How has use of the term "white privilege" harmed you?

[McDiggy]

196. DU disappointing me...again...

Well, growing up in a trailer park in WV with all of the other poor white people, I had no idea that I lived in splendid "privilege." My parents smoked crack and the trailer door was off the hinge from the police kicking it in a few times. Usually not a big deal until this guy named "Methhead Willie" decided to rob us a few times. Oh well. The only realistic options after school are sell drugs, get disability, or join the military. My main core of friends isn't doing to well. My childhood friend John got busted selling heroin. It was that or work at McDonalds. Not sure if I blame him. My high school friend Ernie died in Iraq when his humvee rolled over on him. My friend Alex died last year from a drug overdose. My friend Tim is an alcoholic and I had to sever my friendship with him when his pill habit made him start stealing from me. Thankfully, I heard, he's over that demon, though the liquor one remains. I somehow got out. Thankfully I have never used alcohol or drugs in my life. I went to school and took it seriously...well, seriously enough, anyway. I got a scholarship to the local community college based on my ACT scores. I was about to go into the Marines (again, one of the few avenues out), but lady luck shined on me. I worked as hard as I could for 2 years and got into a competitive professional degree (PharmD) program. And now I'm fine. If you want to call *me* privileged...fine...I am. I don't need help anymore, personally. I earned every damn drop of my privilege, though. But all of my dead or dying friends? You think their skin color makes them "privileged?" Give me a break. They were very much dealt a piss poor hand at life and they most certainly needed help.

But, hey, all of us are white. So fuck us. So called liberals hate us because we are white hillbillies. Conservatives hate us because we are poor people caught in a cycle of hopelessness. Poor, white, out of site. Nobody gives a damn about Appalachian people. So they suffer. That's a pretty clear effect of the concept of innate "white privilege" harming an entire group of people. Senator Jim Web wrote a pretty good book that kind of went into it. Looking back at when I was 16, asking me to switch places with the son of a radiologist whose skin happened to be a dark brown hue would have been a godsend. Asking me to switch places with someone in the inner city...honestly, I'm not sure I would have experienced that much of a difference. Only luck got me out.

Here's the thing you so called "liberals" need to grasp. There is a difference between "all white people are privileged" and "most people of privilege are white." Process that for a second. And its pervasive on here to nausea with everything. It's like a competition. Find a group to stereotype against and tell them that they are all magically the same. It's disgusting. Then when you experience a person from the ultimate boogeygroup, the white man, that isn't privileged, that isn't wealthy, that doesn't have a pot to piss in, you don't take him seriously. And we wonder why poor white men don't vote Democrat? As soon as they show up, they are told to sit at the back of the bus and that their sufferings don't matter. We tell suffering people that they are lucky to have pale skin and a penis and that those two "virtues" will magically save them. Except that it doesn't.

The truth is the same as its always been. In the US, you are only worth what our plutocratic overlords think we are worth. And if you are a member of the American underclass - be it Hispanic, inner city black, or Appalachian white - you are unprivileged. Your enemy isn't each other. We are living in a time where the value of a human being is less and less every day. The enemy is the emerging plutocracy that has destroyed the middle class. And, guess what, there are some white people that might want to be our allies if we took their suffering seriously.