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What is the individualist response to claims about "white privilege"?

You recently published a blog entry entitled, "Personal Motives for Benevolence" where you introduced the idea that prejudice is often formed by favoritism and not overt bigotry. Clearly, favoritism can extend to race too, in the same way it extended to your example of "professor" vs "quilter." So what is the proper response to advocates of "white privilege awareness" such as David Wise and David Sirota? David Sirota recently wrote a Salon.com article entitled "Let's hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American" where he argued that culturally,"white terrorists" are treated as lone wolves, whereas Islamists are treated as existential threats. Semi-noted Objectivist hater David Wise wrote an article called "Terrorism and Privilege: Understanding the Power of Whiteness" where he claims "White privilege is knowing that even if the Boston Marathon bomber turns out to be white, his or her identity will not result in white folks generally being singled out for suspicion by law enforcement, or the TSA, or the FBI." What is the individualist answer to this collectivist viewpoint?

Doug H. , 10.05.2013, 03:38
Idea status: completed

Comments

Joshua, 24.11.2013, 22:24
I think the most important part in any such conversation is separating the observations about society/pyschology/behavior whatever, from the normative claims and hidden assumptions about how we should address such concerns.

In this particular case, I think there are two things to focus on. First, don't let anyone get away with talking about 'white privilege' or 'male privilege' without acknowledging that qualitatively it goes both ways(the fight over quantitative is obviously complicated. Privilege as a notion has been entirely stolen by various political ideologies because the valid underlying observations were never integrated by someone other then the socialists who wanted to use it.

Secondly, its really important to deal with the ubiquitous fallacies of composition. Even if we acknowledge that being white male and straight is generally advantaged in America(which is actually a more contentious claim then I think people give credit), it doesn't mean that any particular white straight male has had a privileged life.

The short of it is that there are real and important observations with a really bad heritage of package dealing. Stay focused on ripping the package deals apart.

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