Here's an interesting example of the importance of question wording in polling. It's from a recent survey about racism conducted in Britain:
Ask white people if there's "white privilege" in Britain, and only 29% agree. But ask them if white people have an easier time of things and 47% agree.
These are not exactly identical things, but you could legitimately treat them as pretty close to interchangeable. However, depending on the point you wanted to make, they'd provide you with very different evidence.
Choosing one over the other is not precisely lying with statistics, but it's certainly an example of how numbers can indeed lie if they aren't treated very carefully indeed.
Clearly, lots of people do not understand the term.
But the large number of Eastern Europeans working low level jobs in the UK may also factor in. The Estonian guy working for peanuts on a farm may not feel he has much white privilege, but also agree that white British people have it easier than the rest (and he's not including defining himself as British).
The first generation Briton from outside Tallinn who is working at a machine shoppe in Leeds might think he's underprivileged, but he should tell it to the fourth generation Briton of mixed Jamaican & Ghanaian heritage that.
The Estonian-Briton with the imprecise speech if a non-native English speaker is still less likely to get hounded by the constable than is the Afro-Jamaican Brit who talks no different than any chav.
Seconding this: I think in England, the different between "white (including Poles, Romanians, and Turks)" and "white British" would be quite significant.
The right have successfully spun the term as more than what it means on its face.
It is now loaded with an implication that somehow white people are engaging in racist behavior in order to secure their privilege when, as far as I know anyway, that's not what the term is driving at.
An example would be living in a neighborhood (there are plenty of them) which at one point had racially restrictive covenants. Now, the white person living there today may not have ever, actively worked to restrict non-white people from owning property anywhere, let alone in that neighborhood. But the neighborhoods 2021 make up of disproportionately non-minority owners is a legacy of those covenants.
Its far from easy to figure out what the remedy should be for each instance. And the general public is lost, as the poll demonstrates.
How anyone could possibly imagine that there is no white privilege in the US is beyond me. Its about as obvious as the Sun rising in the east and setting in the West.
But the right has won the day on the debate.
There are many kinds of privilege. Where any of them manifest as impunity from the law, they become fatally corrosive. Do the likes of Bezos or Zuckerberg -- or Trump -- benefit from white privilege, or from [paper] wealth privilege, or from [perceived] authority (or ex officio) privilege? Do a very large number of lesser fry, whose identity varies with context, benefit from explicit or implicit "benefit of the doubt" privilege, which can be equally corrosive?
Stand it on its head (always stand everything on its head). We got where we are by letting people off the hook, and by being seen to let people off the hook, and by teaching and reinforcing the emotional reward of being let off the hook. That is the problem: that is what has to stop: all of the "whys" are distractions.
White privilege is where if you're pulled over by a cop you do or do not expect it to be a life-threatening situation.
…it's certainly an example of how numbers can indeed lie if they aren't treated very carefully indeed.
Splitting hairs perhaps, but I would say that the “fault” here, such as it is, is with the WORDS, not the numbers, notably but not only the use and interpretation of the word “privilege.”
Put another way, you can use words to get almost any numbers you want. The more you’re willing to manipulate your audience, the more dishonest you’re willing to be, then the more misleading the numerical results you’ll get.
And then of course there’s how you describe those numerical results, which again is use of words.
So … no. You CAN’T “prove anything with statistics.” That’s just innumerate nonsense
The left has a knack of choosing slogans and buzzwords and using them with specialized meanings that differ from their ordinary ones. "Defund the police" was a great example of such an own goal--the word defund means take away their money. In fact it normally means take away all of it, so in normal English "Defund the Police" is tantamount to abolishing the police. Then people wonder why the slogan has such meager general support. Later denials that that's what it means naturally fall on deaf ears: it feels like a bait and switch game.
White privilege is another misuse of language. The word privilege means having something to which you are not entitled as a matter of right, something that is not due to others. It might be earned or undeserved, but its essence is that it is a bonus reserved for some. But most of the examples of "white privilege," including those cited in the comments above, are not privilege. They are a matter of white people having what is everyone's right, and other people being discriminated against and deprived of their due. If you think not being abused by the police is "white privilege," then a perfectly reasonable redress of that problem would be to have the police abuse more white people, at a frequency similar to the abuse they heap on non-whites. If you realize that it is a form of discrmination against non-whites, then the only just solution is to make it stop.
