I never said white privilege doesn't exist. I said its a weak privilege in comparison to all the other traits a person is born into and the focus on white and male privilege in public discourse betrays a bigotry behind the speakers.
And you’re incredibly wrong about whiteness being a weak privilege.
White privilege is majority privilege in America since the majority of people are white. This is where you get into familiarity bias. However, that can go both ways. For every neophobe there may be a neophile.
Instead of using a term like privilege, let's use a words like advantage and disadvantage because those are imo more relevant to discussions about life experience.
Let's look at a stronger advantage: Physical Attractiveness
Effects of perceived attractiveness and academic performance on 9th graders' ratings of peers' popularity were investigated. Participants were 270 9th graders (152 girls, 118 boys) who read a vignette describing a hypothetical same-sex peer with whom the student had been assigned to complete a project. The partner's attractiveness and academic performance were systematically varied in four conditions: high attractiveness/high grades, high attractiveness/low grades, low attractiveness/high grades, and low attractiveness/low grades. After reading the vignette, the students rated the partner's popularity. As hypothesized, analyses of variance revealed that attractive partners were significantly more popular than unattractive partners, regardless of whether the partner had high or low grades. Contrary to expectation, attractiveness was not more important to girls than to boys. Integration with past research and suggestions for future research are offered.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00221329809596155We report the findings of a meta-analytic review of experimental studies concerned with the biasing effect of physical attractiveness on a variety of job-related outcomes. In support of implicit personality theory, attractive individuals were found to fare better than unattractive individuals in terms of a number of such outcomes. The weighted mean effect size, d, was .37 for all studies. In addition, tests for moderating effects showed that (a) the attractiveness bias did not differ between studies that provided low versus high amounts of job-relevant information about the targets, (b) the same bias was greater for within-subjects research designs than for between-subjects designs, (c) professionals were as susceptible to the bias as were college students, (d) attractiveness was as important for men as for women, and (e) the biasing effect of attractiveness has decreased in recent years. Implications of these findings are considered.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229517285_The_effects_of_physical_attractiveness_on_job-related_outcomes_A_meta-analysis_of_experimental_studiesAnd this is a rundown of the various ways physical attractiveness benefits people in the workplace:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224540903365414 I can't break down the studies in these because they are behind paywalls, but there are multiple studies on this showing the
advantage of being physically attractive. Now that's a pretty strong factor on its own, but what makes it stronger is that it travels.
This field experiment found that Hong Kong human resources management specialists were influenced by the attractiveness bias in evaluating short-listed candidates for an entry-level trainee position. Zero order, stepwise and hierarchical regressions showed that perceived attractiveness of the candidates was more related to their work experience and work-related skills than to grade-point average and public examination results. Women candidates were generally preferred over male candidates. Further research is suggested to determine if the influence of attractiveness extends over a wider range of jobs and to measure more precisely the influence of attractiveness in different cultures and for men and women.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09585190110092857So in Hong Kong, if you're Chinese then you have a majority group advantage, but if you move to America then you become a minority group. However, if you're attractive in Hong Kong then you have the same advantage in America.
Attractiveness continually has positive influence. Whiteness has a huge variance of outcomes because its less important a trait than something like attractiveness. Whiteness doesn't travel. You are no longer the majority when you move to Hong Kong or Mumbai or Tokyo. That's why white skin is a weak advantage. It won't overcome a low IQ and an unattractive form. It won't overcome low conscientiousness and high agreeableness. It won't overcome an addictive personality. It won't overcome very poor physical health.
Stephen Hawking just died. He was white. That's not why he succeeded. He had a debilitating disease. That mattered more than his skin color. So why did he overcome that? Extreme intelligence and a good personality, along with a period of his life with decent health and decent attractiveness. His intelligence and his other personality traits kept him relevant and able to communicate while his body simply could not accomplish these tasks on its own.
