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confab  ·  3200 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Explaining white privilege to a broke white person

It's kind of circular reasoning, which most advocates of ideas that invoke special pleading (e.g. white privilege) are prone to commit. The idea of white privilege doesn't simply describe racially-based advantages and disadvantages -- any reasonable person can see the obvious disparities. It does more than that by assigning blame for such disparities to individuals of the advantaged group based not on individual circumstances but on group characteristics over which they had no choice or control. It's the same species of idea that asserts all white people are racist simply due to their race, and black people therefore cannot be racist.

These types of ideas have very little (if any) appeal in terms of their logical or rational capacity to convince because they were never crafted on those grounds. Nevertheless, they seem to have a much broader appeal on rhetorical grounds, where convincing someone of a proposition is very much like a religious conversion experience. In short, these ideas tend to position themselves toward the unfalsifiable end of the spectrum and, as a result, become nothing more than doctrinal statements identifying the good guys from the bad guys -- you're either with us or against us.