“White privilege? Didn’t you already discuss this and debunk it?” you say. Indeed, I did! But seeing as its almost constantly in the news these days, I think it deserves another look.
As alluded to above, and as anybody with two functioning eyes can see, the media and culture of the west today are not particularly pro-Caucasian. There are constant articles railing about white privilege, white nationalism, those goddamn Beckys with nice hair, and so forth.
I feel that I discussed this thoroughly, as have many others, and yet the endless admonitions keep going: Are all of these people just raving crackpots, or perhaps “in” on a gigantic civilizational scam? Or is there a grain of truth to their complaints? The POC blame most of their problems on it, Caucasians don’t think it exists at all, and ultimately we get nowhere arguing this way.
As somebody who is half white and half POC, but is tall and sexually attractive enough to not be seen as Asian at first glance, I am in a perfect position to analyze this from a neutral standpoint…and long-time readers can probably guess why already. But more on that below.
I feel that the issue of privilege can be looked at from two angles: explicit and implicit. And in regards to explicit privilege, let’s be blunt: There are zero (0) explicit legal measures by which the blue eyed devils have power over anybody in America today. There are no more “gentleman’s agreements”, redlining, Jim Crow, restrictive covenants, or anything similar. Eddie Murphy’s “White Like Me” skit from SNL is still hilarious, but it’s simply not what happens.
White Americans certainly don’t conspire to keep down minorities with each other—that would be unseemly. Publically at least, everybody is virtue signaling like a Pharisee, with CEOs and college deans fighting tooth and nail to induct minorities into their organizations—and you can follow one of my favorite Twitter accounts, “Woke Capital”, for more examples of corporations and universities being fully behind the liberal agenda.
One can argue about the sincerity of all this—white elites are rightfully mocked for being a bit hypocritical with their love of minorities (ever notice how they all seem to end up living in 99% white communities?)—but I think it’s fair to say that at least to *some* extent they genuinely want to help the “poor benighted heathens”, patronizing though it may be.
Better yet, if you want to disprove the notion of de jure white supremacy, look at economic statistics. I detailed this in the last article, but to summarize:
Did you see how regular old Anglo-Americans are #7 in the richest demographics? It seems very odd to me that “white supremacist AmeriKKKa” would set itself up to be in 7th place.
The crime statistics paint a similar picture: Caucasians get arrested MORE than Asians in America, and the idea that racist Americans would set up society to be in second place, again, seems very strange to me.
But I don’t want all the above to imply that minorities don’t see that explicit white privilege doesn’t exist, they understand this damn well—look at how Hispanics and Arabs and Subcontinental Indians once fought tooth and nail to be considered white, and now they fight tooth and nail to NOT be considered white. Because there genuinely WAS white privilege in the past, but no longer. They’re smart and they can see the writing on the wall: being a white American is a disadvantage in many ways.
So as you can see there are no explicit legal advantages and are in fact several legal disadvantages…but with that being said, I do still think there is a very small grain of truth to the concept of white privilege.
As I said there are no hard explicit laws, but there are…let’s call them soft “cultural assumptions” or tropes that are remnants of a long-ago time of overt white supremacy, and linger in our collective cultural memory to this day. If there is any white privilege that exists today, it exists entirely because of these. These are found in all kinds of media, and as a huge nerd I feel again that I have a fair amount of knowledge on this subject.
These tropes are not anything that anyone is doing consciously (as I always say, there is no evil cabal of white men deliberately thinking about these), but they come from century old silent films and centuries old literature; tropes that have traveled through the gestalt ether and still form our cultural understanding to this day.
For example, the assumption that a tall white man is a better leader than others. There has certainly been no shortage of “white men comes to a tribe and becomes it leader by virtue of being better than the natives at their own culture” stories over the centuries, and despite all the conscious efforts to subvert this idea in recent times, the fact that many movie stars and directors and producers and writers (not to mention consumers) ARE white people means this won’t go away so easily.
