Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is

[malthaussen]

88. Ah, but is privilege only about "improvement?"

Prejudice on a local level is possibly where privilege exerts itself most insidiously. You can tell who is less privileged in that environment by looking at who gets hired, who gets to rent/buy a house, all sorts of things. And let's not overestimate the cornucopia of special programs offered to non-SWMs, compared to SWMs. Take a black kid and a white kid who have just gotten out of high school and are looking to work: supposing the white business owner has filled any racial quotas he might be obliged to fill, do you think he is as likely to hire the black kid as the white kid? Obviously, individuals vary, which is why anecdote makes for bad evidence, but if we check the statistics and see that the white kid is hired disproportionately often, is it unreasonable to conclude that there is some sort of privilege in operation?

-- Mal