Over the past ten years or so the concept of “white privilege” has become much more prominent in elite “chattering class” culture. From my own perspective as a brown-skinned person who grew up in an America that was white by default, with a black minority, it is a peculiar phenomenon. The prominence of white privilege in our cultural discussion seems to be correlated with the decline of that privilege. The reason people didn’t talk about white privilege in the 1980s is that it went without saying that the normative American was a white person, and it wasn’t impolite to ask every week where I “really” was from (I looked “foreign”; something white nationalists and older boomers can still agree on). Today I’m rarely asked where I’m from, but the idea and concept of white privilege is very prominent and explicit.
One of the consequences of this paradigm is that class becomes less salient. This doesn’t mean that in theory, people don’t think the class is important, but, they background it so much that by default it fades. This is well illustrated by a phenomenon I’ve noticed personally over the past decade: white American academics from working-class or lower-class backgrounds who believe that due to their achievements as professors they have obtained white privilege. Meanwhile, someone like me, who is visibly brown, can’t ever attain this status, no matter my own class background. They don’t say this to brag, but, rather acknowledge that in their view of the world they’ve opened the doors with a special key that they were born with. Their race. That is the most important privilege you could have, overwhelming all others. They believe this sincerely.
And yet I have always been mildly skeptical of this argument. From my personal experience with academics with this background, their origins haunt them. Sometimes it is subtextual and very mild, and sometimes it manifests itself in explosions of resentment (because my own views are heterodox they are often more open with me about their doubts than they would be with other white liberal academics). I have never seen similar things in people of Asian and Asian American background who grew up in the middle or upper-middle class.* To give a clear illustration: when someone in academia who has a tenured position at a Research 1 university says that being an associate professor is a low-paid profession you know that this individual is from the upper-middle class. There are other academics (white) who I know whose income as graduate students (including benefits) exceeding anything their parents ever made!
Here is the thing that I don’t ever bring up: if Greg Clark’s argument in The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility is correct, that generation-to-generation volatility obscures long-term stability in the social status of lineages, then white academics from lower social status backgrounds are likely to have descendants who may not preserve and maintain the gains that they have made. The magic elixir of whiteness doesn’t erase the underlying parameters of class background in this model.
I am aware there are many arguments about the veracity of Clark’s methods and conclusions. He could be wrong. But from having talked to Clark recently, I can tell you he believes he has found even stronger proof in the data of his thesis of the stability of social status over generations.
If Clark is right, then we’re missing a huge part of the picture.
* Many people who are non-white but from privileged backgrounds complain about racism. As someone who has been subject to racism in the United States in the late 20th-century, but comes from a professional class origin background several generations back, I simply don’t believe that for most people racial discrimination in their lives is ever as pervasive and long-lasting in terms of its impact as class-based economic and mental stress.
Wouldn’t a working class white person automatically have “white privilege” regardless of whether they got educated themselves? Having individual achievement matter less (in the sense that there’s an oscillation around a baseline rather than a random walk where present data makes past data irrelevant) and lineage matter more a la Clark would actually seem congruent racial privilege. If these academics of working class background believe they’re better lives now compared to before mean they only recently acquired privilege, then it seems they’re lying eyes are just telling them that class matters a lot within the white race. Redefining class as “white privilege” is category confusion, but that people might do so doesn’t undermine the idea that white privilege exists.
“The prominence of white privilege in our cultural discussion seems to be correlated with the decline of that privilege”
Isn’t this a kind of general trend? Only after the problem has been weakened we see people daring to denounce it. Everybody wants a picture with the jaguar, but only after it has been killed…
Wouldn’t a working class white person automatically have “white privilege” regardless of whether they got educated themselves?
i think this is the orthodox view. but ppl i know from this background are very ambivalent about it probably cuz of their experiences of deprivation. otoh, they will often assert they got out of the class bind because of their white privilege, so it goes both ways.
anyway, i’m not white. i don’t spend too much time thinking about white privilege i don’t have 😉
Isn’t this a kind of general trend?
culture is a lagging indicator of economics and power.
This is very anecdotal, but aligns with my own experience of Italian Americans born in the mid 80s through the latter half of 90s: they increasingly appear to be downwardly mobile from the middle or upper middle class background of their parents. Their parents frequently made it out of working or urban middle-class backgrounds in the mid 70s through the 1980s (a time when the urban middle class was vanishing) with a low tier college or community college degree, sometimes even less if they lucked into a unionized public service sector job or worked really hard to build a business, since the 80s were a heyday of that sort of thing. Their kids went to college by default and were raised in good school districts, so the parents just assumed they would do even better, since Italian Americans had seen continual improvement in socioeconomic status from the 1920s onward into the 1980s (I believe 1981 is the year Italian Americans finally reached the average economic status for “white” groupings). Instead, without any hereditary status, younger Italian Americans are falling into low paying service jobs despite growing up in safe, quality neighborhoods with good schools and having gotten a basic degree from a solid state school.
