American Tune's supposed to be ironic and true you mad fucks. He IS white/straight, and white people DO get advantages in this society, same with straight males.! Coming from a white person, every damn thing he said in that song is true. I think it's disgusting as well, how race/gender preference really does impact our ways of living as they do.
deathtokoalas
it's statistically false. the most privileged group in north america is east asians, followed by south asians. northern european whites are in the middle, with blacks and latinos and native americans on the bottom.
the model was developed by black academics in the southeastern us to try and understand the consequences of american apartheid. it works well enough in that limited context. you could also apply it reasonably well to, say, south africa, which has a similar history.
the problem is when you take something with an extremely limited intended application and try to blow it up to a general, universal rule. it happens all the time. and you can't blame the authors.
there's just a lot of morons out there.
bakerbrown6
+deathtokoalas One question: which group in North America has the most money, most members in congress and the most influence?
deathtokoalas
+bakerbrown6 these people are slaves to the investor class. bankers. pointing to the composition of congress as "privilege" is like arguing that workers must run society because they do all the work.
the investor class is mostly inherited wealth, and is a lot more diverse than you may realize.
to put it differently, the investor class will run the candidate it believes has the highest chance of winning. if the majority of politicians are white, it does not suggest that white people have more power in any real sense. it merely suggests that they are a plurality in most places, and running white people is the best way for the investor class to get votes. the investor class will readily invert this logic by running candidates of any colour and gender combination, when it is likely to maximize votes.
bakerbrown6
+deathtokoalas"If the majority of politicians are white, it does not suggest that white people have more power in any real sense"... no? I guess there is a way to spin anything haha. You don't have to go back too far in American history when people of color had NO rights. There are many who would love to go back.
deathtokoalas
+bakerbrown6 i want to be clear that i'm not rejecting the model outright, i'm just pointing out that it's a specific model and not a universal one. and, the people that built the model would acknowledge that. it's specifically meant to deal with the consequences of slavery, as they applied to the southeastern united states. they simply weren't interested in trying to describe a universal social phenomenon.
so, if you want to talk about white privilege in atlanta or dallas or st. louis? yeah, that's a real thing. it's a consequence of the legacy of slavery. but, if you start crunching data in chicago or detroit (even with the recent mess) or new york or toronto or seattle, you're going to see a different picture emerge. and, this is where people start pushing back.
the exact error here is called "universalizing the specific". it's a first year logic error. but you see it quite commonly in academia, especially in the social sciences, where academics want to take these ideas and paint them over these large academic or geographic areas, often with poor results.
trying to apply it to canada yields particularly bad results. i know it's called "american song", but you hear the same ideas coming from activists here. the reality? there are so few blacks in canada, that there hasn't even been a real opportunity to systemically discriminate against them. number of blacks descended from slaves in canada? statistically insignificant. blacks make up a few percentage points of the overall population, but almost all of them are highly educated recent immigrants directly from africa or the caribbean. statistically, they're actually slightly privileged due to the immigration rules requiring high levels of education for entry. so, you just can't apply a model meant to explain the legacy of slavery to a country with no serious legacy of slavery. but, people do it anyways because they want to universalize this specific idea.
(to be clear: yes, there was slavery in canada. but it was short lived, and it left almost no descendants. certainly, it didn't leave large swaths of areas of freed slaves.)
that's not to say we don't have structural racism here, but it's historically applied mostly to native americans overall - and to french canadians and east asians in specific geographic regions.
the take-away is just that critical theories are specific things, and you need to be very careful in applying them in ways that are not catered directly to the issue being analyzed.
i mean, check this out:
http://www.news.utoronto.ca/immigrants-who-outperform-mainstream-populations-us-canada-and-australia
the reason this gets scary to me is that it constructs a social hierarchy that really doesn't otherwise exist. but, if it exists in our mind, we will create it in front of us. i don't think that was the intent. but it scares me that it's often the result. worse, the type of argumentation attached to proponents of these ideas (as universals) tend to reject data and logic in favour of subjective experience. as a whole, this comes off quite orwellian.
bakerbrown6
+deathtokoalas Just curious what you might have to say about blacks in all of the jails and mostly for drugs (even though whites do more drugs)....
deathtokoalas
+bakerbrown6 yeah, that's a good example of the systemic racism that exists primarily in the american south (although the profiling exists throughout the country in different degrees). i mean, it's a backdoor to slavery. meant to replace the collapse of jim crow. the root of the problem here is in the continuation of prison labour. did you know that the prison system has a monopoly on paint in the united states? if you look at prison labourers at "workers", the united states prison system is one of the largest employers in the country. so, you get the whole school-to-prison pipeline issue.
it's just important to recognize it's a largely regional issue. we don't have any prison labour at all up here, so trying to pull that out doesn't make any sense.