And of course the big one—fuckability! Namely, the idea that white people are better looking than other kinds of people (and OKCupid data bears this out, especially for men). Here’s a test: when you see somebody writing a long diatribe against white privilege, ask yourself if that person gets laid regularly, and with high quality partners. Because I guarantee they don’t.
I personally have on stake in this issue, but I imagine that if you’re a Brazilian, a Filipino, or some other ethnicity whose women are slobbered over by sex tourists, and you see some dorky white man banging all your women just by virtue of being the “white god” that awes the short, swarthy ladies of your tribe…there’s the only true example of white privilege that exists, and I wouldn’t blame that guy for being angry.
A lot of the things considered “European beauty standards” are, in fact, universal (symmetry of face, tall height, thinness, etc.) But with that said, some beauty standards ARE subjective and based upon white supremacist ideals that are consciously long forgotten but still followed implicitly—to cite one example the idea of long, soft flowing hair being better than kinky hair (the inverse of the “white god” thing in the previous paragraph).
Is white woman’s hair inherently better than black women’s? I don’t see any reason why it is—and if you need me to tell you that a black woman with a symmetrical face and trim figure is infinitely more attractive than a white tub of shit with long flowing hair, you’re an idiot. As lame as it sounds, I would consider that a legitimate form of (dare I say it?) white privilege.
Do these arguments sound petty and ultimately ridiculous? They should—90% of what woke black women complain about really revolves around this when you get down to brass tacks. And naturally when you see an Indian/East Asian man complaining about white privilege, I guarantee resentment of the “white god getting laid” drives their entire argument. As I have regularly said, my racial resentments utterly melted away when I started getting laid regularly. But I have the ability to “walk in someone’s shoes”, and I can forgive those who are sexually frustrated for acting irrational.
To cite one example of anti-whiteness being rooted in sexual rage and media representation (again stemming from the aforementioned sexual rage): Edward Said’s celebrated Orientalism, in this case an unusually specific (and not entirely inaccurate) one: a lot of decadent Westerners DID use the Middle East as a fleshpot, running their way through the women AND boys of the Levant—leading to long-standing stereotypes of the Middle East as being feminine and decadent. Mr. Said no doubt resented that, and why shouldn’t he?
Are white people inherently better looking than Said’s people? I don’t think so, I think there are beautiful and ugly people in both races, but the strapping colonial soldier is much more sexually attractive to women than the downtrodden man of the east who just took a shellacking from the soldier—once again it’s the old “white god” idea.
A lot of these Orientalist works portray the decadent, feminized East as a place for the masculine white man to conquer. This is a trope that lingers in our collective cultural gestalt from centuries ago, and there is perhaps a small grain of truth to it (or there was at one time). So too is the idea of the white man who “saves” the exotic woman from her shitty culture.
But let us make it clear here that white people have made great strides in amending this—hardly a day goes by when some (usually white) person doesn’t complain about this exact thing. So one can hardly say that white people are callous imperialists continuing these portrayals in a deliberate effort to stomp upon the benighted POC.
And yet one can’t get rid of these cultural biases overnight. Why should you expect white people to wake up and portray themselves as losers 100% of the time? In fact, they DO portray themselves badly quite often, which is amazing in and of itself, but it’s impossible to expect it 100% of the time.
Why shouldn’t a white filmmaker or cartoonist make his hero look like him? Would you not do the same if you were in his shoes? For that matter, if you could be the “white sexual god”, wouldn’t you take advantage of that? Hell, I look close enough to a “Dirty white” to have used that to my own advantage in my younger days.
Instead, I’ll say it again, if you want to get rid of these cultural assumptions, people of color need to make their own media. And make them popular and well-liked so people rethink their cultural biases.
That is the only way you can accomplish anything, and get rid of the few fragments of “white privilege” that actually exist. Because spending 23 hours of the day complaining about white people and then spending the 24th going “WHITE PEOPLE HELP, GIVE ME BETTER MOVIE ROLES WHITE PEOPLE!” is incredibly lazy, cowardly, and hypocritical.