So, words matter.
Concur on both counts: both terms -- although amplified and distorted by the Right far beyond their original meanings -- were in 20-20 hindsight unfortunate choices.
I think that says more about the comparative mechanisms of publicity though. Nobody has perfect foresight. The Right is just MUCH MUCH better at slinging BS.
And as to "privilege," I see both sides here. Yes resentful Whites are correct to say that they didn't get any more than their "rights." But they got their rights, while other folks didn't. And from the point of view of those who have been -- and continue to be -- denied their "rights," getting your rights is indeed a privilege.
IOW, just because White folks define it as a "right" doesn't mean that other folks seeing it as a "privilege" is in any way less valid.
Rights???? What is a "right"????? Government backed money systems??? Legal status??? I mean, you mumble slop that makes little sense.
That is not the "left". It's just a form of liberalism that can't accept that debt has limits. Not everybody has a 6 figure middle management honey pot that is white. Nor can we debt expand forever. Even white median wealth has stopped growing since 1980. Black still not growing. Only Hispanic income is growing.
Progressives clearly don't read classical socialism much less classical marxism. They basically want to force(mainly black) white's to not get middle management jobs, instead, if blacks get it all social ills will fade....you see that isn't left wing at all. Just John Stuart Mills redone. Illiberal means to supporting liberalism. The problem is, it doesn't change to total wealth pyramid. Just creates more distortions. When the wealth pyramid collapses, we are all poor.
I agree completely. "White privilege" is an oxymoronic term that is also politically obtuse: http://tony-greco.com/2020/06/25/white-privilege/
"Privilege" is a relative term. If the police can legally stop anyone at any time and demand their ID, but in fact they stop colored people more often than they stop white people, you may see this as discrimination against colored people, or as white privilege, or both; I happen to think "both" is the accurate description of the situation.
With respect to remedies, I always say "level up, don't level down". If one group is having their rights respected and another group is not, the proper remedy is to respect the rights of the second group, not disrespect the rights of the first group. In the case of your specific example, the answer is to make the police stop abusing black people rather than requiring them to abuse white people.
There is no such thing as white privilege other than debt flows. Capitalism died in 1929. The Social Democrats in 2008. All that is left is banking collapse, wave of corporate defaults and destruction of "small business" . Not only will white's suffer, but it leads to white's turning against capitalism, which won't be good for our colored friends.
Ah yes, I am privileged because I don’t use drugs, don’t sell drugs, don’t shoot people, don’t belong to a gang, don’t beat up my girlfriend, don’t have 8 kids by 8 different women, etc.
Some privilege!
You caused me to look up "stereotypical" this morning. The synonyms of hackneyed, threadbare, and trite are spot on. Thanks for the perfect example.
I've described creeps and criminals. And they come from all places... are of all races and countries of origin.
This is another example of how polls have to be constructed and worded very carefully, and interpreted skeptically, to get at true attitudes. But which is the true attitude, the one called forth with the term "white privilege", or the one about having an easier time? In the US, where these attitudes and more important, which is the one which motivates partisan voting?
"Choosing one over the other is not precisely lying with statistics, but it's certainly an example of how numbers can indeed lie if they aren't treated very carefully indeed."
It's not the numbers or the statistics that are lying, it's different questions. And the questions are not asking the same thing.
But they'll often be cited by reporters, reading casually, as equivalent, and most readers won't track down the source to see the difference in the question construction.
White privilege is easiest to see in regards to the Second Amendment. People with lighter skin tones openly exercising their 2A rights are treated by everyone else (including the police) with respect, deference, sympathy and/or ginger caution. People with darker skin tones openly exercising their 2A rights are treated by everyone else (including the police) with fear, hostility, aggression and/or summary execution. No clearer example of how white people get to enjoy more rights than black people do... which some would call "white privilege."
I don’t know… criminals with guns are making their presence known all over. Murders and shootings up a bit in lots of black communities. They seem to be exercising their 2A rights quite vigorously.
The problem is the word "privilege". Replace it with a word or words that don't imply membership in the upper class and more people will own to it. "white advantage", maybe? But really, the problem isn't that most white people do not suffer the petty (and sometimes not so petty) injustices that black people do-- the problem is with those injustices. The answer to abusive policing for example is not (I certainly hope!) to have the police be equally abusive to everyone, but to end the abuse period