Source: Philip Cohen (https://www.flickr.com/photos/philipcohen/38444249116)
The concept of white privilege is central to contemporary social justice movements. And though there are disagreements, there’s a broad consensus on what white privilege amounts to. Roughly, white privilege is a set of benefits one gets merely in virtue of being white. Society confers these benefits not due to wealth, effort, or any other feature, but merely from whiteness. These benefits might be economic, political (e.g., citizenship status), or something much less tangible.
But this idea that white privilege is a benefit to whites was not always central to the concept. There’s an older concept of white privilege complicating this picture. On that older concept, white privilege often had short term benefits for whites. But those came at the expense of long term harm to working-class organizing that hits both whites and non-whites.
Examples of White Privilege
This is where things get a bit trickier. When people cite examples, sometimes they focus on things that are merely unearned. But at other times they focus on things that are both unearned and undeserved.
We can start with the latter. Peggy McIntosh’s classic article ‘White Privilege and Male Privilege‘ makes for a good starting point. And I’ll say much more about her article below. But, for now, she generates lots of examples of privilege that are both unearned and undeserved. A few of them: the ability to ignore non-white activist work without repercussions, the ability to ignore non-dominant cultures, the ability to find academic courses that only cover whites, et al.
I say these examples are ‘undeserved’ because they’re things whites shouldn’t have access to. The world would be a better place if whites didn’t have the ability to ignore non-white activist work. And so on.
Other examples are unearned, but deserved. That is to say that whites should have access to these things, but so should non-whites. A few of these examples: having one’s voice heard in a mixed racial setting, going shopping without being followed by store security, going into a grocery store and finding the food of one’s cultural traditions, making mistakes without these mistakes counting as a mark against all members of one’s race, et al.
What these examples have in common is that they’re benefits that everyone should have access to, but only whites have regular access in today’s world. We need to expand access to others.
A Quick Note on Race and Other Factors
One quick note. The extent to which these examples are grounded in race as opposed to other factors is unclear. McIntosh declares intent to focus on examples that relate more to race than, e.g., socioeconomic status or immigrant status, but I suspect she’s less than successful. Many of her examples have as much to do with those other factors as they do race.
I’ll say more about this below in the section called ‘The Broke White Person.’ It has been a common point of complaint about both McIntosh’s article and this particular concept of ‘white privilege,’ more generally.
Two Concepts of White Privilege
I’m going to set the examples aside for a bit, because there’s a deeper issue I want to get at. The concept of white privilege I described above, the social justice concept, is relatively new. It’s really only about three or four decades old. It replaced an older concept that I think we can learn from.
In his book Mistaken Identity, Asad Haider covers this in some detail. And I wrote about Haider’s book earlier. What Haider does is dig into the pamphlet called White Blindspot, written by an offshoot of the Communist Party USA.
The idea is that what they called ‘white-skin privilege’ is a set of apparent and/or short term benefits to whites as a group. They cite things like social respectability, being acknowledged as a person, et al. These things mark off working-class whites from working-class people of color, especially working-class black people. But, in practice, these benefits functioned like a bribe. The upshot of the bribe is that it prevented cross-racial, working-class organizing. The threat of removing these benefits was sufficient to deter working-class organizing in such a way that capitalists were able to devalue labor-power and maintain an industrial reserve army.
Consequently, on this second concept of white privilege, it’s not a long term benefit to whites at all. It’s, in fact, a psychological poison to them. Haider draws the obvious historical comparison to W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of the psychological wage.
For the sake of convenience, I’ll refer to the two concepts as the ‘social justice concept’ and the ‘communist concept.’
Who Benefits From White Privilege?
Here’s the rub. These concepts yield different answers to the question of who benefits from white privilege. If white privilege is a system of benefits whites access as a group, then whites benefit from it. But if we think of it as a psychological poison the capitalist system feeds whites, they ultimately don’t. At least, not as a group. Only certain individual whites do, namely those at the top of the hierarchy.
The communists hit this point pretty hard in a followup article. It’s called, with a title cleverly referencing the full identitarian turn of the Weathermen, Without a Science of Navigation We Cannot Sail in Stormy Seas. They use a simple metaphor. To say white people, as a group, benefit from white privilege is to say fish benefit from the worm attached to the fisherman’s hook. Yeah, the fish gets a short term thrill and the white man gets short term bennies. But neither’s better in the end.
That’s the idea, anyway.
Let’s hold on to that point for a minute. I think the communists are basically correct to draw a distinction between short term benefits and long term losses. But they probably understate the impact of the short term in real world race relations.
Whiteness is Nothing More Than What’s in the Knapsack
Haider points out what’s wrong with McIntosh’s metaphor of the knapsack. And, arguably, that’s his most important contribution to the literature. Through the metaphor, McIntosh reifies race to make her point. As do many other social justice activists.
