The Disturbing Reality of White Privilege

[jeff47]

39. Yes, it is what you are trying to do.

The problem is, Not every white person is on the same exact level, and gets the exact same respect from society as a whole.

And privilege does not require that they all be on the exact same level. Nor do the people using the word privilege believe that they are all on the same level.

We're well aware that rich white people have more privilege than poor white people. Heck, rich minorities probably have more privilege than poor white people. But that's not the point.

But that's not what we're trying to do

Yes, it is exactly what you are trying to do. You are searching for a term that would be less offensive to the right.

And this isn't about the right, Jeff; many of them can't be saved by our efforts alone. It's about those people on the fence.......those are the ones that can and need to be, woken up, by and large. And special snowflaking over who has the least "privilege", etc. sure as hell isn't helping us.

The only one who's special snowflaking is you.

I'm a white male. That gets me a certain amount of privilege. I'm paid well, which gets me some additional privilege. However, I'm nowhere close to rich. Which means I lose out on some other privilege.

But there is not a single "privilege scale". You appear to be think there is one. Privilege is not a quantifiable value. We can't declare I'm a 6, while Alan Keyes is a 7. It does not work that way. It's a complex and highly variable multi-dimentional social effect.

Your objection to using the word privilege is over attempting to oversimplify down to a single metric. Since that oversimplification just does not work, it is wrong to change language based on it.

Additionally, there's little to no evidence that some other word is going to magically turn those fence-sitters into civil rights activists. However, it means we are spending time arguing over the perfect word to use instead of actually working on the underlying problem. Exactly like those on the right would like us to do. Perhaps we should stop indulging them.