Explaining "Privilege' to Straight White Male nerds....

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Which is why Hillary Clinton is president.

Oh, wait...

Allow me to help you with some reality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... bPmdePpfG0

Like I said bubbles once you get away from what you see on TV in magazines and newspapers then reality starts to set in its a hard pill to swallow.

Yeah that makes perfect sense a competition where the winner is decided before it is even announced great example she still ran and more than likely will run and will in the future besides being president is a joke look at bush and Obama and that becomes clear as day. Maybe not though seems to me one of the main reasons people get elected to a presidency is that they do what people tell them to do Hillary seems to do what she wants and doesn't like being told what to do unlike her weak hubby.

Eh, I think where you're born has a bigger impact than what gender and color you come out; you could hit the genetic lottery and be smart, attractive, driven, etc, but it wouldn't make a bit of difference if you were born in some war torn hell hole, while the less "gifted" person born to a minority demographic in America would have much better odds for success in life.

Exactly this is America home of mostly white people so there is an illusion that being a white man gives you special powers when in fact it is just simple math. Go to an Asian country and being a white male wont do you much good you will have to prove you not an idiot first if you are a white woman though get ready for the red carpet. Same as in any country if you are a minority you will deal with problems and if you are born into a place where there is nothing but devastation and strife then luck is your only friend no matter what color you are.

I know hard to deal with reality always best to deal with having your world view distorted by trying to make jokes. Don't worry iam sure you will learn to live in the real world some day by that time though it will probably be to late like they say ignorance is bliss.

Theres providing for them and then theres passing on so much wealth they are never forced to learn the value of hard work.

That is another issue people should be able to give money to their children but when they do nothing but be bums that's just wrong. One of the biggest problems with new generations is their inability to contribute to society an any way the ultra rich bums are a prime example of wasted resources.

No. Never, ever, ever mention privilege to me. It's a stupid argument.

For one, the most important point, just in case you stop goddamn listening to me when I inevitably get angry, which trust me, I have a right to be so, when did anything get solved when people started arguing over who has it worst? Hmm? That only seperates us. Do you really want that? For every gender/sexual orientation/gender orientation/so on to be seperate, socially? Furthermore, claiming that any one persons struggles are not important is simply another version of the kind of discrimination all good people on this planet want to stop.

And next, more personally, let me tell you a story. I am a white, straight male. I live in the UK, perhaps even more likely to be economically privileged than in the US, which does not have things like the NHS. As I am on this site, you may be able to guess, I have aspergers syndrome. But that doesn't matter, right? I'm white, straight and male, so obviously, I am on "the easiest difficulty".

I was bullied horrifically in school. It was the full package, that one. From name calling, to rumour spreading, all the way up to attempts on my life. By the time it got that bad, it was too late in my school career to uproot myself. Even then, I ended up in that crappy school because, quite frankly, the other secondaries in the area refused to "deal with" my aspergers. But no, still, white, straight, male="privileged."

Did I mention I'm horrifically ugly? I didn't? Oh well, doesn't matter, only ugly women suffer. Clearly, I could not develop image issues, because I'm "privileged".

I got out of school. I survived that hell. But it wouldn't leave me alone. I was terrified of normal people. I saw them everywhere, and to my eyes, they were monsters. But I continued. I struggled, but I did a series of courses designed to help my employability, now I saw the GSCEs I struggled so hard for were essentially useless in a recession economy. I went to uni to follow a foolish dream of filmmaking, one I still follow today, simply because it seemed as if any career was now a foolish dream anyway. May as well go for the foolish dream I actually want. There, for a short time, I felt like I belonged, but then realised I didn't.

I met a girl. It didn't work out. Wasn't her fault, but I didn't see it that way at the time. This was my first proper romance, at the age of 18, and I understood even less about it than any other thing about normal humanity. I ripped myself apart, I ripped her life apart, I ripped my best friend's life apart, trying to figure out why. It was only a year later my friends figured out how to tell me, and I finally redeemed myself after a year of near madness, pain, and anger almost constantly. I don't think I could ever say sorry enough, and every time I think about it, I feel I should burned alive as the abomination I am. In that incident, I realised; I could learn to socialise, I could hide my aspergers, but I would never truly be normal.

But such a dire realisation doesn't matter. I'm "privileged".

Now I am at uni. In final year. Not enjoying it at all. The uni does not understand that I think differently from most people. I need a job so I don't end up in my dead end of a home town again, which would set all the progress I have gained in the last four years to zero in time. I am in one of my bad points. The ones I go to CBT to desperately try to fix. I spend most days switching between too hopeless and depressed to do anything, and too angry to focus. The uni gets in the way of my treatment, whilst simultaneously not caring that I could no more write my dissertation with two broken arms than I could right now.

But none of that matters, because according to you, I am privileged. I have never suffered. Things will turn out right for me.

They won't. I can tell you they won't. I have suffered, am suffering, and will continue to suffer, and unlike those who are supposedly not privileged, nobody gives a damn for my plight, I could die and nobody would care. So screw your damn privilege. You don't know a goddamn thing.

People need to look up intersectionality -- it's about what's p*ssing you off.

Discussions of "privilege" cause friction all over the place. I.e. There are feminist "brown" women who have conflicts with upper-middle class white women feminists (some of the white feminists deny the importance of race -- they think that gender discrimination dwarfs it so much that racial issues are irrelevant).

Intersectionality is about that. It's about how privilege is not as simple as "you're white and male, so being disabled and poor doesn't matter" -- of course it matters. In that case you lack non-disabled and non-poor privilege, and the problem is that some people won't recognize that.

Thomas81 wrote:

Wealth does not mean a person will or will not have strong work ethic. Some of the hardest workers I have ever met were born to wealth, while the poorest were perfectly content to just skirt by. I think this is the unspoken point of the whole privilege argument. In reality the color of your skin isn't what stops you from attaining more "privilege" in life. It is probably the level you judge yourself according to your race. For example, if you were a Wendigo and the majority of other Wendigos were rich then you would feel greater pressure to be like the rest and excel. Imagine you were an employer and you had two candidates vying for the position. One of the men is a smartly dressed, well spoken, and dark as the far side of the moon black man. The other is a sloppily dressed white guy who calls you dude. You bet your a$$ that any sensible person would hire the black guy in a heartbeat.

Last edited by Sherlock03 on 09 Nov 2013, 4:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

To be honest in such a situation it would most likely be the same. When your that poor your pretty much equally screwed regardless of ethnicity.The only difference would be based on family history. The assumption that being caucasian instantly leads to the idea that you will be rich or racist or an oppressor or treated with respect by stuck up yuppees. When I get looked down on as subhuman by yuppees if I got ran over by their fancy BMW they would just keep driving.

Yeah, that's twisted, but are you completely unaware of the selective editing that goes on with 'reality shows'? Let alone the facts that a woman beating on her partner is less likely to kill them by accident than a man beating on another person, and the fact that the above post wasn't about physical abuse, but about having sex with someone other than your partner and how society reacts to it.

Your response is, 'being president isn't really that great anyway' ?! Really? Hillary is smart, ambitious, straight, white, and hard-working, and no one could deny that she really wanted that position. So your post above is inaccurate, regardless of the sour-grapes-by-proxy that you're doing.

In some cities, only half of NT black men are employed. Would you even have an $800 a month job if you were an AS black man in that type of area?