Fuck yes.

[trinityvixen]

It doesn't have to be white privilege. Privilege is just as insidious in any form, but because our country's class imbalance skews along color lines (predominantly, though, of course, there are exceptions), it often manifests as racial.

Read the whole thing because it's brilliant.

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

(Is it "black privilege" that got Obama lecturing at UChicago law despite having no publications? That got Obama the nod for president over essentially his white, more experienced clone, John Edwards?)

See, your privilege is showing again. You assume that number of publications should be a big part of a job assignment. Some times it is, some times it is not. It's a historically white argument that the "better" (read: more statistically accomplished) candidate is ignored and that the affirmative action candidate is put in instead. That's white privilege right there--to assume that Obama didn't, through some other means, make himself the best candidate for the job.

Or, as the case may be, the best candidate who would take that job. The University of Chicago is not located in the best of neighborhoods. On top of that, most universities need to do significant neighborhood outreach to assure their neighbors that despite having the wealth of small nations, the university is part of the community at large. Someone with Obama's demonstrated community outreach background might have seemed just the person to genuinely (or not) reach out to the community.

The Edwards thing is more a consequence of history--you can put Adlai Stevenson forward as many times as you want, he won't win. That's why we have, for much of the latter half of last century and all of this one, tended to put forward new candidates to challenge incumbents. Because if Al Gore or John Kerry didn't win the first time, what hope have they the second time? Edwards, unfortunately, proved himself not so slick as shit when he went up against Cheney. So, he's done.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Guh? (on the publication thing--you've got a point on Edwards) That's not a white privilege thing, that's a "the way universities and law schools work" sort of thing. I don't think Obama got the job because he's black--he got it because he was a charismatic state senator who was editor of the Harvard Law Journal. Either way, I'm sure there were con law scholars far more qualified who could have taken the job. But when you start attributing everything to race or "racial privilege", then it gets hard to explain minority successes, doesn't it?

Chicago is the #6 law school in the country. They'd have no trouble finding candidates.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Were they #6 when Obama went? Where are the resumes of the other people considered that prove there were better candidates? Why isn't "charismatic state senator" a better explanation for why he got the job than "black privilege?

I'm not saying you don't have a point about the articles. But you just pointed out a very good reason to hire him that, again, had nothing to do with color. Yet you brought up the specter of color with the "black privilege" in the first place. I'm not attributing anything to racial privilege. I was saying there are probably plenty of reasons he got the job unrelated to race. You just proved my point: reverse racism is mostly not true.

However, white privilege is a demonstrative thing. You want to believe it's not true in McCain's case, fine, you cling to that. But to say it's not still in effect in the world today, America especially, is ignorance.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

They were probably higher than #6 at the time, actually; NYU's rise is relatively recent, and Chicago has been declining.

The point I'm trying to make isn't that Obama got the job due to "black privilege", but that it's as silly to say that a bunch of things in that article were due to "white privilege" as it is to say that Obama got his lawprof job due to "black privilege." Yeah, there's "white privilege" in America, but "Republicans don't hate Bristol Palin" has much more to do with her mom being a Republican than with her being white, as one example.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

At this point, you'd be hard pressed to separate the GOP from the white privilege. Because of its hostile policies towards minorities, the GOP is whiter than ever, and therefore more prone to fits over white, male privilege than ever.