I hear you saying you're mad because he said you were racist, but I didn't get a good sense of what the speaker's argument was.

You think you could restate it?

Lets say you do benefit from a system that you are not aware of, and we want to label that unconscious benefit with some label - what label fits?

I often benefit from being a male in this society - benefits that I take for granted, that a female doesn't have. Lets see, how would I label that benefit, if I didn't want to call it sexism? Hmmm. Interesting question.

Well, he started out talking in response to something someone in the video said in an interview. The (white) man in the interview said something along the lines of, "In this one hand, I can hold the hand of a black man, but my other hand is held against my will by powerful white institutions that have the power to actively oppress minority groups. And, while I don't want to tke part in those institutions or that oppression, I can't not be. I'm forced."

I think what he was essentially saying is an admittance that yes, he is white, and yes, he recognizes that he benefits in some ways in society, and is given preferential treatment.

But, the professor took it waaay out of context and overboard when he said those remarks I quoted in my initial post.

But, if I could label the "unconcious benefit" from the system that I'm not aware of, I guess I would call it Preferential Treatment. But, what we have to understand here is that Preferential Treatment is something SOMEONE ELSE does TO me, I don't give myself preferential treatment in society - other people do, and those other people are white.

Now, the interesting thing to ask ourselves is, do we give other whites preferential treatment in mult-racial situations, and it just stays under our radar? Are we that unaware of the social situation? Is it inbred in us to act this way toward our own 'kind' and the 'other kind'?

Mr. Squealy says:

But, if I could label the "unconcious benefit" from the system that I'm not aware of, I guess I would call it Preferential Treatment. But, what we have to understand here is that Preferential Treatment is something SOMEONE ELSE does TO me, I don't give myself preferential treatment in society - other people do, and those other people are white.

Of course you give yourself preferential treatment. You are you and everyone else is them. Some people are more different from you than others. And as part of an aggregate that doesn't have to identify its color or ethnicity because it is in power it can say that it gets "preferential treatment" which is a nice way of saying that you get more goodies than black kids.

You ask if "we are giving whites preferential treatment under the radar." Maybe I'm being a d*** but of course we are! It is inbred into us and it is learned to degrees that are difficult to tease out.

Homo sapiens is a tribal and territorial animal with instincts that move towards hierarchies. Most cultures reinforce both the tribal and territorial in us. Western representative democracy as we see it in the last 90 years or so has mitigated some of that in the US and Europe but that doesn't shut off the "us" and "them" buttons that we have in us and reinforce. White men are a very powerful in group with a bred belief that they are (we are) entitled to something. Our group share in the power, as a social construct, transcends the group share that black men have. We all know this.

For me the hardest part is akin to yours. We live in a culture that says individuals are the most important aspect of society but we make these group selections and generalizations. How can we get out of them? Until we can make the content of someone's character the judgement by which we do things, then we'll be there. So far, blacks and Hispanics cannot be judged that way.

Okay, anyone can acknowledge the dictionary definition of Racism, which is the following:

rac·ism      /ˈreɪsɪzəm/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[rey-siz-uhm] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation

However, for each of us, racism is different, how we come across it, how we receive it. I spoke with a friend about this the other day, and she said that for her, racism is the inability to adapt to a black man living next door in a predominantely white neighborhood, a black man being president. I would have to say I agree with that, I think it is a very practical definition.

And, I think that her definition relates to what you said, Peterevolves, that, while we say the individual is most important, we don't practice that theory, we just group people into categories, and like you asked, and it is a VERY important question - how do we get out of this?

I think part of it is natural - that we feel comfortable when our surroundings (people surrounding us) reflect us (our color) back to us, otherwise, when, for example, a white person walks into a room of black people, no whiteness is reflected back to him, he feels out of place. I'll admit, in that AAAS class about the Black Church in America, I feel real out of place; I stick out like a sore thumb, and I never feel like I can comment on anything said in class, because every time he makes a mention to The White Man, he talks about whites as if all we ever do is oppress blacks, like we don't have jobs and families to feed.

Blacks can be just as oppressive and racist. I went to a mostly predominately black highschool  in Southwest GA- I was in the minority. I was pushed around in the hallways, I was told I couldn't sit somewhere in the cafeteria, I would be kicked out from the lunch table I would sit down at. But, am I gonna sit here and say that Blacks are trying to take over the world and are eventually going to incite genocide and kill off all the white people because they think they are the superior race? NO. I don't make generalizations...like some people.

