Well, that’s an interesting take, tackiness. I’d be interested if you could expand a little on your description.

I would have thought of it as discomfort, for a white person to undertake any sort of anti-oppression analysis. I think it can only be detrimental to the unlearning process if self absorption about our own discomfort takes the place of genuine awareness and a desire to change our behaviours. As for denial, it acts as a self defence mechanism, and is just one of many possible outcomes as opposed to being the main one.

Whatever it is described as, tackiness, discomfort etc, it’s probably better to just work towards getting over it, and hopefully ourselves and our own feelings in the process.

(Speaking of regrets, I can’t believe I modded Jesu for rolling her eyes at Richard. That was sucky and wrong of me.)

Steve, I do think there’s an element of fear behind denying that there’s any sort of systemic privileges in this world - often, those braying the most about free competition are those who are actually the most afraid of it.

But I do find something tacky about the self-referential, tautological “the biggest privilege of all is denying you have privilege!”

This system is a patriarchy ruled in general by straight white males. In this a women is seen as less of a threat and also as a sexual object and allowed to pass through while another male esp with the more masculine image brothas carry is seen as more of a threat and therefore to be kept away. Itz been like that for many things and a lot of stuff can be linked to it because remember.

Racism, Classim, Sexism and many other types of discrimination dont work in a void seperate from each other u can have ups and downs that all affect what happens. One type can overrule others like a sellout ass carlton or the corna brotha are always gonne be seen as a blacc male 1st by white society and the sellout is going to be seen as a joke many times.

And my analogy for the system is that it like the elites in a house and every1 else on the sidewalk. There many lines u can say for different groups and different privelges and disadvantages systematically put ur group in different places along the line but race, sex, and class are the 3 big dividing lines U could say in that order too because a blacc women is blacc 1st and ppl take into account other stuff after the stereotypes etc are not the same for all women are not the same.

Continuing though, there 1 door and the ppl in charge control who gets in and they’ll put in a token person from each group (esp in our case) and then parade them around like SEE U can do it too when the reality is that capitalism doesnt allow for it (fucc capitalism btw) and many ppl believe it like the case with richard and oprah.

“Capitalism does require inequalities. Inequalities provide the motivations for voluntary transactions, and voluntary transactions are how wealth is created.”

If everyone stops producing and people continue to trade what they have, who is stopping society from starving to death whilst everyone else is busy creating wealth?

“However, there is no reason that those inequalities have to be between rich and poor, in absolute terms. A system where an upper class of Bill Gates cruelly oppresses an underclass of $150K/year doctors is eminently practical, if somewhat unlikely to develop.”

So who do the doctors treat? Are the doctors cleaning the toilets, serving the food, collecting the garbage, and getting 150k to do it? Why don’t the doctors quit their waiter jobs and just stick to high paid work?

First privilege sometimes means thinking that everyone could do the good jobs and the mucky jobs will somehow get done by magic.

Better people than I have written about privilege. Yet it seems that discussions of privilege nevertheless arise (and often) in these, the interwebs—often with disingenuous trolls but, sometimes, with well-meaning people who simply do not understand …

I had the opportunity to sit in on some interviews for a new hire to the group I was working in. It was a desirable job, and we had a lot of applicants. My manager had sifted through all of the resumes to come to the most qualified candidates on paper. There were 5 of them. They were all white guys. I don’t think that was intentional on his part. I know that the HR policy is that the manager had to explain to HR why they choose not to interview any minority candidates that apply. (They also have to show that they’re not being arbitrary. If the job requires a MS why didn’t the description say so? If you’re just giving preference to people with an master’s degree because it’s better are you letting any non-minorities through without one? Did your last hire have a masters? Is it really necessary? HR does not want us to discriminate.)

There was some brief instruction from my boss not to ask personal questions but no official training for me.

So I sat through 5 separate conversations, asked questions about work history, projects, and how they’d handle things I’d had a hard time with in the last year. By the third candidate I had my questions down pat. At the end of it my boss and i discussed what we thought. There were 2 candidates that were clearly worse. Between the remaining three it was a coin toss. They seemed equally qualified. So we talked about what we thought of their personalities and communication skills. One guy was cut because he seemed to have a hard time explaining things and we made the final decision based on personality. The person we picked seemed nice and like someone we’d enjoy working with. The person we didn’t pick had seemed cold and unfriendly. My boss thought about it some more and than made his choice for the ‘nice’ guy. (turned out i did enjoy working with him)

I’m know that everything was handled fairly. But once education, work experience, professional accreditation were all normalized there was more than one ‘best fit’. And what we thought of them made the difference.

Maybe you can ignore what others think of you if you have a 4.0 from MIT, a PhD, and a string of success that no one else can match. But for the other 99.999999% of the population that’s not the case. What other’s think of you will be important at some point. I’ll also say that after the interview I did two things. First I started trying to be nicer to everyone I worked with. Second I started thinking about how much more difficult it would be to seem like I’m ‘nice’ and would ‘fit in’ if I were a black lesbian from a low income neighborhood (just to illustrate).

We already have that dialogue. When we talk of the black crime rate, and all the chicken-and-egg scenarios and self-reinforcing stereotypes that that entails, we are talking of black males - perhaps immortalized in the unfortunately true line from American History X, ‘one-third of all black males under 30 are in some stage of the penal system’. Racism is not a monolithic entity, and there are aspects of it that adversely affect black men especially. College admin officers, who you are clearly implicating most directly in this statement, would have an extra prejudice against black males that has no counterpart for black females. The mistake, I think, is in assuming that prejudices against a group must necessarily affect all members of that group equally.