As an addendum to my comment, this downward SES drift for Italian Americans coincides with their rejection, explicitly or implicitly through neglect or distance, of the social support networks that their parent, grandparents, and great grandparents had relied on. This is in part due to the inherent loosening in social ties that occurs with being raised in a suburban petit bourgeois milieu, and also in part due to the fact that these networks tended to be at varying levels of social conservatism: the Roman Catholic Church, Catholic youth groups, the extended family of older grandparents and aunts and uncles with conservative opinions, the fraternal and sisterly orders for Italian Americans. In an American culture that became increasingly socially liberal in the latter half of the 2000s onwards, rejecting social and religious conservatism is important to fitting in amongst your general mid 20s to mid 30s peers. Unfortunately, at a time of increasing economic vulnerability, it’s also cutting off important support networks that your parents and grandparents could rely on when in need.
I agree with this essay. However, I do have a point of contention. You write as if asking where someone is from is a bad thing. I love asking people where they are from.
Now, I only do this when I hear an non-US accent (without regard to skin color ). The last person I asked was a white woman from UK whose accent I mistook for Aussie. This habit has been very rewarding — I’ve learned a ton about people’s cultures and their immigrant stories. I also share my immigrant story as well.
When I was working in 14 hour days and took a car home (this is an NYC benefit since public transit becomes very infrequent or unavailable late at night), I would always strike up a conversation with the drivers. Some were Russian speakers like me, but I also met many Egyptians, Turks, Slavs and South Asians. All of those conversations started with me asking the driver where they were from.
“Instead, without any hereditary status, younger Italian Americans are falling into low paying service jobs despite growing up in safe, quality neighborhoods with good schools and having gotten a basic degree from a solid state school.”
Interesting case study @Targen
“if Greg Clark’s argument in The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility is correct, that generation-to-generation volatility obscures long-term stability in the social status of lineages, then white academics from lower social status backgrounds are likely to have descendants who may not preserve and maintain the gains that they have made.”
To some extent. On the other hand, it is also true (1) the socially ascendant white academics are likely to have children with someone with a higher social status background, and (2) the same thesis implies that lots of white academics whose parents were from lower social status backgrounds are disproportionately likely to have had higher social status grandparents, aunts and uncles. When do you define social status in a multi-generational lineage?
I also think that there can be confounds in times of great economic upheaval. Both of my parents earned PhDs, my dad from Stanford and my mom’s masters degree was from U. of Chicago. The grew up in poor farm hamlets that are now found in “ghost towns of America” lists and went to schools with fewer than fifty high school students and decidedly less prestigious undergrad schools. My mom’s family had an outhouse and were an hour from the closest grocery store and grew or hunted much of their own food. They were landless peasants back many generations into Europe before becoming subsistence farmers and lumberjacks/iron miners in the U.S.; my father’s ancestors were small time farmers who had been leather workers in the old country and left to dodge the draft. Both families sewed their own clothes. When they were in their college years, they considered pizza and spaghetti to be exotic food. In their generation, which entered academia at the graduate school level in the 1960s and 1970s, they weren’t the norm, but weren’t that unusual either.
They, and pretty much everyone else I can think of who was similarly situated (maybe twenty families) had kids who, with two exceptions (both involving one of multiple children) maintained their social status. One wasn’t very academic compared to two siblings who maintained their socio-economic status, both had kids young in unstable relationships.
Also, I knew lots of fellow college students who weren’t that well off themselves but had higher social status grandparents (my own kids are arguably in that spot to some extent), kids who fell off track but later but managed to restore their children to grace.
Maybe the fit immigrant hypothesis is at work.
Maybe a lot of talent had developed among lower classes who had been artificially kept down for a long time that got new opportunity in an unprecedented bout of meritocracy in entrance to academia right around then. People who in earlier days would have taken over farms or run small rural businesses who would have been considered too poor and unpolished in earlier days, were given opportunities to get degrees and become professors (my dad took advantage of the GI Bill). People who would have been union leaders and would have been excluded from management for lack of social capital were hired as management trainees instead (a reason as important as anti-union laws for the decline of the union movement starting in the 1970s in the U.S.).
Maybe the pool of people needed to do historically middle class and upper middle class work grew more or less permanently due to structural economic change.
I think you are seeing something similar in India in the kind of activity described in the movie Super 30. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7485048/
In a situation where economic upheaval is rampant, the ability of the those at the top to hold onto top spots doesn’t necessarily mean that a fair number of people at the bottom can’t rise in a stable manner. And this is particularly likely to be stable when those who do rise the first time do so in a fairy pure meritocracy and have children with other who rise in socio-economic class based upon merit.
Also while “white privilege” may be too broad a brush, I think that there may be something to a notion that there may be more finely grained ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds of multiple types (e.g. not Nigerians, but middle class Nigerians from a particular ethnicity in a particular county sized region, or not all whites, but religious Scandinavian descendent farmers in a particular part of the midwest) who might have an advantage that is fairly ethnic in character. Meanwhile someone who is working class white for many generations from Appalachia or Alabama may still be at disadvantage or risk of decline, especially if they choose a life partner who isn’t from academia.