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comment by MadEmperorYuri
MadEmperorYuri  ·  3177 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Explaining white privilege to a broke white person

    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.

I have never seen white privilege defined this way. Can you show me where you got that from?





confab  ·  3177 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Of course you haven't because how an ideology self-identifies versus how it applies its principles is rarely the same -- that's the nature of ideological thinking. It's like asking Fox News to be consistent with its claim to being "fair and balanced" while expecting them to compromise their core ideology for the sake of being "fair and balanced". That will never happen because what they preach and what they practice can never square with one another. Their goal has never been to convince but to win at all costs.

And to suggest that the Left is in any sense less prone to this instrumentalist bullshit is pure fantasy. They engage in the exact same rhetorical slight-of-hand as do the right-wing fear mongers. It's really a shame. The Left (at least historically) has marshaled fact and reason as a basis for their social, economic, and political critiques. Nowadays, such requisites are seen as suspicious or status-quo capitulations that invariably compromise the party line.

Truth is now a matter of beating the royal crap out of your opponent rather than demonstrating the persuasive merits of the better argument.

MadEmperorYuri  ·  3177 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    And to suggest that the Left is in any sense less prone to this instrumentalist bullshit is pure fantasy.

Where did I, or anyone else, suggest that? The only person to mention right or left wing politics is you, just now.

I'm not interested in either of those. I just want to know how you formed your idea of what white privilege is, for it differs from mine own. I have no particular preference for one definition or another, but, presumably, one of us has a more widely accepted definition than the other, and I'd like to make a judgement so that I may either adopt yours, incorporate parts of it into my own, or reject it. With that resolved, I could better communicate with you now and others in the future.

confab  ·  3176 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm neither defining nor forming an idea of what white privilege is or is not. I'm describing how that idea has been used by those who believe it to be true. It's an idea that pathologizes the behavior of a particular demographic group by categorically putting members of that group on the couch without any consideration for the diversity of behavior or beliefs among those within that group. It's more commonly known as stereotyping.