[quote=“Adelita”]
I do not see where there were any suggestions about race in the article and perhaps some of you could try to let your guard down, stop assuming and try to manage your perceptions.
There were no suggestions about race anywhere, I agree. Maybe some people are confused by what I meant by “white, middle-class privilege”, so I’ll try to explain it as best as I can.
Systematic privilege is the set of advantages automatically conferred to a group, based on the stereotypical assumptions about the people belonging to that group; it is ‘unearned, exclusive, and socially conferred’. We talk about male privilege, white privilege, straight privilege, etc.
If you are white, you may not even be aware of instances of white privilege, because they have always been part of your experience. As a white person, I have very few experiences of racial prejudice. I can enter a store, show up for a job interview, walk down a nice street in a nice neighbourhood, and there are all these assumptions made about me (not a shoplifter - reliable worker - not casing the neighbourhood for a B&E). Remember the young African American guy who was stopped at Barney’s after buying a very expensive belt? Would that have happened if he had been of a different race? Or if he had been older? Or a woman?
If you are middle class, during your formative years you acquire certain skills, standards and beliefs. Those are so automatically internalized that you assume them to be universal: it is “common sense” to dress formally for a job interview; it is “the done thing” to shake hands and make eye contact with the person interviewing you; it is “the usual protocol” to wait until the end of a job interview to ask how much the job pay. Well, not everybody knows that, but because we do, we assume everybody else is the same. The idea of someone wearing a hoodie and not a sweater to a job interview, or committing the faux-pas of asking about their salary first thing, is so foreign to us that it makes that person the deserving object of ridicule and derision.
So, going back to my comment that you quoted, what I meant to say was: the article blatantly ignores the challenges faced by non-white, underprivileged people, by assuming they are competing on the same level playing field as the rest of us.[/quote]
I disagree. One word that you used a lot in your last post was “assume.” Your assumptions may differ than mine and mine may be different than the next guys. You’re assuming that he was talking about a specific race or “non-white” yet many who are the so-called privileged white have the same challenges as those in other races. You’re also feeding into the stereo-typing of racial groups with your comments. It is a level playing field and some of the points that the author of the article made will make all of the difference, such as getting off your arse. There are lazy people in all racial groups.