A race-conscious person is not necessarily more racist than a person who claims to be racially ‘colorblind’.

In American public schools, whites are the most segregated, while Asians are the least segregated.

The statistics from the 2000-2001 school year show that whites are the most segregated group in the nation’s public schools; they attend schools, on average, where eighty percent of the student body is white. The two regions where white students are more likely to attend substantially interracial schools are the South and West. Whites attending private schools are even more segregated than their public school counterparts.

This may be surprising at first for some white people who are unconscious of the pervasiveness of whiteness. However, this fact becomes unsurprising when given the quote above which racially frames a familiar sight or experience. Most racial minorities in North America live in metropolitan areas that are typically racially diverse, while more white people are spread out in suburban and rural areas that are overwhelmingly white.

However, on seeing a group of white people, most North Americans would not categorize the experience as seeing a “group of white people”, but the group would instead be remembered as just a “group of people”. On the other hand, people will see and remember a “group of Asians” or “group of black people” because minority races are foregrounded against the white-race background. The bias to remember relatively unusual instances makes it seem like non-whites are more segregated than whites.

Michael Kimmel’s article “Toward a Pedagogy of the Oppressor” discusses the invisibility of whiteness and the invisibility of privilege in general.

To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible. You’re everywhere you look, you’re the standard against which everyone else is measured. You’re like water, like air. People will tell you they went to see a “woman doctor,” or they will say they went to see “the doctor.” People will tell you they have a “gay colleague” or they’ll tell you about a “colleague.” A white person will be happy to tell you about a “black friend,” but when that same person simply mentions a “friend,” everyone will assume the person is white. Any college course that doesn’t have the word “woman” or “gay” or “minority” in the title is, de facto, a course about men, heterosexuals, and white people. But we call those courses “literature,” “history,” or “political science.”

It is ironic when some white individuals accuse racial minorities, especially Asians, of being especially segregated. This is not reality, but this myth is rarely challenged in discussions where the participants are mostly whites unconscious of their whiteness.

Q: Why do all white people have white privilege, even though not all white people are well-off?

A: White privilege is different from having money, and white privilege is different from class privilege. When ‘white privilege’ is discussed, whiteness is not a proxy for wealth. All white people have white privilege, not some or most white people. Saying that all white people have white privilege is not lumping all white people together. It is not denying that individual white people may have other disadvantages due to gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, or class.

Because this idea is often misunderstood when communicated through prose, a mathematical equation may be more accessible and precise for some audiences. Let a person’s total privilege be represented as:

p = Aw + Bx + Cy + Dz + …

where A, B, C, and D are some positive constants,
w is whether or not the person is white (or how much the person can pass for white),
x is whether or not the person is male (or how much the person can pass for male),
y is whether or not the person is heterosexual (or how heterosexual the person is),
z is how much the person is able-bodied.

For all white people, w = 1, and the first term (white privilege) is A.
For all non-white people, w = 0, and the first term (white privilege) is 0.

Notice that saying that all white people have white privilege is not saying that the total p for every white person is greater than the total p for every non-white person. It just means that every white person has the advantage of A. White privilege is one dimension of privilege, and it holds for all people who are white.

Of course, the above equation is just an expression or model of how white privilege fits together with other privileges, not a proof of the privileges. The purpose of expressing it in an equation is to clear up the misunderstanding that saying that all whites have white privilege is equivalent to saying that all whites are the same.

For more concrete examples of white privilege, refer to the Daily effects of white privilege section of Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”.

One caveat of expressing privilege as the sum of the different dimensions of privilege is that it does not account for the intersection of race and gender, gender and sexual orientation, or multiple combinations of oppression. A person who deals with multiple levels of oppression is actually dealing with something more complex than the sum of its constitutent parts.

(The above equation is an adaptation of something I posted in an XKCD forum, unfortunately.)

It is often the case that differences in political views are not just different opinions on isolated issues, but the underlying assumptions and worldviews are very different.

Beginning with the assumption that all Muslims are participants in a global conspiracy to take over the Western world, Mark Stenyn had argued in a Maclean’s article that the alleged plan will succeed because Muslims’ average birth rate is higher than the average birth rate of non-Muslim Caucasians. Four Osgoode law students called his article “flagrantly islamophobic” and filed a human rights complaint against Maclean’s for not publishing a counter article from their perspective.

Attempting to ridicule the activities of Canadian human rights commissions, Mark Steyn refers to a human rights complaint against a plastic surgeon who refused to perform labiaplasty on transwomen. The article he cites by Margaret Wente includes disparaging descriptions of transwomen’s bodies:

During the lunch break, I had a sandwich with Michelle. Her gestures were feminine. But up close, she looked more like a guy than a girl.

She had a man’s big hands, big teeth, broad-bridged nose, and coarse facial skin.

This, of course, is irrelevant to the case, but serves to demonize and dehumanize the complainants. In her introduction of Michelle, Wente ridicules Michelle’s height and voice, and doubts her female identity because she had fathered children:

First up on the witness stand was Michelle Boyce, a statuesque 38-year-old with a lush cascade of curly black hair and the breaking voice of an adolescent male. She described herself as intersex - someone who’d been born with both ovaries and a penis. Although raised male, she said she’d always thought of herself as a woman (despite the fact that in her 20s, she had married and fathered two children in the customary way).

