Exposing White Privilege
The reality of oppression
Every year, there is ever more discourse surrounding the notion of “white privilege”. We have reached a point where there are ongoing calls for reparations in hopes of alleviating perceived historical injustices. The narrative of those who stand in opposition to these equitable efforts is that this was all in the past and that America has moved on from those times of bigotry, and now underperforming minorities only need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps in order to succeed. When asked why African-Americans are not doing as well as their white counterparts, a common response from these people have been to blame it on black culture or single parenthood. Yet, might all this grievance actually be justified? Does white privilege actually exist? The answer is yes, of course it does! There is overwhelming evidence for this, and these people are afraid of addressing the elephant in the room because they’re scared of a truly equal society free from the forces of oppression that white people have been and continue to be perpetuating. I, however, am not like these privileged self-interested bigots, I am willing to speak truth to power and expose just how fragile the opposition’s position on race really is. It’s time to finally bring to light just how severe the malicious marginalization of underprivileged peoples is.
Understanding the Concept
First off, how do we define “white privilege”? There have been efforts made by many experts, but all of it comes short. A quick search on Google tells me this:
Okay, so we’re getting somewhere. “Inherent advantages” must necessarily refer to some kind of institutional or social privilege that comes with being white. Yet, we may want to ask ourselves what mechanisms has enabled white Americans to establish this position of superiority over everyone else? What is the reason for their ability to structure society to their favor? To this end, white privilege can be understood as a product of “whiteness”, though even that is difficult to define. Fortunately, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture has made an effort in providing us with a concise definition:
Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups of are compared. Whiteness is also at the core of understanding race in America. Whiteness and the normalization of white racial identity throughout America's history have created a culture where nonwhite persons are seen as inferior or abnormal.
Hmm, so it’s basically the culture of white Americans, which is used to oppress minorities. But how might such a culture operate to enrich whites at the expense of everyone else? Well, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture used to have this insightful chart:
Unfortunately, this was later on taken down and they had apologized for making this. I don’t know why they would do such a thing considering how brilliantly this chart was made and how much it gives people who care about deconstructing whiteness a foundation to work with. So taken together, we can understand that whiteness manifests itself as meritocracy, high civilization, and orderliness. Personally, however, I am not satisfied with this. The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture have done a good job so far of conceptualizing whiteness, but what really matters is how white privilege, downstream from this, manifests itself in real-world outcomes that oppresses non-whites. That is what experts refer to as systemic racism. Here is Wikipedia’s definition:
Institutional racism, also known as systemic racism, is defined as policies and practices that exist throughout a whole society or organization that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race or ethnic group. It manifests as discrimination in areas such as criminal justice, employment, housing, healthcare, education and political representation.[1]
So essentially, systemic racism is the method by which white privilege is sustained, and whiteness is the sociocultural byproduct of white privilege. My job, therefore, is to fill in the conceptual framework we’ve established with the actual evidence, and doing so will leave no room for doubts as to the existence of white privilege.
The Gaps
It is a well-established fact at this point that blacks and Hispanics underperform on a variety of key life outcomes compared to white Americans. Here’s some examples:
So given the evidence of all these disparities, how can there still possibly be people in denial that there’s systemic racism against minorities and that white privilege exists? Well, to be fair, let’s explore what evidence opponents of this view have.
The Opposition’s Response
When discussing the existence of systemic racism, someone who is well-read on statistics might try to point to a host of literature suggesting a lack of evidence of any kind of bias against non-whites. Said individual might argue that, for example, white Americans are not actually racist, and that there is no bias in sentencing, police shootings, police stop and searches, loans, and incarceration once proper controls are implemented (Last, 2020a; TheLawOfAverages, 2023).
He or she might also deny the existence of white privilege entirely by demonstrating that white Americans are actually more likely to work through high school and college, college debt amounts are similar upon graduating between races, different races get similar amounts in college grants, and a lack of job networks and connections favoring white Americans (Faulk, 2018).
So, I believe that I have presented the evidence for the opposition. While all the fancy statistics and numbers might intimidate a young and inexperienced activist fighting for social justice and equity, fear not as the math wizards are soon to get absolutely annihilated once put up against my litmus test.
The Failed Explanations
If it’s true that systemic racism isn’t real, then we need to answer why these gaps in outcomes exist in the first place. Perhaps you might argue that it’s because of the welfare state that was created under the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson which incentivized single parenthood, and this caused blacks to be less likely to grow up with an intact family, which consequently resulted in them performing worse due to a lack of proper parental guidance.
