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comment by disbell
disbell  ·  3176 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Explaining white privilege to a broke white person

    But that's just the point - if the whole argument is that individuals can't see their privilege, and they answer with a personal anecdote, you're not going to advance the argument by taking the individual experiences of the person entirely off the table. The appropriate tactic is to relate the individual experience to the demographic, not dismiss it.

I agree with you here. Additionally, I think one heuristic that could help people get on board with the idea of privilege is to look at race/class/gender/ethnicity in another country. Take just about any East Asian country, for example. Often, Americans interested in social justice will immediately try to overlay American race relations on places like Japan or Korea, pointing out that Hollywood actors are popular there and the US military presence. Upon a closer look, though, it becomes really apparent that the ethnic majority straight males in those countries run the show and have a great deal of privilege; Western whites just tend to be on top of the minority heap but are still disadvantaged in those societies. From there, you can see that white privilege isn't a universal inherent to being white, but depends on the environment you're in. There is in fact Han privilege in China, and it's just as problematic for minorities there.

I think a lot of the resistance to the idea of white privilege is the innateness that seems to come along with it- people don't want to believe that they are inherently "bad" or in living an unfair life.