[mrcharles]

Privilege does not mean you have had a problem free life. It means you haven't had to deal with certain things that other people have to deal with.

If you are a white dude, you've never had a bank officer refuse you a loan for bullshit reasons because of his own racism. You've never had your resume skipped from a stack because the person looking at it didn't like your foreign sounding name, or because they were worried you might get pregnant. You've never had coworkers contribute to a climate of harassment because "it's just a joke" about rape, sexism, race, etc.

I grew up really poor. Like, collecting bottles and exchanging for food poor with my single mother and sister. I had to work my ass off to get where I am today, but I did it by being able to get loans, being able to get apartments, by connections I made because of other white dudes.

It took me a long time to realize that privilege isn't "you have everything"; privilege is "you don't have drawbacks that other people have to deal with daily no matter their situation."

[mkal_tsr]

I'm well aware what privilege is.

I've been hit, spit on, bullied, tormented, passed over, told I wasn't a "real man", and more for being several std devs below the average height (fun fact, we make less money for this) due to a "heigh-ist" society.

So when I see people saying, "I'm not a bigot, but your orientation+race+gender means you don't know how bad some people have it" I'm going to call out their bullshit. They haven't lived my life, they don't know what I have and have not gone through. To say that one's unchangeable traits precludes their experiences and opinions is undeniably bigoted. Don't promote that, listen to what people have to say and understand the context from which it was said.

[mrcharles]

And yet in this case, it's not being bigoted to suggest that white guys complaining that people want inclusiveness is a bad thing is an invalid opinion. It would be like tall people complaining that a Brown's opened up. "Why are they catering to all those short men? The real clothes market is in average/tall people!"

You can call it bullshit if you want, I call it an argument made from a position of privilege.

But once again, I don't think you really understand privilege. Privilege does not mean that you never have to deal with discrimination. It simply means that there are kinds of discrimination you will never have to deal with.

White people have inherent privilege over black in north america. Men have inherent privilege over women in work settings. Tall people have privilege over short people when it comes to shopping for clothes. But one privilege absolutely does not imply all privilege.

[dragonwriter]

> If you are a white dude, you've never had a bank officer refuse you a loan for bullshit reasons because of his own racism.

Non-white people exist, can be in positions of economic power, and can make decisions biased against whites in such positions. If you are white in the US, you are far less likely to have had a bank officer refuse you a loan with some false pretext but really motivated by his own racism -- but being white does not mean that that did not happen to you.

> You've never had your resume skipped from a stack because the person looking at it didn't like your foreign sounding name

Er, being a "white dude" doesn't mean you don't have a foreign sounding name (White does not imply Anglo-American name, whether given name or family name), in much the same way that being a non-white dude doesn't mean you don't have an Anglo-American sounding name.

> or because they were worried you might get pregnant.

White dudes can have given names that are more commonly female, so certainly could have a resume bounced from a stack for that reason.

> You've never had coworkers contribute to a climate of harassment because "it's just a joke" about rape, sexism, race, etc.

Actually, its quite possible to experience that as a white dude, especially in a predominantly non-white or non-male workplace -- especially given a prevalent attitude that whites and males are somehow magically immune to that sort of hostility by virtue of the supposed "privilege" whites and males have in most workplaces by virtue of the on average superior positions of power.

There are real and valid reasons for discussing privilege of different groups in broad aggregate social analysis, and even in recognizing that, for networking and other reasons, that privilege can result in an advantage to members of that group compared to otherwise similarly situated members of other groups.

OTOH, its also very easy to overstate what that "privilege" really means on an individual level, and to let it become a source of blindness towards (or an outright source of license for) discriminatory abuse of power positions against those who happen to be in groups that are, on average, better situated with regard to power relations, even when the subject individual is not advantageously positioned in the relevant power relationship to the instance of discriminatory abuse.

The concept of "Privilege" is, IOW, an important part of understanding social context and how it affects individual experience, but when it makes you see people only as stereotyped members of groups and blinds you to the real individual circumstances, well, then its just another source of racism/sexism/etc.