"White privilege" is an academic-leftist neologism that has not been run by the mainstream of America before the left foisted the notion on the rest of us. I encourage readers to look at the wikipedia link on "white privilege" to see the notion explained. From the introductory section:
White privilege (or white skin privilege) is the societal privilege that benefits white people over non-white people, particularly if they are otherwise under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. ...Writers have noted that the "academic-sounding concept of white privilege" sometimes elicits defensiveness and misunderstanding among white people, in part due to how the concept of white privilege was rapidly brought into the mainstream spotlight through social media campaigns such as Black Lives Matter.[9] As an academic concept that was only recently brought into the mainstream, the concept of white privilege is frequently misinterpreted by non-academics; some academics, having studied white privilege undisturbed for decades, have been surprised by the seemingly-sudden hostility from right-wing critics since approximately 2014.[10]Again, I encourage a reading of the full wikipedia link, where what is explained as "white privilege" is advantages that whites (qua whites) experience relative to nonwhites in America. The "advantages" enjoyed by whites are actually the effect of (real or contrived-by-leftists) unfair and unjust treatment of nonwhites. In essence - and I'm doing my utmost to characterize this notion accurately - what the wikipedia link describes is a set of circumstances in which whites are not treated unfairly relative to nonwhites.
In essence, then, "white privilege" is whites not being treated unjustly. No, it's not some special or acquired advantage, as the term "privilege" traditionally denotes (or is it connotes...). It doesn't mean an advantage conferred, per se. It means a disadvantage inflicted on others. (And speaking of things that disadvantage black youth, does the greater prevalence of single-parent families among minorities and black people in particular also contribute to "white privilege"? Should we double down and insist that this disparity is due to the white-privilege power structure, etc.?)
At this point you might understand how this notion would "elicit defensiveness and misunderstanding" among those upon whom the notion is foisted. What is taken by the leftist authors of "white privilege" to be defensiveness and misunderstanding is really nothing more than disorientation and confusion as to how the term "privilege" is genuinely applicable to a situation in which what makes the "privileged" privileged is that they're not treated unjustly. Instead of a term that conveys, commonsense-like, the unjust treatment of nonwhites, the leftists have decided that
I wish that there were something that I'm missing here, but I've given up on giving leftists the benefit of the doubt.
If the "white privilege" notion were an isolated thing, not intertwined with a bunch of leftist ideology, with a related cluster of neologisms and dogmas, etc., then one might reasonably treat it as an unfortunate inexactness, or a lapse in an otherwise cogent, good-faith critique of prevailing American institutions. But that's not what this is.
I think leftism is toxic wherever it is found, but a thesis I'd like to advance in connection with this (the "white privilege" topic as well as all the other intellectual failings documented quite exhaustively in my leftism-related links) is as follows:
The American left is especially toxic and intellectually bankrupt, because of how at-odds leftism is with uniquely American founding and operating ideals, namely: freedom from state power. The American left is set up starkly over-and-against the American mainstream, standing in a position (as it were) of dialectical alienation. (This is why leftism seems to be a much "better fit" in European nations such as France, where (e.g.) the French Revolution of the late 18th century illustrates the contrast with America's revolution/break with the English Crown.)
A key example: the ideas of Ayn Rand are within a legitimate Overton Window of range of opinion in America. There is a (relatively) healthy debate on the American Right over the role that Ayn Rand should play in forming culture and politics. A great portion of the ideas in Atlas Shrugged resonate with a large segment of the Right (particularly the free-market, libertarian right). How does the Left respond to Ayn Rand? I'm speaking here of the American Left; the Left as well as non-Left in Europe don't treat Rand as being within the Overton Window of discourse there. (Just how punitively high should taxes on the rich be, is the point in contention in these Euro-welfare-states. Just how much someone should be able to keep what they earn through providing value-added to customers/purchasers in legitimately voluntary transactions, is the point of contention in the American mainstream. Or: does your life fundamentally belong to you, or to the state/demos/collective? And: is politics the most just, appropriate, humane, etc. way of addressing social problems?)