Yet, this argument fails when critically examined. Single parenthood itself is not causal with crime, and it’s actually bad parents with social and psychological disorders that are the most likely to leave their kids behind (Black, 2021).
In fact, there’s actually evidence to suggest that having such a parent incarcerated and not around in the child’s life positively affects their mental health and educational attainment (Artega, 2018). When hearing this, the opposition might try to weasel out of it by explaining these disparities as a function of black poverty. Yet, once again this fails. Poverty is not causal with crime. In one study tracking lottery winners in Sweden over time, it was found that lottery winning did not reduce conviction risk for neither the parent nor the child (Cesarini et al., 2023).
In sibling-comparison models too we find no association between childhood family income and psychiatric disorders, substance misuse, and violent crime arrest (Sarialsan et al., 2021; 2022).
There association between poverty and crime is also sharply reduced or outright non-significan when looking at studies utilizing a within-individuals design (Airaksinen et al., 2021; Sarialsan et al., 2017).
So neither single parenthood not poverty are good explanations. Fine, then maybe it’s because of blood-lead levels. However, even that is questionable. Higney et al. (2022) meta-analyzed the lead-crime relationship and found substantial publication bias in the literature, and correcting for it significantly reduced the effect size. Another problem with the literature is that blood-lead levels is often a proxy for other variables such as socioeconomic status (which itself is a proxy for other things). This is important because it means that the lead-crime relationship might actually just be driven by something else which happens to be correlated with lead. Beckley et al. (2018) found that once childhood socioeconomic status was accounted for, blood-lead levels was a weak predictor of criminality. It’s possible that lead could have some kind of effect, but it’s clear that it is nowhere near enough to explain the disparities we currently see between races.
As a last ditch effort, maybe they’ll say it’s because blacks and Hispanics don’t place enough emphasis on the importance of education, yet this too is completely untrue.
So why haven’t these gaps narrowed then to all the people who claim “systemic racism isn’t real”? If everyone is equal and there is no systemic racism, why do these disparities persist? Another cope response is to bring up generational poverty, but based on the evidence from adoption studies, random shock studies, lottery studies, and guaranteed income experiments, generational poverty doesn’t actually exist to the degree necessary to explain why the gaps remain today (Last, 2022). Lastly, with regards to incarceration rates, the gaps persist within the same income percentile:
You can see here that the ratio of blacks to whites incarcerated actually increases the higher up the household income percentile they both are. What’s the opposition’s explanation for that? That’s right, nothing. Clearly, white people have been finding a secret way to throw blacks into prison without being detected by all the statistical methods that we currently have, it’s shocking how effective they’ve been. Not only that, but white privilege isn’t just an American thing either. It persists throughout all of the Americas:
In Britain and France, we see a similar situation where people with a darker complexion suffer a wage gap compared to the native ethnic population (Algan et al., 2010). Given that all of these non-oppression explanations fail, it’s obvious that there is systemic racism keeping minorities oppressed while enriching white people, just a very subtle insidious form of it that somehow manages to escape being detected in statistics.
The Mysterious Workings of Oppression
Systemic racism and white privilege are truly the greatest threats to world peace in all of human history. They are so pervasive in society that we can see it everywhere, yet white people have been sneaky enough to somehow make their privilege undetectable when empirically tested. However, the very existence of all these disparities suggests that the researchers are simply being complicit in perpetuating systemic racism. There are other instances in which white privilege manifests itself, so let’s look at some more cases. The first one is race differences on the dating market. White men are the most desired on the dating market. When a white man sends a message, they are the most likely to get a reply from women overall compared to men of any other race (Rudder, 2009):
This is clearly proof that white men have managed to trick women into desiring them, hurting men of other races on the dating market. There was also an incident over a decade ago where a poll in Cape Town, South Africa, caused controversy because it was asking students to vote on the most attractive race. Here were the results, once again demonstrating how powerful white privilege is:
Another instance of white privilege is that even once socioeconomic status is controlled for, an IQ gap persists between whites and blacks (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994, p. 288):
However, even this figure is a bit misleading. This is because whites and blacks at the same decile of socioeconomic status are going to be more similar in terms of ability, so controlling for socioeconomic status indirectly controls for part of this average ability difference. To get around this, adoption studies that don’t suffer from placement bias and randomized experiments have been conducted and have found that the effect of socioeconomic factors on IQ is null (Last, 2020b). In fact, with regards to IQ, the gap persists no matter what we try to do, which explains why this gap has remained so stable over time (Chuck, 2013). This is very strange indeed. We know that blacks do just as poorly on culturally fair IQ tests as they do on regular ones (Jay M, 2019). Not only that, but aside from the biggest gaps on IQ tests showing up on the most g-loaded items (Nijenhuis & Van den Hoek, 2016), the gains in IQ from early intervention attempts in childhood eventually fade out and disappear (Protzko, 2015). White privilege is so pervasive that it’s actively attempting to prevent blacks from making progress in American society. Additionally, it seems that all the people who have been decrying math as a racist subject may have actually had a point. To demonstrate, here is a simple formula to calculate the necessary effect of environment on a trait given its heritability:
where d is the effect size, and h2 is the heritability of the trait. When it comes to intelligence, twin studies typically find the heritability of intelligence to be around 80% once the Wilson Effect, the increase in the heritability of intelligence with age, is taken into account (Bouchard, 2013; Lynn, 2011; Panizzon et al., 2014; Plomin & Deary, 2015).
