In our society today, many people point fingers and place the blame for undesirable issues such as prejudice and tolerance. It is easier to look to others rather than to look within. No one wants to take responsibility for their roles and partaking in race and gender discrimination, even though we all are guilty at some point in time of being less than “fair.” So why do people agree there are gender and racial discrimination problems in our society, but they are not willing to accept that they in some way contribute to the overall issue? In order for there to be any change or movement towards an even more accepting world, all people must take responsibility for their shortcomings.
While watching privileged, I found myself a little uneasy about the message. I do feel that people can be “privileged” in certain ways, but this all depends on how you define privilege. Is it the amount of money you have? The education you were able to obtain? I personally believe there are many ways you could consider a person to be privileged. Most people want what they don’t or can’t have, its just human nature. I could sit and consider someone to be better off than I am just if they had something I didn’t have. Who is to say that we can limit being privileged to how much money you have? I consider the girl who can shop everyday for new clothes with no regards to price to be more privileged than me. My qualifications of privilege may be petty in comparison to the racial prejudice our country faces, but I feel that privilege comes in more forms than money and skin color.
So why do I feel that these two points go together? Why do I believe that privilege is how you define it? That the prominence of it in this country is based on the fact that people place the blame for discrimination on others? The idea of privilege is only as strong as the people who allow it. When will we start taking personal responsibility for the roles we take in prejudice acts and take effective steps towards changing racial and gender views on privilege? When will people realize that most people can be considered privileged in some way or another, and the more strain we put on the idea that it is based on race and gender, the further we are pushing ourselves away from equality.
The two links below I found particularly interesting. The first link is about cultural success and the second is about and the second was the Wikipedia definition for White privilege. I found it quite interesting.
http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/webfeatures_viewpoints_dont_blame_culture/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_privilege
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Privilege is simply unearned favor. It can come in many forms, but in most cases, because it is unearned, it is considered ill-gotten. I would be hard pressed to agree that a person has more privilege than me simply because they have more education or more money in the bank than I do. White Privilege goes way beyond economic wealth, but in many cases it does seem to allow for economic gain to occur. The first article you hyperlinked eludes to this. In the late ninety’s, when the economic market was expanding, everyone no matter what racial group seemed to be prospering. But after the dot.com collapse, almost 25% of Blacks found themselves on the lower end of the poverty level. A white man with a criminal record had a better chance of getting a job than a black man with no criminal record, almost as if the white man is excused for lawlessness, if the crime was not too heinous. That is, in a nut shell the perfect example of white privilege. I have seen it in my own community growing up. If a group of upper-middle class white high school students are caught putting graffiti on a wall, it is just misguided youths with poor parent supervision. If a group of young Blacks, Latinos, or Asians did the same thing, than it was called Gang activity, even if they wrote the same messages or the same types of messages. When I was a teenager, the local mall was central location for high school students to congregate, especially the movie theater. It was interesting how, a group of black youth group members, who were at the movies for a church activity, got looks from the mall security force, while the groups of white upper-middle class teenagers were utterly ignored. What was even more interesting was the mall security force member was also black.
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