Why does the fact that Michelle Boyce fathered children cast doubt on the claim that she had always thought of herself as a woman? It is quite probable that Boyce married and fathered children because she was raised as a male and was in the closet at the time due to tremendous social pressure. It is also possible that Boyce is a lesbian or bisexual. However, these possibilities do not seem to cross Wente’s mind, and this fact is introduced as if it was a self-explanatory contradiction to Boyce’s professed gender identity. There is no contradiction in Boyce’s narrative, but Wente sees contradiction due to her ignorance and false assumptions.

Other assumptions in Wente’s article include the assumption that labiaplasty is a frivolous operation for vanity, that discrimination against transwomen with respect to labiaplasty is not ‘real’ or ‘important’ discrimination, and that the lawsuit is self-evidently absurd.

Mark Steyn quotes Wente:

Well, he was rude. He said hurtful things and hurt her feelings. The hearing has now adjourned for a few weeks, in hopes that further mediation may find a way to soothe them.

Over lunch, Michelle told me that the demeaning treatment by Dr. Stubbs “had a profound effect on the rest of my life.” After that, she became a full-time activist. Today she has a government-funded job investigating the health status of the transsexual population.

and he comes to the conclusion that Boyce got the government job because her “feelings were hurt” as a transsexual:

My feelings were hurt by being denounced as a “flagrant Islamophobe”, but I’m unlikely to get a government job out of it.

It is quite possible that Boyce got the government job because she is the most qualified person for the job, but Steyn apparently cannot see that possibility. Steyn also appears to confuse the right to labiaplasty with compulsory labiaplasty:

On the other hand, I’ll be grateful if the commission doesn’t order me a compulsory labiaplasty.

Human rights commissions investigate human rights complaints. Steyn does not think that the Osgoode law students’ complaints deserve investigation, and attempts to discredit human rights commissions by bringing up a human rights complaint regarding discrimination in transwomen’s access to labiaplasty. However, in doing so, he reveals his prejudice against transgender people and an underlying hostility towards minority groups and their viewpoints.

Four Muslim, law students from Osgoode Hall Law School at Toronto’s York University filed a Human Rights Complaint against Canada’s Maclean’s magazine on December 4th, 2007. In a Maclean’s article titled “The future belongs to Islam” published in October 2006, Mark Steyn had argued that Muslims will eventually take over the Western world. The Osgoode law students, on March 30, 2007, had asked Maclean’s to “publish a response to Steyn’s article from a mutually acceptable source.” Maclean’s refused, allegedly claiming that they “would rather go bankrupt,” which resulted in the law students filing the Human Rights Complaint.

Here is an interview with one of the law students, Khurrum Awan:

When the interviewer asks Khurrum how to strike a balance between human rights and free speech rights, the Osgoode law student responds:

I don’t think that this issue is about freedom of speech versus minority rights. This is really about the right of communities to participate in our national discourse on issues that relate directly to us. [...] We just simply want to extend free speech to make it more inclusive of the communities in question. And if we do that, we don’t have to, you know, get into this false trade-off that we always assume that somehow free speech and minority rights — or free speech and multiculturalism — are somehow diametrically opposed.

What is ironic is that while many of the critics of the Osgoode law students criticize them for suppressing freedom of speech, the Osgoode law students claim that they are filing the Human Rights Complaint on behalf of freedom of speech (i.e., the right to publish a counter article in Maclean’s). While many critics accuse the Osgoode law students of censorship, the Osgoode law students feel that they themselves are being censored.

Read the rest of this entry »

(via I am a shadow)

The above video is a concise summary of hateful, xenophobic rhetoric used against immigrants. There are four themes of this rhetoric: portraying immigrants as “invaders”; dehumanization; the sense that immigrants bring crime and disease; and a conspiracy theory that immigrants emigrate with the intention to take over the country.

There is a nice quote near the end by the ADL speaker:

The Anti-Defamation League is exposing these trends and this rhetoric, because words have consequences. There is a direct connection between the policies we have in our society, the words of leaders, and the daily lives of minority communities and immigrants.

People who describe themselves as “Anti Political Correctness” often claim that opponents of hate speech are trying to limit the scope of discussion, or that they are just hyper- or over-”sensitive” to negative comments about minorities. Of course, this is missing the point. Hateful rhetoric and propaganda exclude the target group from humanity and serves to remove their right to participate in the discussion.

Perhaps hate speech can be thought of as ad hominem arguments in debates about the target group, in which the target group cannot participate, since their humanity itself is the subject of debate.

Many Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes, a new study shows.

In a series of studies that subliminally flashed black or white male faces on a screen for a fraction of a second to “prime” the students, researchers found subjects could identify blurry ape drawings much faster after they were primed with black faces than with white faces.

Why was there a difference between white and black faces? They also tried to prime subjects with Asian faces, but the subjects did not subconsciously associate Asians with apes.