Okay, you don't like it if some black guy calls you racist for benefiting from the system.

What are you going to do about it?

Well, I'm gonna stop playing paddy-cake first off, and I'm just gonna have to tell him myself...in my most calm, cool, and collected voice possible the next time he makes a generalization like that in class

So, you expect he's never had a white guy come up to him before and say, hey, it hurts my feelings when you say I'm a racist when all I do is unconsciously get benefits from the system?

You don't think that you are doing pretty much exactly what he says you are doing?

Actually, that might be an interesting thing to bring up in the class - should unconscious benefits that a white person gets without having to ask for them REALLY be called racism? Shouldn't it be called something like "racism benefits", if the white person in question doesn't actively oppress other races, say, by asking police to do profile stops, or asking employers to prefer hiring white people?

I'm not sure your high school experiences really count in this case - because it's not necessarily easy to seperate racial discrimination from the age and size and social status discrimination that happens in all of those youth prisons we call high schools.

You can take some satisfaction from the fact that those bigger black kids who pushed you around could be in prison right now. It's really very traditional to take satisfaction that the bullies and sports stars in high school usually fail later in life. I remember these dumb hicks who used to push me around, until I got big... but that's another story.

Younger kids always get pushed around by the older kids and bigger kids in high school. I imagine that's the lesson adult's want to teach - kids, get prepared to have to kiss ass and get beaten up and get your money stolen by the people aho have more power than you in this life.

Hey, when you think about it, that's also the racism model. Get prepared to have to kiss ass.

Likewise, rich people are inherently classist, the enemies of the poor and working classes.

 Similarly, men cannot deny their inevitable complicity in patriarchy; they are part of that system. Diddo for heteros, the able-bodied, U.S. citizens, etc. 

 Similarly, men cannot deny their inevitable complicity in patriarchy

Yep, all those arguments you offer are traditional. This debate has been going on for a while, so we can mostly predict how the debate goes.

Somehow I doubt we're going to settle these old arguments here, tho.

You got any sense of what can be done about it?

Bill does this.

He's Captain Wet Blanket. Sigh.

You said:

But, am I gonna sit here and say that Blacks are trying to take over the world and are eventually going to incite genocide and kill off all the white people because they think they are the superior race?

 The power differential here is really significant. As totally bizacko as it might seem to us having grown up with a much less racially nasty youth (I am about 30) is that we can take for granted some sort of human treatment for minorities. But for your Prof (is it Bernard Belle btw?) we have to consider that in states across the country, blacks were "eugenically" sterilized into the 1970s. That's mind boggling.  And it wasn't isolated either. Following the inane pseudoscience of Francis Galton there were movements in the U.S. and Germany that sought for racial hygience. We look at the Third Reich as the bad example. But the U.S. carried this madness on way longer. Indiana had a particularly nasty eugenics program.

I know someone whose maid told her that in the 50s she had gone to the hospital to get an appendectome she came out and was sterile. She was black. It would be fallacious to generalize her to the whole population but these things add up. African Americans/Blacks today have that kind of thing in their recent past. We have the sexual revolution, women's lib, and Vietnam. I wonder what your prof's experience was.

Your feelings are really valid here and your professor might well be making a genetic fallacy or you might think s/he is: that because someone is white they are racist. That's an unfair ascription to you as an individual person but as a part of an aggregate it might well be fair. It totally sucks to have an unsubscribed to ascribed status. It creates white guilt for sure. 

I saw these posts out on the net and thought about your problem, SESO.

So, the whole precept starts here...

http://web.archive.org/web/20070202205223/http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html

A woman writing about male priviledge thinks about the mechanism of priviledge itself, and invents the "invisible knapsack" metaphor.

Through work to bring materials from women's studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to women's statues, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there are most likely a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of while privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women's studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, "having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"

After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are just seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.

The invisible knapsack contains a long list of priviledges, such as:

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
7. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.
10. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race.

Sinc ethat old article, the LOLcats people have used the metaphor, cleverly as always.

http://elusis.livejournal.com/1744514.html