[Marxism] Defining White Privilege

[Greg McDonald <sabocat59@xxxxxxx>]

Taking up where Anthony left off:

http://whiteprivilege.com/definition/

Defining “White Privilege”

by Kendall Clark

     white privilege, a social relation
      1. a. A right, advantage, or immunity granted to or enjoyed by  
white persons beyond the common advantage of all others; an exemption  
in many particular cases from certain burdens or liabilities.
      b. A special advantage or benefit of white persons; with  
reference to divine dispensations, natural advantages, gifts of  
fortune, genetic endowments, social relations, etc.
      2. A privileged position; the possession of an advantage white  
persons enjoy over non–white persons.
      3. a. The special right or immunity attaching to white persons  
as a social relation; prerogative.
      b. display of white privilege, a social expression of a white  
person or persons demanding to be treated as a member or members of  
the socially privileged class.
      4. a. To invest white persons with a privilege or privileges;  
to grant to white persons a particular right or immunity; to benefit  
or favor specially white persons; to invest white persons with  
special honorable distinctions.
      b. To avail oneself of a privilege owing to one as a white person.
      5. To authorize or license of white person or persons what is  
forbidden or wrong for non–whites; to justify, excuse.
      6. To give to white persons special freedom or immunity from  
some liability or burden to which non–white persons are subject; to  
exempt.

I started WhitePrivilege.com in order to make the structures of white  
privilege—its causes and effects—less socially invisible, primarily  
by pointing out instances in U.S. society where it is or seems to be  
at work. I needed, therefore, a good working definition of the social  
phenomenon I was looking for. I hit upon the long, detailed definition 
—which has been used in antiracism education in many educational  
contexts, including a wide–range of colleges and universities and  
even PBS—one day, rather suddenly, while talking to a friend of mine,  
the philosopher Bijan Parsia, who’s spent a good deal of time working  
on the philosophical theory of oppression. “White
privilege is after all,” Bijan said, “a form of social privilege per  
se.”

If that’s true, one good way to define racialized social privilege is  
by reference to social privilege generally. In other words, you can  
figure out what white privilege is in part by figuring out what any  
social privilege is. So I walked over to my copy of the Oxford  
English Dictionary, looked up the word “privilege”, and after reading  
it through a few times, I realized that if I rewrote the definition  
of privilege to refer to white people, rather than people in general,  
I would have the basis of a working definition. And so that’s what I  
did, with a few modifications and changes as seemed
appropriate.

In that sense, the definition is like a working hypothesis, subject  
to change and adjustment as we accumulate and study more and more  
facts. I have from time to time tried to make the defintion less  
verbally complex (because I initially didn’t realize that the OED’s  
language is a bit stilted for everyday use) but its main conceptual  
claims have remained stable.

Why is it important to define “white privilege” so carefully?  
Because, in part, many people want to deny that it exists at all,  
especially in response to other people’s assertions that it is at  
work in some particular situation, that it exists unjustly and so  
should be dismantled. This pattern of assertion and denial is itself  
racialized: for the most part, people of color say white people enjoy  
white privilege, while white people for the most part deny not only  
that they have it, but that such a thing even exists. I have been  
assured countless times by white people that there is no such thing as
white privilege and that the very idea is nonsensical.

(For example, among the objections to the idea of white privilege,  
there is one which deserves some consideration here. Given the fact  
of a systematically unjust society, such as is the case in the U.S.,  
the differential possession of basic human and political rights  
becomes a privilege. Yes, every person by virtue of being a person  
has the right to enjoy and possess certain rights. But, in fact, over  
the long course of U.S. history only white people have enjoyed and  
possessed the rights which they loudly proclaimed were fundamentally  
human rights. I think it is fitting and accurate, in such an unjust  
situation, to call the racially differential possession and enjoyment  
of human rights a privilege arising out of particular social relations.)

In studying historical examples and theories of oppression, it  
becomes clear that social (in)visibility is an important strategy.  
Early feminists make this point over and over. If men and women  
equally believe, for example, that women are by their very nature  
subordinate to men, then gender oppression seems natural, inevitable,  
timeless. If you can design structures of oppression which are  
invisibile, which seem natural, they will be more effective than  
structures which are visible. If you can convince everyone, but  
especially members of the oppressed group itself, that the way things  
are is natural or inevitable or unavoidable, people will be less  
likely to challenge the way things are.

If that idea is correct, then we should expect the very idea of  
racialized social privilege—that is, social privilege which attaches  
to a group or groups which are identified racially (whether one  
understands ‘races’ culturally or scientifically)—to be invisible  
socially. We should expect that members of the dominant group, the  
one which has the privilege, to deny that it exists or that it could  
exist. Which is precisely what we white folks do (for the most part)  
when faced with claims by people of color that we enjoy social  
privilege by virtue of the social fact that we are taken to be white.

To sum up, (1) white privilege should be defined carefully because it  
is contested; (2) that contestation is itself racialized, (3) which  
is what we should expect, since (4) socially invisible structures of  
oppression are more effective and enduring than socially visible ones.

We define it in order to make it a problem for white people, to show  
that it is an unjust, historical creation. Whatever has been made by  
human hands can be unmade by others.

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