nor ever could be true. They desire "cosmic justice," or "cosmic equality." They demand that the universe no longer deliver inequalities of any kind. Their real issue is with God, or evolution. They want reparations from God or nature for not making the world wholly equal. Why is it that some people are born fast or clever or able to sing and others aren't? Why are there inequalities in the way people work? Identical white twins, born in advantage, can be totally different from one another in the end; one a disaster, and the other a success. Does "white privilege" explain their differences?

In the end, this term "white privilege" is irresponsible and imprecise and useless, unless its meaning is made clear. It's apparent cultural meaning (the passive variety) is used as a bludgeon, and the coercive notion already considered applies to virtually no one today.

It is interesting to see that the groups most sensitive about generalizations and stereotypes with respect to race are the groups most likely to generalize about white people today. When was the last time you heard a liberal scholar make a distinction between a French immigrant descended from aristocracy versus an Irish immigrant raised in poverty? No, they both descend from "white privilege."

(I'd like to finish this ranging piece by probing a simple metaphysical question: Does the secularist (that is, the person who believes there is only human authority granted to it by virtue of evolutionary status) have any intellectual right to claim that there should be equality? One of the strangest incoherencies in all modern debate on the question of privilege is that the ones most likely to advance Darwinism are the ones most vociferous in denouncing any conferred advantages to conquering peoples. Perhaps I'll simply put it this way. If I firmly believed that we are nothing more than animals adrift in a vacuous black ocean, then I would be the first to assert that if my people won, then we get the spoils! If others don't like it, then they can fight for their reparations instead of attempting to make us pity them for being weaker. In short, I would be a Nietzschean secularist.)