So in this case, we would substitute d for 1, since the black-white IQ gap of 15 points is roughly 1 standard deviation, and h2 for 0.8. Solving this, we get that X ≈ 2.23607.
In other words, for environmental factors to explain the entirety of the black-white IQ gap, the black environment would have to be so much worse than the white environment that it reaches the mean of the white environment just 1.27% of the time. Yet we have no evidence of this in the real world. Therefore, the only logical conclusion that can be made here is that math is indeed a racist tool used by white people to perpetuate their oppression of racial minorities. Science too is racist, as can be observed by the fact that the overwhelming majority of scientific innovations came from Europeans (Murray, 2003):
That’s right, white people have been enjoying their privilege even before they started having a global presence, how crazy is that right? There’s also evidence of white privilege among attorneys and physicians, at least in California.
We can see that for both instances, African and Latinx (gender inclusivity is important) attorneys and physicians are more likely to have complaints levied against them, once again showing that no matter what, white privilege always finds a way to keep BIPOCs down. If all that wasn’t enough, there are still so many other ways in which white privilege manifests itself, like how it makes black people less likely to invest in stocks (Bennett & Chien, 2022).
White privilege also causes immigrants to imitate the savings behavior of their home country (Richwine, 2022):
Going back to IQ again, even when IQ is controlled for, there are still some disparities that remain. For instance, welfare use and likelihood of having had a child out of wedlock (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994, pp. 331-332):
So even when IQ is controlled for, white people are still finding a way to force BIPOCs to use welfare and have children out of wedlock, how morally abhorrent. All this oppression is clearly the reason why blacks and Hispanics have lower levels of trust than whites do (Gao, 2016):
Now, some might retort this by pointing out how social trust has been on the decline since the 1960s in spite of the United States becoming ever more diverse which should make racial minorities feel more comfortable and at home (Putnam, 2001). This fails to recognize the way in which white privilege operates. When white people feel that their status is being threatened, they will use their klan wizardry dark magic to ensure that blacks and Hispanics continue to remain low in trust no matter how much political influence they gain. Someone might try to point out the highly replicated finding of stereotype accuracy, and that just goes to show just how entrenched white privilege is, as white people have even managed to find a way to make everyone else conform to their group’s stereotypes. The future of the world looks grim under the suffocating inescapable reality of systemic racism that will forever exist to enrich white people.
Conclusion
In this post, I have definitively proven that systemic racism and white privilege exist. More needs to be done to promote justice and fairness towards racial minorities, and the longer white people continue to remain silent on this, the more they’re hurting these marginalized communities. It’s understandable why they would feel so uncomfortable discussing this, after all, it’s just as the famous saying goes: “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”. White Americans—no, all Europeans everywhere in the world, need to be educated on their privilege and encouraged to take action in deconstructing whiteness. We must have more diversity initiatives until the outcomes between the races are finally equalized in every single way possible. Whiteness cannot just be fought in the United States, it is clearly a global phenomenon and as such must be addressed on a global level. Only once this malevolent force has been eradicated will we finally be able to build a beautiful multiracial utopia in which everyone can have the opportunity to rise to the top. Because after all, the only reason why all these disparities have been able to persist for so long when we’re all innately equal is because of the evil white man.