Additionally, people are more likely to justify the beating of a black man than a white man when they subconsciously think about apes.

In the paper’s fifth study, the researchers subliminally primed 115 white male undergraduates with words associated with either apes (such as “monkey,” “chimp,” “gorilla”) or big cats (such as “lion,” “tiger,” “panther”). The latter was used as a control because both images are associated with violence and Africa, Eberhardt said. The subjects then watched a two-minute video clip, similar to the television program COPS, depicting several police officers violently beating a man of undetermined race. A mugshot of either a white or a black man was shown at the beginning of the clip to indicate who was being beaten, with a description conveying that, although described by his family as “a loving husband and father,” the suspect had a serious criminal record and may have been high on drugs at the time of his arrest.

The students were then asked to rate how justified the beating was. Participants who believed the suspect was white were no more likely to condone the beating when they were primed with either ape or big cat words, Eberhardt said. But those who thought the suspect was black were more likely to justify the beating if they had been primed with ape words than with big cat words.

Racial stereotypes are not just about hurting people’s feelings or abstract ideas dissociated from reality. Racial stereotypes have real consequences because they influence people’s perceptions and actions. If people are more likely to condone violence against a black man than a white man because of racial bias, it reveals not only an individual’s error in perception, but also systemic discrimination against blacks in society. It means that in our society, brutality against a black person is accepted more than brutality against a white person. This has ramifications throughout our legal system in terms of eye-witness reports and jury decisions.

Associating a black person with an ape is not just an insult, but an instance of dehumanization. Dehumanization is not just a very bad insult, but the dehumanized person’s life is considered less valuable than other lives. Dehumanization is not just unfair, but dangerous to the group that is dehumanized. (Think about effect of dehumanization on the Iraqis.)

Racial stereotypes are non-trivial and should be taken seriously.

Q: The class privilege checklist doesn’t return an accurate score of my class privilege relative to others who took the test. Why do people take it seriously if it’s such a poor assessment of wealth?

A: The checklist is not meant to be a diagnostic test that measures how much money you have. Rather, each item on the list is an instance of privilege.

Class privilege is not just how much money you have, but also includes things like access to education, access to technology, the knowledge gained from travelling, and the cultural capital gained from visiting museums and art galleries.

Money can be used to buy material luxuries, but money can also be used to buy access to education and technology. Sometimes a person who has little money has access to education and technology. The checklist is not meant to suggest that the person has money because she has access to education and technology. The checklist would merely indicate that the person has privileges in education and technology. These are still called ‘class’ privileges.

Q: Why is access to education and technology considered ‘class’ privilege?

A: Access to education and technology are class privileges because they are things that can be bought. If you are rich, you can buy education and buy technology. (However, if you have education or technology, it does not follow that you are rich.)

Other privileges cannot be bought, such as white privilege. A non-white person can be a billionaire, but he will never gain enough money to buy white privilege (assuming that we will not have the technology to alter one’s race). However, the non-white billionaire can still buy access to education and technology. Thus, class privilege (which includes educational and technological privileges) can be distinguished from other types of privilege.

Update 1: Fixed the first question and answer of this post after some thinking about the privilege checklist as a privilege walk.

Q: What is the meaning of the class privilege checklist? Is it meant to make people feel guilty? If not, what is the point?

A: No, the class privilege checklist is not meant to make people feel guilty. The point of the exercise is to recognize one’s privilege. Essentially, recognizing one’s privilege is an act of learning/gaining knowledge.

Q: How is the class privilege checklist insightful?

A: Ideally, as the privileged person checks off the items of privilege in the list, she will realize that many things that she has taken for granted are not things that everyone else has. If you are in university, there are fellow undergraduates at your university that made it to university without having the advantages you had.

If you had previously believed that the obstacles you have overcome to get into university are the same as that of all your fellow undergraduates, you should reevaluate that belief. If you believe that the problems you are dealing with right now as an undergraduate are basically the same for all other undergraduates, you should reconsider. In addition to coursework and relationship problems, other students also have to deal with financial difficulties.

Are you stressed about your math problem sets? Other people in your class have additional “problem sets” that they have to stress over and solve in addition to the assigned ones. Both problem sets (mathematical and financial) take time and have time restrictions. Both mathematical and financial problem sets may not yield solutions, not matter how much time you put into it or how hard you work at them.

Understanding the meaning of the checklist requires thinking about the connections between the items in the list and their cause-and-effect relationships in terms of growing up. The deepness of the exercise comes from recognizing the multidimensional factors of privilege. Class privilege is not just rich versus poor, or even a continuum from the the richest person on earth to the poorest person on earth. Class privilege affects things like access to education, access to technology, seeing other worlds, and whether or not you are a “sophisticated” person.

The class privilege checklist is not meant to be exhaustive, as even each item of the checklist can be studied extensively through discourse and empirical studies. The checklist is meant to promote divergent thinking instead of convergent thinking. Other than recognizing one’s privilege, there is no overarching theme. Each item on the list can be (or are) research topics that have interesting ramifications in social relations.