Comment by goatlover

5 years ago

> If you can be convinced that the status quo is oppressive to racial minorities, then it serves to perpetuate white supremacy.

This is assuming white privilege is the same as white supremacy, when the term white supremacy has been used for KKK and neo-nazis groups, not mainstream white society since after the civil rights era.

It also assumes that most whites and only whites benefit from white privilege, otherwise it's not so white, and may be more a combination of class, culture and/or historical consequences. Also the fact that white people are still a majority in countries like the US, where a majority in any country likely has similar privileges just by being the majority. One last assumption (in America) is that white culture is a certain way, when in reality the US is primarily an English dominated culture historically, whereas Europe has a lot of cultural variation.

A related issue is that white supremacy is sometimes extended to considering an entire economic system as racist, just because history went a certain way. But there's nothing about an economic system that says any one particular group need benefit more than another.

Fair point. White supremacy is an attitude, whereas white privilege a state of being. I would quibble that white supremacist ideas are quite widespread - see, e.g., references to "thugs" during the BLM protests.

I also agree that white privilege interacts with class, culture and historical consequences, this was well put.

If, hypothetically, an economic system admits little class mobility, and if classes are racially biased, then the effect of that economic system is to maintain a racial caste system. What are your thoughts on this? I'd also point that the justice system works similarly. There are few explicit racial biases, but what is the effect of this system? It actively maintains a racial hierarchy. Does that make it racist?

  • Sure, I’d say the West is less so over time as laws and attitudes shift towed being more inclusive. But as for capitalism in general, it’s just an economic system that any society can make use of. I’m of the opinion that it does a better job of growing the economy and producing more opportunities than other systems, raising the standard of living in general. It does also produce more wealth inequality. It also has a tendency to produce powerful corporations. So those two tendencies along with a few others need to be kept in check.

> there's nothing about an economic system that says anyone one particular group need benefit more than another.

Crony capitalism creates positive feedback loops where the friends of rich people benefit more than strangers to rich people.

I doesn't take a lot of analysis to see how that can re-enforce the dominance of one race in a society if there's any small amount of inequality to start(1) and people of a given race are mostly associating with others of the same race, since the positive feedback loops in capitalism are significant.

(1) And "small amount of inequality" isn't a fair assumption for the US, where one race started out owning people of the other race.

  • I should have said racial or ethnic group, since there's no reason other than historical happenstance why any racial/ethnic grouping can't benefit. As for friends of the rich, has there been any economic system where that wasn't true? If not rich, then at least the powerful and well connected have always benefitted in every society. The challenging part is how to mitigate that somewhat.

  • > I doesn't take a lot of analysis to see how that can re-enforce the dominance of one race in a society if there's any small amount of inequality to start(1) and people of a given race are mostly associating with others of the same race, since the positive feedback loops in capitalism are significant.

    This isn't racial discrimination or racism or white supremacy, and yielding equal outcomes among racial groups isn't innately desirable. If we assume that all races would be equal today were it not for historical discrimination (quite an assumption given that significant disparities predated first contact between different racial groups and thus racism between them), and we want to correct for that historical discrimination then we can talk about it, but that's fundamentally different than "racism is rampant today" or "we've made little progress since abolition" or "we live in a white supremacist ethnostate" or any of the other left-wing claims.

    • > This isn't racial discrimination or racism or white supremacy

      Definitionally, "a system that gives white people a structural advantage based on what color they were born" is a system of white supremacy, even if the system could be tilted to be a black supremacy or hispanic supremacy system if the initial conditions were different.

      There's what the system could do (in another historical timeline) vs. what it is doing.

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  • > Crony capitalism creates positive feedback loops where the friends of rich people benefit more than strangers to rich people.

    That's about class, not race, ethnicity or whatever other grouping you prefer. White billionaires hang out with black billionaires, not with white hobos.

    • > White billionaires hang out with black billionaires, not with white hobos.

      I'm pretty sure that, to a 90%-10% ratio, they hang out with white millionaires, not either of the groups you described.

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