The Myth of White Male Privilege

Kentucky coal miner. Image source: National Archives and Records Administration

One thing I hear a lot from people in the social justice movement is a demand that straight white men like me both acknowledge and check our privilege. These demands are based on bad thinking.

The first problem with this thinking is that (get ready for it SJWs) it enforces a socially constructed privilege binary that doesn't reflect reality. It says that there are only two conditions that a person can occupy in American society. You are either oppressed, or you're privileged. There's no middle ground for people who go through life without suffering any special oppression or enjoying any special privilege. It's one or the other.

To be fair, some of the people talking about who's privileged try to establish a scale. For example, they see a heterosexual white man as more privileged than a homosexual white man. They see men as more privileged than woman. They're almost on the right track with this kind of thinking. They recognize that there are different levels of oppression and privilege.

Where they go wrong is that they think a person's level of privilege or oppression can be measured by their physical characteristics, such as gender and skin color.

Read that again until it sinks in. The people who complain the most about privilege believe that you can judge a person's life based on what they look like. In this, they are no different than any other racist bigot running around society today.

If they presented their opinions about privilege as a generalization, as a rough approximation of reality, their thinking would be less problematic. It might even be useful. But if you use such generalizations as an absolute yardstick that can be universally applied to every individual, you've crossed the line into dangerous stupidity.

Not Oppressed ≠ Privileged
The problem that decent people have been trying to fight for longer than most of these social just warriors have been alive is the mistreatment of people based on their race or gender. Unlike privilege, which is a fluffy, poorly defined concept, unjust treatment can be seen and measured, especially when that mistreatment is delivered by government. For example, black people in America tend to have a shitty time dealing with our justice system, whether it's on the street or in the courts. Some of the mistreatment is societal rather than governmental. For example, gay people face the threat of violence even if they've done nothing to deserve it.

If someone is mistreated, that's the problem that must be addressed. That someone else isn't also mistreated is not the problem. Those people represent the baseline. They represent the level we should try to help everyone reach.

Why We Scoff
Now we're going to get in to why a lot of white men like me scoff at the people who think a person's privilege can me measured just by looking at them. We scoff, because we're told over and over that we not only have no idea what it's like to suffer oppression based on race or gender, but that it's impossible for us to ever understand. At the same time, we're told that everyone who's not a straight white male knows exactly what our lives are like.

This is not just a case of bad thinking. It's a case of social justice warriors claiming that non-white, non-straight, non-males have magical powers of perception and understanding, while the rest of us are forever blind and stupid. People who think this way have fallen for an appeal to ego, the same kind of appeal that's used to sell everything from beer to conspiracy theories to fancy clothes. Accept this way of thinking, the pitch goes, and you automatically become a superior person.

It might be true that nobody can ever truly understand another person's life. They'd have to actually experience that life to do that. But that doesn't mean that we can't achieve a level of understanding. I don't have to be gay to know that getting your ass beaten for no good reason is a bad thing. I don't have to be black to understand that gunning down an unarmed black man who doesn't pose a threat is murder.

And no, you don't have to be a straight white male to understand that someone like me has a better chance of surviving a police encounter than some people have.

But to achieve that kind of understanding means that you need open eyes and an open mind. You have to listen. So listen to a straight white male for a moment.

What [Some] White Men Think
I can't speak for all of us, but I think I can safely say that most of us don't feel like we're swimming in privilege. What we feel is that we're occupying that baseline position in society. We're the norm, and we, or at least most of us, want everyone else to be at the same place.

And this is where a lot of my straight white male brethren go wrong in their thinking. They think that everyone else has already achieved that level. Part of the reason they think this is because they realize that a lot of progress has been made over the decades in dealing with social injustices. You no longer have to sit at the back of the bus, the thinking goes, so everything's cool. They see someone like Jonathon Butler, who enjoys a level of socioeconomic privilege most of us white guys will never see, portraying himself as a victim of oppression, and they can't take claims of oppression seriously. It's the "cry wolf" syndrome.

It's understandable in a way. When you tell some poor redneck who's struggling to make ends meet and who has to deal with a sheriff who thinks that harassing him is fun, he's not going to listen to anyone who claims he occupies a position of privilege, especially since he's part of the only group of people it's still considered politically correct to make fun of.

The Perils of Tribal Thinking
This brings us to the bad thinking that's getting in the way of dealing with governmental and societal oppression, which is the idea that your group is the only one facing injustice, while the other guy's group is living a life of privilege. That kind of thinking divides people who have shared grievances and who should be working together to end those grievances.

The big grievance we should all be working on is that we don't have a functioning justice system in America. It almost doesn't matter that some people face more injustice than others. That injustice still occurs is the problem.

This gets to my main point. Although I'm criticizing the social justice warriors for their silly ways, I'm also criticizing my straight, white male bros who think that because the system kicks them around, they're the only victims. You're not. The things that bother you are the same things that marginalized people have been complaining about for years. You're facing the same problems, not because of your skin color, but because if you're not rich, you're an easy target.

I know a lot of you bros like the Pledge of Allegiance, but do you ever stop to think about what it says? "...and justice for all." Are those just words to you? Do you ever stop to think about what those words mean? Do you realize that they're a call to be a better nation? It doesn't seem like it. When you put your hand on your heart and get all teary-eyed about "justice for all", it seems like you're really getting teary-eyed over justice for you.

This is one reason I despise the Pledge. Celebrating justice for all is some hypocritical bullshit when that kind of justice doesn't exist in America today.

And it will never exist if we don't come together as Americans to demand justice and fair treatment for all Americans instead of retreating within our tribes and pretending that injustice is something that only happens to Americans who look like us.