A Brief History of White Privilege
"Like
most PC concepts, “white privilege” has never been adequately defined.
Quite deliberately so -- the idea is to have a concept so elastic and
amorphous that it can be stretched to cover any given situation,
distorted through multiple dimensions, and immediately changeable if
necessary. White privilege is a tactic rather than an idea, and to ask
for a specific definition is to ask for something that has never been
and cannot be.
But
it does feature one basic element, not easily denied or cast aside,
that, in fact, the concept cannot work at all without. That is the
contention that benefits -- social, economic, academic, and historical
-- are automatically conferred to an individual simply as a matter of
being white (don’t ask for a definition of “white” either -- you won’t
get one). Whites have always had it easy, have always gone to the head
of the line, have always eaten high off the hog. White immigrants always
arrived aboard the Queen Mary, were always ushered through
immigration first, and were automatically assigned upper-class positions
within the American system. And all of this was accomplished, without
exception, on the backs of minorities, which, again without exception,
means blacks."
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