Revealing white victimhood

Academics, political commentators, journalists, students and opinion writers all have an obligation, inherent within their disciplines and practices, to accurately represent the viewpoints or ideas they are attempting to criticize. It is one feature of writing that has never gone out of style. It is one aspect of responsibility in theorizing that allows for communities of people, who all might disagree, to engage in meaningful conversations that propel our society forward. If one person is arguing against a point made by another, the point in question must be understood, internalized and argued against in a way that does justice to it and does not misrepresent it in order for the criticizer to be taken seriously as a thinker. This is true in philosophy as well as all other academic disciplines in which integrity or credibility of a writer is esteemed.

It would seem in a recent Quad publication that the concept of “white privilege” has been gravely misrepresented, misunderstood and misdescribed. Arguments of the kind written in the piece “Rethinking White Privilege” are called straw man arguments. They build up a false representation of an idea and create an opposing viewpoint that is actually opposed to nothing or, at least, not the original idea. They make up the thing they are arguing against.

So, what exactly is white privilege? A few quick Google searches surely provide an accurate answer. White privilege can be described as a term to designate the many various societal benefits awarded to a person, who is perceived by society as white, because of their whiteness. It may be, but probably shouldn’t be, hard for a white male to understand privilege, given it is only through a lack of privilege that privilege is realized. When there is another class of people that is harmed because another class is privileged, this is what we all know as oppression. These definitions are just short sketches of these vastly written about terms.

In a less book-intense sense, white privilege is not being afraid of police brutality being a factor in your day-to -day activities. White privilege is not being worried about being perceived as an “affirmative action student” or an outsider. Whiteness in our culture is seen as the standard by which all other skin colors are unwelcome deviations. White privilege is having representation in media, the government, academia and entertainment. White privilege is an empirical phenomena that can be measured through scientific studies of wages, poverty, community violence and incarceration. To say that white privilege is a scheme made up by the “radical leftists” (whoever they are) to dismantle some unknown existing racial unity in this country is absurd and what theorists call white victimhood. Some people, in being called out in their privilege, revert to a false victim stance and deny they maintain privileges in society despite the mounting evidence that they surely must. Ultimately, those who do not accept that white privilege is a real structure of our society are living in willful ignorance of the many harms perpetuated on minorities through systemic racism and oppression.

Liesl Metzger is a philosophy MA student . ✉LM821853@wcupa.edu