The dialogue you’re looking for, on the other hand - the one that says that Political Correctness has created a liberal culture that oppresses men while privileging women, and the blacker the better - can probably be found at a local Republican voters’ mass meeting. Perhaps you’re just not looking hard enough. Maybe you could argue that partisan-conservative outer ring suburbanites don’t a ‘nation wide’ make, but it’s certainly looked like that in many ways for about 25 years. Take what you can get, man.

“Who is oppressing the black male youth of today? Well, it’s not the dead slaveholders from 1865, and it’s not whites as a group, so who does that leave? My speculation is that the welfare policy that lead to the breakup of black families in the 60s and 70s is largely the issue, as it created a matriarchy in the inner city that’s not serving the needs of the male children very well. The prison numbers fit a similar pattern, of course. Boys need fathers to teach them self-control, male pride, and ambition, moms just don’t do it.”

You sure about that “whites as a group” part? Because in between self-sacrificing in the name of political correctness and absurdly tilting the college admissions game in favour of black girls, whites as a group can occasionally display these characteristics. (It’s a personal page, I know, but I had it forwarded it to me recently and it’s certainly relevant here.)

I actually agree that boys need fathers to teach them those things - particularly male pride, because it is a particularly emasculated and insecure man who ends up being the molesters, woman-beaters, and rapists of today, though there are always just plain crazies - but how do we address without burdening, explicitly or implicitly, only one-half of the population? That’s the real issue.

“So the tragedy of racism is that it oppressed both blacks and whites, as that sort of thing usually does.”

This isn’t a tragedy of racism, this is a tragedy of slavery. An aristocratic economy based on cheap, menial labour will usually do that for you, and would do so no matter what criteria - and there always is one - a society uses to designate the immutably-genetically inferior underclass that is to do all the said labour.

“To return to the analogy, the road needs to be fixed rather than simply making cosmetic adjustments. Because I don’t really specialize in public policy, I really don’t know how you make up for a group that made up a servant class for the first three hundred and fifty of the four hundred years that it was present in America. But a lot of what is currently in place is a stop-gap–better than nothing, but inadequate to address the full depth of the problem. Of course, I don’t even really know if the road *can* be fixed by state actors.”

Perhaps the most intelligent statement made here apart from those of Amp himself. An emphasis on that last part: the state is by nature a ham-handed, slumbering institution, and as such is best equipped to hammer ham-handed, institutional nails. Curb carbon emissions, and tackle corporate malfeasance. But reknitting the very threads of a culture with a history of forced servitude (including economically, in the case of Mexicans) that has left them antagonistic toward a bureaucracy-based white paper economy? The state would be hopelessly inept and hogtied.

“I think her example does prove that anybody can get rich in America if they work at it hard enough.”

Perhaps. But they’ll have to prevail against the countervailing weight of anachronistic laissez-faire ideology that is turning America, relative to Europe and Canada, a class-based society. Think how much more successful a woman of Oprah’s ability and drive could have been in, say, Sweden, where people are sensible enough to realize that helping the impoverished is, well, helping the impoverished, rather than a violating of Natural Right.

“The solution we get, though, is that the SAT has been made easier several times.”

True and untrue. Making such a value-to-value comparison ignores the fact that one of the subject tests, the Writing, has been added as part of the overall Reasoning test, lenghtening the test by 70 min and adding a devious little essay section that, while not being overly difficult, tends to be the most unpredictable in terms of marking.

“Richard, if that’s how you’re looking at data, the comparison you’re making isn’t a single-characteristic phenomenon either, because it doesn’t separate high-school completers from non-high-school completers. (If we look , the college participation disparity between black women and black men is much smaller).”

Slam dunk, Amp. Richard is trying to imply an active bias in favour of black women over black men from the point of view of college admin - which no doubt through sundry contortions would have ended up a pity party that exalts the martyrdom of the middle class white man - but college admin can’t get their reverse discriminatory freak on if black men are more likely to be INELIGIBLE for consideration in the first place.

I applaud you for your kiddie glove handling of the 1974-1991-2003 dating dispute. I’m sure that you know as well as I do that Richard picked up a number that was at least plausibly defendable if the feces squished into the fan, which he was betting was not going to happen by assuming that the casual reader would not follow the link. (It happens all the time. In fact, I even didn’t follow the link myself, and would not have known that Charles’ point was in fact valid, nor would have receded the point for Robert in my mental scorekeeping, had you not brought attention to it. His quibbling over a two-year education versus an associate’s degree (remembering that an associate’s degree requires, you guessed it: two years) doesn’t seem like a believable reason behind his creative omission. We all know what’s going on here.

I haven’t talked politics in a while and have a lot of pent up blogginess to exude, but I fear losing all I wrote so I’ll splice it here.

I agree that 1.8:1 - or even the 42% to 32% Charles’ data showed - is a legitimate reason for real concern. No one here has said otherwise.

So, why don’t you write about it?

Sigh… you were the one, Richard, who made “double” the magic number.

Yeah, because a 2:1 ratio is so different from an 1.8:1 one.