On privilige

[sqbr]

EDIT: *cough*, meant to post this to debunkingwhite. But hey, you guys may be able to help too :)(*) If you're unfamilar with the concept of "white privilige" I reccomend White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.

A statement I've seen pop up fairly frequently is "I don't want to give up my white privilege, I want to share it with everyone". I've seen enough criticisms of this statement not to say it myself, but I don't have quite enough of a grip on it's wrongness to explain it to other people.

The counterarguments that I can see (which combine together in complex ways):
-Maybe POC don't want to live exactly like white people, but to have their own lifestyles validated (ie it's like turning women into men to remove male privilige)
-It may not be possible (ie it's like giving all peasants a castle to remove class privilige)
-Certain priviliges only work if there's another, less priviliged group (ie "not getting suspected of shoplifting")

But I have a feeling that's not all there is to it, and can't express it very well.

So, in words of one syllable: why is this wrong? It is wrong, right?

(*)n.b. to sonnlich, I realise this oversimplifies the position you were taking in our particular discussion, but I decided to pare down the question to it's simplest form rather than adding a bunch of qualifiers etc, esp. since I'm interested in general.

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

I just tend to think that when you have equality, everybody wins, overall. Equal doesn't have to mean identical, after all.

Absolutely. I mean, I think white people have already lost a lot of privilige over the past century or so, but I also think we're all better off.

Something I totally meant to make a bit point in my reply and compltely failed to say at all: obviously I can't speak for you. But I often find myself somewhat alienated by non-white protagonists. Not enough to stop me enjoying a story, but enough to be noticable. The fact that I don't feel this way very often is a privilige. One I am quite happy to give up, especially since I'm sure I'd get over it pretty quickly wth enough exposure to a wider variety of protagonists (same way I've learned from a young age to identify with men and non-australians, etc), but it's still there.

[tevriel.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see.

I don't feel alienated by non-white protagonists. In thinking about this as I wrote a whole lot of text I just deleted because I realised I was on the wrong track, this is probably because I've never really seen a television or movie protagonist with whom I do identify, ethnically speaking. My ethnic background is moderately odd, and I would argue that white South Africans tend to be portrayed rather negatively as a rule, and first generation immigrants are generally treated as a study in alienation all by themselves - which I can't really argue with.

When mild cultural alienation is the norm for you, alienation in films is lost in the noise. I don't really see protagonists in films as people I would identify with no matter what their skin colour, so I'd perhaps be putting it better if I were to say that I don't feel more alienated by non-white protagonists than I do by white ones. (Often less, since a non-white protagonist is more likely to have a mindset that encompasses non-Eurocentric notions, which, when your cultural background is partly African, matters.)

Skin colour isn't everything, not by a long chalk...

[alias_sqbr]

Oh, yes, I mean cultural/ethnic background more than skin colour, although of course the two are pretty closely linked.

Anyway, that's really interesting. Hmm.

I feel the need to note that I do sometimes identify very strongly with non-white protagonists more than white ones, ie Gunn from Angel(*), it's more of a tendency than a rule.

(*)Which I guess ties into me finding few characters to identify with class wise. But that's a whole nother thing :)