I'm surprised how many DU'ers think aknowledging white male privilege is somehow bigoted

[patrice]

40. If we should treat every person as an individual, we should treat EVERY person as an individual.

This does not mean that white male privilege has not/does not happen and that white males are not profiting from it. Just that, probably, some white males would prefer that assumptions NOT be made about them in order to justify the fact that assumptions should NOT be made about people of other colors and genders.

Perhaps an approach to this problem should be predicated on all individuals respecting one another and an important part of that respect is to also be honest about one's self. One way to get at that honesty would be to model it; begin with questions directed to one's self and questions directed to other individuals, so that individual white males can account FOR THEMSELVES the different ways in which they personally have or have not benefited from white male privilege.

Believe it or not, the privileges of white masculinity, though they may have worked in certain financial and material ways, have not over-all worked to the more wholistic benefit of a lot of white males. And in some cases, whatever those privileges were, they were negotiated away or destroyed by other things that happened in INDIVIDUAL men's lives, so though they may recognize the truth of their privilege in some limited way, what matters most is how their own lives have worked out and whether they actually are authentically happy or not, which many many many of them are NOT.

Even when someone is right about you, how do you feel when another person, who may be more or less a total stranger, and "different" to boot, TELLS you who you are? Does that work for you?

No matter how right you are, you can't demand what you don't honestly give to others.

Whether you think they need that from you or not is beside the point, unless and until they actually DO demonstrate that whatever they need to recognize the truth IS beside the point, at which point, one then has grounds to consider disregarding what they pretend to need in order to talk about white male privilege and, then, just go ahead and say what you think you need to say about white male privilege.