I live in Poland, but I was on 1-month trip in the USA once. One of the places I visited was Houston, Texas and I have seen numerous black people with nice suits and expensive cars, who seemed to be quite successful in life. Like I said, I think that the only kind of privilege that is still exsist (and probably will always exist) is the wealth privilege - if you have money you have a good life, as simple as that. What aboput the fact that asians actually make more money than whites in the USA? What about many, many poor white people who live in trailor parks, are they more privileged than guys like Jay-Z or Lebron James?
The wealth gap thing is absolutely real. However, there are major problems with saying that it undercuts the presence of racial discrimination in America and that it has replaced white privilege.
The wealth gap is correlated to what could be called white privilege. In America, a person born into money has better chances than a person not born into money, in general. However, it is also true in America that a white person is more likely to be born into money than a black person. 400 years of slavery creating a wealth gap between blacks and whites, underfunding of black communities during segregation and Jim Crow eras, and the sabotaging of black communities through Reagan-era policies all contributed in large to black people being more likely to be in lower socioeconomic standing to their white counterparts.
So while America has shifted away from overtly racist institutions, white privilege didn't stop existing because of it, it just changed forms. Before, white privilege was the fact that white people had more political and social power, had access to rights black people didn't, and that the government generally overtly did things to **** with black communities. Those things large and by large don't apply anymore; black people legally have the same rights as white people, can hold political power, don't have laws preventing them from living as productively and securely as white people, that is true.
However, white privilege still exists because of those institutions, it just now exists in a form that ties it directly to the class-based issues we have now. Previous detriments to black communities resulted in them generally having lower socioeconomic standing than the white community. When you have a society that is placing further and further emphasis on wealth, what do you think is gonna happen when just as soon as a few decades ago, the government actively hindered a demographic's ability to gain wealth? They're going to suffer in comparison to a demographic who weren't sabotaged.
The issues associated with white privilege, as I mentioned before, are built up from one era of society to another. It's a complex issue consisting of numerous mechanisms, and cannot be summed up in a simple way without missing important contexts, which is why the likes of Fountain and Onii still think it's not real.
To illustrate what I mean, I'll break down one line of how white privilege changed through a few of America's eras:
A. One form of white privilege during the segregation/ Jim Crow era is that black communities were actively underfunded, making them ghettos and also meaning that education in black communities was extremely poor in comparison to white communities.
B. During the Reagan era, the government actually issued policies that trafficked guns and drugs into ghettos, where the black communities inside were struggling socioeconomically because they were underfunded during the previous era. Depression and stress were more likely in these communities, so the drugs the government planted in these communities(particularly cheap and addictive ones like crack) were easy to traffic within the community once the government planted them there. Guns allowed gangs to compete with each other and control the streets so they could sell the drugs. So the government first hindered the members of these communities' ability to provide for themselves by hindering them socioeconomically, and then placed a means for them to make money through inciting violent drug trafficking; except this is illegal and, well, violent, so it only hurt the communities even more.
C. In the modern era, the government no longer actively employs institutions to hinder these communities, but the effects of these eras still exist(I'll explain shortly). The cost of education is steadily increasing, and the need of higher and higher levels of education for good socioeconomic standing is increasing alongside it.
White privilege exists in one modern form today based on ramifications from A and B alongside with the currently societal status of C. Education is getting more and more expensive, which is a bad thing for the people in the neighborhoods created in A and further harmed by B, with those people being more likely to be black than white because of A and B. It's harder for black people in comparison to white people, in general, to afford quality education because A and B happened. And because quality education is getting more and more needed for good socioeconomic standing, that means it's harder for black people in comparison to white people, in general, to have good socioeconomic standing.
That is how white privilege still exists; it went from being overt in previous eras to being a subtle aspect of the class/wealth-based society we have now. White privilege exists in that, if you are white, you have better odds at gaining a good socioeconomic standing than if you're a minority. Do some white people miss these odds and end up in the same position as minorities that miss theirs? Yes. However, it's the fact that white people have these higher odds that is why white privilege still exists.
There are numerous forms that these odds manifest themselves in that tie back into the two previous eras I mentioned. One example is that students who are from ghettos are less likely to be accepted into good schools because of the negative societal associations with these ghettos even when they make the same qualifications as students from good communities. The white privilege in this is that 1)students from ghettos are more likely to be black than white because 2)ghettos in America exist as a result of institutions that were meant to favor whites.
I think the USA is pretty much the same as the rest of the world, if you want to be successful you have to work your ass off for it, playing the victim wont get you anywhere.
Oh no, this is absolutely not true. The whole "American dream" thing where "you just have to work hard and you'll be successful" thing is a giant lie. The hardest working people in America are those who are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. They have to work anywhere in between 2-4 jobs just to sustain themselves financially, working ungodly hours at low-wage jobs. The whole American dream lie is to make people think that working that hard is the normal thing to do to be successful, when that isn't the case at all since those people are faaaar more likely to be stuck in that class than to ascend through them.
