When I hear "Not all white males have 'privilege'"....

...I can't help but think that the person making this statement is using the imposed standards of the so-called "1 percent", ie the very wealthiest of all Americans (who, ftr, are very much a disproportionately white male group of people), and then using that 1 percent as the barometer of ALL Americans-including the many white men who, to be sure, are not in that top 1 percent.

Not only is this willfully ignorant of the effects of social stratification (ie a multi-tiered, incredibly complex social class system), but it's always used as the weapon of choice whenever discussions of racism and sexism are brought up. A weapon that is used specifically by those who don't want to talk about racism or sexism, who deny that racism and sexism even exist, who insist that "It's only about economic class!"-which, in this context, is really code for "Only the opinions of white men matter in discussions about economic marginalization, social oppression, and political activism-just like in every other context in society."

We can talk about the problems faced by "ordinary Americans"-if those Americans, of course, happen to be white, straight, and male. One is reminded of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in the late 1800s/early 1900s, a huge working-class organization that for some time, explicitly prohibited from its membership and organizing activities those workers who weren't white, native-born, and male.

One of the many ways that white men have privilege-and it relates to our discussions here-is that when they don't like something about the current system, the dominant institutions of American society and culture provide platforms for them to speak their concerns first, long before the concerns of people who aren't white/and or male. White male privilege is not having the need to create an alternative set of norms and channels to have political efficacy within the system, because the system was set up by and for white men, and that bias is deeply built into it.

So, this is my message to my fellow white men: Society is changing, and is changing fast. Just because you will no longer have the only or even dominant voice at the table, doesn't mean that you are being silenced. It simply means you have to listen to other perspectives besides your own, a perspective that you have taken for granted as being the culturally dominant one for most of this country's history.