What is white privilege?

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Gray2233 said:
Why?

I genuinely mean this, why is it bad that only 33% of women are in those positions?

There's this assumption that it should be perfectly equal between men and women, why exactly is that?

I'm not saying that should not be the case, but surely there's preference? Men and women tend to want different things from life. The people who argue for perfectly equal representation are often pushing the theme of perfect outcome rather than opportunity and can never qualify why things should be perfectly equal in outcome.

Do hold in mind that should women not be interested in certain jobs, the push for equality of outcome means that certain women might be forced to do work they're not interested in but also that those less qualified might end up in said positions. This works the other way around, what if we pushed and enforced 50% of nurses being male?
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Or forced 50% of bin collectors to be women, or 50% of bricklayers, or 50% of any number of jobs that women would almost never choose.
 
Mr Oblong said:
But for politicians it's more straightforward: I believe politicians should represent their constituents (roughly, nothing is perfect). Democracy is one way to do that (although candidate selection is not a perfect process, people have limited choices in the ballot box) where people vote for candidates who purport to believe in certain things, to understand certain issues... but the lords are a long way from democracy.
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I hear you in that regard, but also remember that women are a majority in the UK and in most western countries. They've the majority voting power in reality, so what do we do with that?

The "lords" in the UK I find an outside issue, I agree that the UK should have a secular government and that's coming from someone who loves the Queen, less so other members of royalty granted.

Lord-Jaffa said:
Or forced 50% of bin collectors to be women, or 50% of bricklayers, or 50% of any number of jobs that women would almost never choose.
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Exactly.

Where's the push for 50% female oil rig workers? Tons of money to be made there.

Women that tend to do genuinely well are often not the types to push that sort of narrative.
 
Gray2233 said:
There's not enough representation or promotion for alternative educational choices post school in the UK, there's a lot of schemes but they're barely advertised and have a stigma attached as being 'lesser' than getting a degree. Becoming a tradesman or even entrepreneur is frowned upon in many circles. University if you're 'smart' is the be all and end all, and if you don't spend tens of thousands doing it you're doing it wrong.

Living in the north of England, and while anecdotal I admit, the people I know who earn the most are either tradesmen or people who went their own way in business related ways. I'm talking £50-60K + as a minimum here and in some cases 100k +. On the other hand I know multiple people with laughable degrees who are working in call centres, a friend of mine I was chatting with earlier has some sort of degree in Spanish for some god forsaken reason and laments the time he wasted getting it and the debt he's in given he can't find work that's worth the investment.
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Completely agree. I think successive governments have absolutely failed in promoting the CQHE which is far better suited to so many people than university education. Learn whilst you earn. I would bet that it is probably an easily observable trend now that tuition top up fees have jumped a lot. Which is probably not a bad thing, the misconcieved idea of sending everybody to university being some panacea for the education level of the country was a con sold to those of us of a certain age during the Blair years. We didn't get a better education or a better start, we got saddled with debt and were three years behind our peers on the workforce. Which is why in my opinion the all-encompassing stat of white working class males being the least represented in university admissions isn't, in and of itself, a bad thing without knowing much more granular detail.
 
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Mr Oblong said:
So we've got 8% BAME vs 14% of the population being BAME (as mentioned the hereditary aspect is structurally racist).

33% being women isn't great either.
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It was a quick google as I was interested in seeing the breakdown. With only 36 appointed the numbers are too small really to compare to the general population.

Interestingly the 1/3 women is about the same percentage of male secondary school teachers, yet that isn't seen as a major issue.

Mr Oblong said:
Comparing vs May, Cameron, Brown, Blair is interesting, but it's been a long time since Labour were in power (e.g. Cameron legalized gay marriage, vs Labour only doing civil partnerships, but societal attitudes changed a lot and Cameron would have failed without the large Labour/Lib support). You can contrast it with Major's government, to emphasize the point.
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The figures had those four PMs. So I thought it worth mentioning.

Mr Oblong said:
But in this particular case, we'll never be able to prove it either way. So the substantive discussion can only be about the existence of systemic issues and bias. If you reckon acknowledged racist Boris Johnson is using a special, not-racist part of his mind for these appointments, then that's a generous view I won't share.
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So why did he appoint 3 BAME at all if he is as racist as you seem to be suggesting? Did he use his "special, not-racist part of his mind" for these appointments but switched the racist bit back on for the Bishop? Again, I am not being at all generous, I think not appointing Bercow and Sentamu was petty in the extreme.
 
Funnily enough certain groups are only pushing for "equality" when it works to their advantage and are far less concerned about discrepancies when it's not.

There's a shock! It's almost like they're not actually after "equality" and are just looking out for their own self interest..... Oh wait...
 
Mr Oblong said:
Fair play for finding those figures, genuinely.

So we've got 8% BAME vs 14% of the population being BAME (as mentioned the hereditary aspect is structurally racist).
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Oh give me strength, inheritance is now racist. :rolleyes:

Gray2233 said:
Why?

I genuinely mean this, why is it bad that only 33% of women are in those positions?

There's this assumption that it should be perfectly equal between men and women, why exactly is that?

I'm not saying that should not be the case, but surely there's preference? Men and women tend to want different things from life. The people who argue for perfectly equal representation are often pushing the theme of perfect outcome rather than opportunity and can never qualify why things should be perfectly equal in outcome.

Do hold in mind that should women not be interested in certain jobs, the push for equality of outcome means that certain women might be forced to do work they're not interested in but also that those less qualified might end up in said positions. This works the other way around, what if we pushed and enforced 50% of nurses being male?
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Exactly, no two groups of people on the planet are the same, why on earth people look at two groups with different outcomes and attribute that to some ism I don't understand.
 
silvagti said:
Funnily enough certain groups are only pushing for "equality" when it works to their advantage and are far less concerned about discrepancies when it's not.

