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That said, we appear to have reached, if not a turning point, at least an inflection point in terms of public willingness to do something about race. So some may say that the recent focus on "white privilege" is achieving its goal. Maybe the only solution to get white people to act is to make them feel like less than innocent bystanders?
I would guess that more important factors include
> the ugliness and obviousness of the responses to America's first black president, notably the 'birther' movement begun by Clinton's campaign and carried forward by Trump and Republicans
> increasing prevalence of camera phones recording incidents of racism or police brutality
> social media forcing attention towards issues which more people consider important, where previously major news outlets may have under-reported some stories and over-reported others relative to actual public interest
> the ugliness of Trump's presidential campaign and the shock that he was actually elected
> widespread zealous defense of any and every Jim Crow era statue to Confederate slavers and traitors
I doubt that the term "white privilege" has caused many people to realize that widespread racism remains an issue or caused them to decide to "do something" about it; if anything I'd suspect that most white people's instinctive reaction to hearing the term would be defensive, a hard sell for liberals and a solid propaganda point for the white-victimhood conservative narrative. What has caused more people over the past decade or so to realize that racism remains an issue is how much more obvious and widespread it's being seen as compared to before.
Cameron said:The actual problem is not "white privilege"--it is black disadvantage, and in some cases exclusion from the privileges that all Americans should share.
As I understand it 'white privilege' started out as a term used purely in academic circles going back to the 1960s, so inevitably there's going to be something lost in the translation into popular usage - sometimes intentionally so. I'd say that it's not a very helpful term in popular usage for several reasons:
> Most obviously the potential for misunderstanding, white folk from poor backgrounds indignantly (and correctly) insisting that they were not privileged in any usual sense of the term
> As you've noted, the actual problem in society is not the privilege of white people but the unacceptable hindrances against others, particularly black people
> Possibly most important in my opinion, it not only misdirects the focus of attention (toward 'privilege' rather than hindrances or injustices) but misdirects the ultimate source or nature of those injustices as being fundamentally racial or based in bigotry, rather than fundamentally economic using race and bigotry as tools. As Lyndon Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
A historically elite group in any society will obviously want to remain elite, to ensure that their children and grandchildren would remain elite too, and usually that the country would continue to be predominantly influenced by people whose worldviews would with some consistency be similar to their own. In America that group was wealthy white Protestant men; so whatever influence they've had over the country's laws, banks, media and other institutions - which is obviously substantial - therefore skewed them to varying degrees in different periods against non-landowners, and against poorer and working class folk, and against women, and against non-Protestants and non-Christians, and against Irish and Italian and Greek and Jewish waves of immigration... and especially against those who are most strikingly ethnically distinct by the colour of their skin, and a generally poorer former slave class, and owners of distinctive sub-culture as a result of those historical circumstances.
People in general tend to be prone to tribalist tendencies over religion, nationality, political parties and obviously ethnicity. But the way in which those tendencies are shaped and exploited - until very recently mostly favouring the 'respectable' gentlemen, the wealthy people, the white people, the Christian people, the cis hetero male people - can be attributed largely to the disproportionate influence in government, society and media of wealthy white 'Christian' males who've obviously wanted themselves, their heirs and people who think like them to be favoured. There's a lot to be said about the history and current implications of the concept of 'white' identity, but as far as 'privilege' goes it merely happens to be one of the few ways in which the field is not stacked against the majority of non-elite folk.
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