And I think it’s easy enough to identify the mistake. For McIntosh’s metaphor to work, there’s got to be a white person carrying the knapsack around. Right? The white person uses what’s in there to gain benefits. And so, there must be a white person over and above those benefits. The trouble is that there’s no white person outside the knapsack. Whiteness literally just is the stuff that’s in there. This is to say that whiteness is nothing above and beyond various benefits in the world. That’s all there is to it.
The Broke White Person
McIntosh’s failed metaphor isn’t so innocent. It leads people down various unproductive rabbit-holes. The most famous one is the problem of how to ‘explain white privilege to a broke white person.’ You’ve maybe read the article before, and in many ways it’s a good article. It explains, in careful and largely accurate detail, how whites at each socioeconomic level gain benefits over non-whites at the same level.
But there are two problems I see here. First, the audience for McIntosh’s article is mostly wealthier, highly educated white people. The audience for the ‘broke white person’ article is largely the same. This is a group that’s unlikely to gain much traction ‘explaining white privilege’ to working-class and/or poor whites. They’ll come off as condescending, often because they probably will be condescending. In many cases, they should take a seat. At a minimum, they should reflect on their own motivations for ‘explaining’ things.
Second, and maybe more importantly, the communist concept of white privilege is more useful in speaking with working-class whites. By about a mile. The person you’re speaking with is probably in a working-class job where solidarity-based, cross-racial organizing would be extremely useful. Or they’re living in a working-class neighborhood where, solidarity-based, cross-racial organizing, like building a tenants union, would be extremely useful. Racial prejudices are poison to that work. And so, understanding the nature and role of the ‘psychological wage’ could go a long way toward aiding good activist work.
Post-Racialism and the Future of American Capitalism
There’s a reason why the old concept of white privilege is returning. We’re seeing a shift in the nature of racism in the US, and likely elsewhere. It’s not that we’re overcoming racial inequality. In large part, we’re not. The US system implements new forms of racial marginalization under the banner of ‘colorblind’ policy. See, for example, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
The capitalist system is developing, or trying to develop, forms of accumulation that don’t rely on racism. At least not in any explicit form. Thus far without a lot of success. But I think the idea is clear enough: use financialization and tech-driven automation to devalue labor-power to such an extent that we have an industrial reserve army that doesn’t require racism to form or maintain itself.
This kind of ‘post-racial’ world is probably one where racial inequality sticks around to some degree or another. At least for awhile. It’s likely it’d eventually get to the point where marginalization is no longer qua race. And replacing racism with a different system of social exclusion is hardly praiseworthy.
No One Loses
There’s one final advantage the communist concept has over the social justice concept. It’s the type of movements we can build with it. In general, we can use it to build movements grounded in solidarity, not altruism.
A great deal of social justice organizing is based around the idea that whites can help fight racism by voluntarily giving up their privilege. This includes most of what passes for ‘white-ally culture.’ Most of the groups organizing in this way are white-led or composed largely of white people.
That said, some non-white racial justice organizers have gone down the same road. See, for example, Didi Delgado’s widely-read critique of SURJ, a mostly white racial justice group. Delgado criticizes SURJ for prioritizing the feelings and concerns of its white members. And she’s spot-on about that. But she appears to accept the same flawed framework that generated SURJ’s problems in the first place: namely, a focus on white self-flagellation, ‘accountability’, and giving up privilege instead of doing the work of building cross-racial working-class solidarity. By the end of the article, Delgado advocates an individualistic and arguably apolitical notion of ‘reparations’. People see the need to get at social impact, but if you cut yourself off from the deeper social relations involved, you’ll end up at this dead end.
There are two problems with this entire line of thought. One, it’s based on a misreading of the long term role of privilege. While privilege offers short term benefits to whites, it’s a long term detriment to everyone. And, two, this is a depressing and nihilistic vision, as well as a total political failure. Very few people want to join a political movement that works against their interests. And the few who will join such a movement will be people who have plenty to lose, e.g., wealthy white progressives.
Which Concept of ‘White Privilege’ is the Correct One?
I want to conclude here by claiming that the question headlining this section is the wrong question. Both concepts of white privilege are the correct one, in some sense of ‘correct.’ When you equalize all other factors, e.g., gender, socioeconomic status, disability status, sexual orientation, et al., American society ranks white people higher than black people. That’s clear and obvious. So, the social justice concept of ‘white privilege’ identifies something important. As does, as I’ve tried to show above, the communist concept.
If we’re looking for a way to reconcile the two concepts, it’s this: the social justice version is correct that whites gain benefits, particularly in the short term. And the communist version is correct that, in the long term, this system is holding everyone back from achieving a much better society. The communist version soft-pedals those short term benefits, but the social justice version offers no compelling political vision.
Here’s the question we should ask is: which concept is more useful? And, to lay down my cards, I think the older, communist concept is far more useful.
