General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why I don't like the term "white privilege" [View all]El_Johns
(1,805 posts)from slavery?
It's larger than we think. For example, the Bush family has at least 2 ties to my knowledge; one indirect, through Brown Brothers Harriman, the capital of which was built through the cotton trade and related businesses; and one direct, through an ancestral family in the cotton trade and related businesses & tied to the Southern & international business slaveocracy.
This is one of the reasons the phrase "white privilege" bothers me. It completely erases the dimensions of class & power and substitutes "whiteness". While it's true that many, perhaps most, white Americans participate at least indirectly a/o passively in maintaining racism as a social phenomenon, the major benefits of racism, Jim Crow, and slavery accrued, as do most things, to the ruling class, and this historical and current dimension is completely erased by the "white privilege" meme. This seems to me quite deliberate, allowing people who actually owe their present-day status to black degradation to parade as moral paragons.