Returning to the question: how does the American Left treat or respond to Ayn Rand? My very extensive experience with this is that these leftists do nothing more than misrepresent, distort, and smear Rand, when they're not ignoring or evading her message. ("She would let the poor die in the gutter, since her heroes say their lives belong to themselves and not to the poor or govt agents purporting to act on their behalf." And they choose to ignore the message from Galt about virtue-based aid to the unfortunate. The leftist assumption here seems to be that if it isn't state-directed aid, it is too precarious and conditional to fit the requirements of justice. That's an area for good-faith disagreement, not for unquestioned assumption.)
Given the founding and (still by and large - at a roughly 65% rate, anyway) operative principles of America, the legitimate Overton Window would be the range of opinion between Rawls and Nozick/Rand. [Edit: And a Rawls vs. Nozick/Rand debate might not even take all that much into consideration the reasonably well-argued opinions of many of those describing themselves as conservatives, which pretty much makes it that much more difficult for the Left to defeat non-leftist opinion on the merits.] But this is not what the American Left sees as the legitimate range of opinion. The "center" of leftist opinion in America today is the more Euro-style "democratic socialism" of Bernie Sanders and AOC, with Rand/Nozick written off as terribly misguided, inhumane, evil, etc. What else explains the absolutely pathetic way the American Left debates - i.e., avoids debating head-on, in good faith - rightist ideas (including those of conservatives/Republicans and Trump supporters in general)?
The American Left has replaced a good-faith dialogue with the American Right, with an ever-more-inbred debate about, e.g., how exactly to construct the "white privilege" notion, or just how racist Trump and his supporters are, or just how much more GDP should go to the public sector, or just how evil Rand is, or just how much illegal immigration should be incentivized, or just exactly which past American presidents and national symbols should be besmirched and boycotted, or just how exactly to blame capitalism for high healthcare costs, or just exactly how fundamentally unfair the capitalist system is, or just how exactly and how much to smear Brett Kavanaugh, or just how exactly to distort/smear/deplatform/cancel/evade what conservative opinion that does exist on college campuses, and on and on.
Is it any surprise, then, that the chief source of toxicity in American politics today is leftism, with the Trump phenomenon a backlash against that?
Here's another, related thesis: on the actual merits, many of the best political minds in America are on the Right. The American Left, by virtue of an atrophied dialectical sensibility, is full of hubris - namely, the assumption that they possess a superior intellectual and moral compass (made more developed by proximity to big coastal cities and college campuses, apparently). By their own lights this puts them at odds with an American mainstream full of irredeemable deplorables, racists, religious fundamentalists clinging bitterly to their Bibles/religion, rednecks clinging to their guns, etc. Given their hubris, their outsized commitments to political activism (a substitute religion) as a source of meaning, and the roadblocks to their political vision presented by conservatives, libertarians, Republicans, Trump, talk radio, Fox News, the electoral college, and the Constitution as interpreted in good faith (i.e., with the strong presumption of liberty), it's no surprise that they come off as so miserable and nasty over not having gotten their way.
I would say that the problem has gotten only worse over time (and will continue to get worse) because of the irreconcilable opposition between leftism and America and the American left's doubling down on the correctness of leftism (with the complicitly of the "educators") in the face of this.
I won't belabor this further; either you see how I'm right (here and in all the other blog posts about leftism/leftists I have provided ample leads for above) or you don't. If anything, this here blog post demonstrates that it's pretty much the end of the line as far as American-leftism's credibility is concerned; it serves more or less as a culmination of all those other blog posts. This here blog post can and will serve well as a one-stop unit for future reference, whenever I mention how intellectually and morally bankrupt the American Left is. (The further left you go, the more deranged and toxic it gets.) Had they ever engaged in good faith with the likes of Rand I might have concluded differently. If they were nearly as progressive and forward-looking as they pretend to be, they'd be gung-ho on philosophy and philosophical education.
As it is, my one-word summary of the American left is: pathetic.
