ext_22662 ([identity profile] chiss.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] silverthorne 2007-03-24 03:49 am (UTC)

Live in Texas or Arizona for a while. You perception of 'white is dominant' will change dramatically--white shareholders or not.

No, it wouldn't. You've stumbled into something that's kind of an area of expertise/interest of mine, or at least my major (that being Sociology, and the stratifications of race/class therein, and the resulting correlations between). And now that I've said that, I'll muck something up bigtime and look like an idiot. ;)

I do agree that white people are not 100% dominant everywhere, all of the time. However, you've set up a bit of a false dichotomy; it's not a case of "white people are dominant everywhere or they're not dominant anywhere". There is a liberal, ivy-tower theorem that says people of other races cannot be racist against white people, or labeled as "racist", and I definitely disagree with that. However, the instances of individual racism that you're no doubt experiencing don't even begin to shift the dominant paradigm, and that is that white people maintain systematic, macro-scale power in terms of money and privilege over other races. By the nature of race relations, there will be times when there are more minorities than whites in places, and racism can and will result. The rub here is this: do those small "pockets" of minority-on-white racism change the power that white people have in America as opposed to minorities?

The answer is no, unfortunately. And while racism stings and hurts and is a HUGE detriment to a person's quality of life no matter how large or small the scale it's on, the presence of those "pockets" doesn't change the presence of white privilege.

Annnnnnnd the rest of us whites? In the same damned boat with the non-whites screaming about white priviledge.

There is no way to express how untrue this is or how potentially it hurtful it is to those non-whites who are affected by that white privilege. It doesn't affect a "small" percentage of whites. Have Americans had a black president? No; one is running and the vast majority claim "America isn't ready". Can a white person be arrested by the police for driving in the wrong part of town based on their skin color? No. Are the overarching cultural goals set up by the media for whites/displayed in mass media as in large part limited to music, sports, or crime?

I could go on. Social privilege is not the same as economic privilege, and whites have social, macro-scale privilege over all other races virtually everywhere. The fact that there are places where other races have gathered and exercise small-scale prejudice against whites doesn't change that fact.

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