Be honest WASPs: why does AA really bother you?

[dashrashi]

Cady, omg, this thread.

I tried?

No, I saw. It's just..."What white privilege? I don't feel privileged!" over and over and over...oy.

[Susan B. Anthony]

Cady, omg, this thread.

I tried?

No, I saw. It's just..."What white privilege? I don't feel privileged!" over and over and over...oy.

As a white person, I feel that my life is hard!

[Astro]

As a white person, I feel my penis is hard.

[Susan B. Anthony]

As a white person, I feel my penis is hard.

I feel that too.

[goaliechica]

As a white person, I feel my penis is hard.

lulz

[mbw]

BitchPhD has a very timely post up here, which includes a discussion of white privilege and redlining minority neighborhoods.

[BearlyLegal]

BitchPhD has a very timely post up here, which includes a discussion of white privilege and redlining minority neighborhoods.

I liked her post, and the description of the long-term economic impact of housing and other discrimination is 100% correct.

For the 75.2% of whites who own property, this is a pretty clear advantage. But what of the 24.8% of whites who own no property, and others who do not come from families that were able to capitalize on the advantages of pre-civil rights laws? For them, these advantages don't exist. Many of them live in the ghetto or in conditions of squalor in double-wide trailer homes, no better than poor African Americans.

The author makes an excellent point:

If your folks owned their own home, if they made middle-class wages, if they went to college, then they damn well *did* benefit from racism--consciously or no--and that benefit was certainly passed on to you in the form of educational opportunities, educational expectations, the ability to pay for poo like summer camps and after school programs, access to things like museums and music lessons, boy scouts or 4H programs, organized sports and community swimming pools, borrowing down payments from grandma and grandpa, knowing about financial aid forms because mom and dad filled 'em out back in their own day, and all sorts of other hard economic advantages.

But there are tens of millions of white people whose folks never owned a thing, who didn't go to college, who weren't even necessarily in the US to benefit from racism --consciously or no-- and therefore that benefit was not passed on to them in any form.

Again, I take no affront to the concept of socioeconomic advantage. But individual whites are not necessarily recipients of this kind of advantage. Stereotyping an entire race based on the advantages that 75% of that race has enjoyed is ridiculous.

[dashrashi]

Bearly--that's only one very specific and narrow aspect of white privilege. There are plenty of others that you get, even if you're poor or new to the country. See the checklist earlier in the thread.

[Susan B. Anthony]

Stereotyping an entire race based on the advantages that 75% of that race has enjoyed is ridiculous.

Good lord. It's not stereotyping.

[lawandethan]

1.  AA in law school is just plain unfair.
2.  Diversity in today's context means race-based screening; it does not mean anything helpful or help anyone trying to learn the law.