My HOT TOPIC of the day is this new phrase we are all throwing around.
It has probably been around for along time just popularized now
In the 1980s Peggy McIntosh, a Women’s Studies scholar at Wellesley wrote a paper called “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies.”
Privilege/ “White Privilege”
From Wikipedia so it MUST be true Peggy McIntosh is an American feminist and anti-racism activist, the associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women says whites in Western societies enjoy advantages that non-whites do not experience, as “an invisible package of unearned assets“. White privilege denotes both obvious and less obvious passive advantages that white people may not recognize they have, which distinguishes it from overt bias or prejudice.
SO even if you are not prejudice which i believe EVERYONE is in one way or another you are.
So here is my question if people who are white are privileged and that is why we can not get along in the USA then WHY do blacks and whites live pretty seamlessly in the UK? Did Briton not have slaves? No they did and truthfully they were the ones who made a bunch of money off the trafficking of slaves to America. But lets not pick on the the Brits there is plenty of blame to go around on that mess.
RACE or NOT RACE?
I was reading from a black American living in the UK named Angela Mackie-Rutledge who said there were more interracial relation ships there, and people who have lived in the UK for years now tend to assimilate more into the British culture and thus face less racism than black people who have just immigrated from Africa or the Caribbean. She also mentioned that in the UK racism is defined differently.
“Racism v National Origin
I have found it very interesting that what Americans call “national origin” is referred to as race here. For instance, if someone made a derogatory comment about Welsh people it would be construed as a racist statement — even if the person saying it was white.”
SO what if it has nothing to do with skin color.
What if the real issue is white black or green
Anti-Privileged = poorly educated, groups with few opportunities & jobs.
SO how do we fix that problem? Some people like to say we can not the system is flawed against people and so they are set up to fail and there is no way out of the situation. End of story. Sounds like a defeatist attitude to me.
My BIG issue is
when you say privileged or white privilege it makes it sound like that person is better than the unprivileged person. That’s just not the case. Anyone can succeed if they want to and if they have the right circumstances.
I am in favor of school choice for that exact reason if your neighborhood school sucks you should be able to choose another and if that crappy school doesn’t get any money they are a lousy school and should be gutted and started over.
Lots of kids in Salem NH are not “supposed” to be here that is a FACT many teachers will attest to they “live with” grandparents or whatever excuse they give because their Mass schools suck. I don’t blame them for having to cheat the system because the system is broke. But we need to help them to help themselves and then the people who want to succeed will. But we are not helping the “underprivileged” by propping them up and expecting them to thrive. There are schools where the teachers send home food for the children for the weekend because they “KNOW” they will not eat if they do not. WHAT is THAT !! in America where we have food stamps and welfare there are still children who are not eating?? Flawed system. Drugs are a huge problem in NH and that is a lot of the problem i know and we have less issues up here with black and white and more black and white vs Hispanic. But people do not “dislike” each other because of color or ethnicity. They dislike each other because of actions.
If you hate from me because i am “privileged” and you are not isn’t that just as bad? You are hating me because of something i apparently had no control over. I disagree the word as a whole.
Privilege : a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only
to a particular person or group of people.
What about J K Rowling who wrote Harry Potter as she lived in her car with her children homeless. Was she privileged? No. She is now! She was talented! And worked hard to get what she deserved. She could have given up and just said well the system is stacked against me I will never amount to anything. Like Oprah. She did pretty well for herself.
I am not saying some people have it easier than others but some people have been here longer a person whose grandparents came over from somewhere else and worked all their lives in a mill so their kids could work all their lives at factory so there kids could be the first in the family to go to college and took years to pay off their loans so THEIR kids could go to college is naturally going to be in better shape than a person that just got here.
A person who’s parents were junkies and had to quit school and get a job so their family could eat or join the military so their family could have a place to live and be able to go to college for is going to have to work hard to make it.
What about the mom who worked and went to night school so she could support her family after her husband left. I don’t care if these people were black, white or purple they deserve what they got cause they earned it. They did not just arrive off the boat and have the government say welcome to America here is a house, food and healthcare but that is ANOTHER whole BLOG!
But the blame game isn’t going to make it any easier it is only dividing us into groups again when we are trying to get along every day in our own towns don’t let the media and government break us into groups we are all Americans and we need to remember we may not be perfect but we are a lot better off than a lot of countries and we got this way by working at it for a long fricking time.
“When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact…that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance; We’ve learned to fly the air like birds, we’ve learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we haven’t learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters…”― Martin Luther King Jr.