There's a shock! It's almost like they're not actually after "equality" and are just looking out for their own self interest..... Oh wait...
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I'm a straight, white man. I'm middle class. I had a stable home. No abuse. Okay school. I don't have a disability... I'm plenty privileged, simply because the **** I avoid because of my social identity is worse than the **** I get because of my social identity.

And to further prove you wrong, I'm concerned about equality on all fronts. Lots of people are. I think that's a pretty dark post. You might also consider how those people judge overall equality e.g. some people might consider it okay to benefit from sexism, because they lose out because of their class and consider themselves 'in credit' in terms of overall fairness? Of course, every group has its *****! :D

Plenty of people object to the concept of white privilege because they don't feel privileged, so it's an unintuitive or even wrong-feeling notion. I get that.

But once you drill down and discuss the (very real) advantages and disadvantages someone's had in life (even simple stuff like being born in a developed country vs a developing one), people start to get that it's not a binary thing, it's layered and plural. You could imagine it as a thousand checkboxes: some people have 1000 ticked, some have zero, but most have a bunch of ticks that give them a different experience of life. It's basic sociology.

I think most fields would benefit from having more diversity (I cited the example of men in primary teaching), but that's a separate argument.
 
Energize said:
Oh give me strength, inheritance is now racist. :rolleyes:
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Whispers... Karl Marx...whispers...

I took a first year University course on sociology!

Marx is amazing I'll have you know!

He was literally wrong in everything he ever said but my gott..!! It wasn't real communism (marxism).

Tongue in cheek here but my lord some of the responses in this thread.
 
Energize said:
Oh give me strength, inheritance is now racist. :rolleyes:
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Racist by design? Probably not. Is that what you're getting hung up on?

Racist in it's effects, yes obviously. In the lords, inherited peerages structurally make it harder for people from the outside group to become part of the inside group.

It's entirely by design. The consequences are not equitable. You might not care about it, but the mechanisms are really straightforward and, if we're not playing daft, uncontroversial. I mean what else is inheritance if not a regulated control of familial power/resources? It's virtually the definition :p
 
Mr Oblong said:
I'm a straight, white man. I'm middle class. I had a stable home. No abuse. Okay school. I don't have a disability... I'm plenty privileged, simply because the **** I avoid because of my social identity is worse than the **** I get because of my social identity.

And to further prove you wrong, I'm concerned about equality on all fronts. Lots of people are. I think that's a pretty dark post. You might also consider how those people judge overall equality e.g. some people might consider it okay to benefit from sexism, because they lose out because of their class and consider themselves 'in credit' in terms of overall fairness? Of course, every group has its *****! :D

Plenty of people object to the concept of white privilege because they don't feel privileged, so it's an unintuitive or even wrong-feeling notion. I get that.

But once you drill down and discuss the (very real) advantages and disadvantages someone's had in life (even simple stuff like being born in a developed country vs a developing one), people start to get that it's not a binary thing, it's layered and plural. You could imagine it as a thousand checkboxes: some people have 1000 ticked, some have zero, but most have a bunch of ticks that give them a different experience of life. It's basic sociology.

I think most fields would benefit from having more diversity (I cited the example of men in primary teaching), but that's a separate argument.
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This isn't white privilege, it's white guilt.
 
Gray2233 said:
Whispers... Karl Marx...whispers...

I took a first year University course on sociology!

Marx is amazing I'll have you know!

He was literally wrong in everything he ever said but my gott..!! It wasn't real communism (marxism).

Tongue in cheek here but my lord some of the responses in this thread.
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Please see my post above on inheritance. It's about structural opportunity- inheritance is a structural replication. It's not controversial. Cheers
 
Skunkworks said:
This isn't white privilege, it's white guilt.
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Nice catchphrase, but no substance.

Can you address the simplest expression of privilege, which is "I'm plenty privileged, simply because the **** I avoid because of my social identity is worse than the **** I get because of my social identity."

Doesn't mean I have no troubles, of course not. But the concept is easy, I don't get why it's so triggering.
 
Mr Oblong said:
Doesn't mean I have no troubles, of course not. But the concept is easy, I don't get why it's so triggering.
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Quite simply because it's a lie and it doesn't exist as "white privilege".

The reality is it's simply majority or indigenous advantage. Being white in Britain is advantageous because it means you look like the majority of people in this country.

It would be the same as if a white person went to China and complained about "Asian Privilege". It's a tragedy that so many have bought into this myth of "white Privilege".
 
Mr Oblong said:
Nice catchphrase, but no substance.

Can you address the simplest expression of privilege, which is "I'm plenty privileged, simply because the **** I avoid because of my social identity is worse than the **** I get because of my social identity."

Doesn't mean I have no troubles, of course not. But the concept is easy, I don't get why it's so triggering.
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I’m not interested in indulging your cult word-salad. Your posts reek of it. No doubt you think you’re too super-duper enlightened, and everyone else are simple philistines. In reality you’re just gullible enough to buy this fringe nonsense.
 
silvagti said:
Quite simply because it's a lie and it doesn't exist as "white privilege".

The reality is it's simply majority or indigenous advantage. Being white in Britain is advantageous because it means you look like the majority of people in this country.

It would be the same as if a white person went to China and complained about "Asian advantage". It's a tragedy that so many have bought into this myth
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It sounds like you agree with the outline of it, but would call it something different?
 
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