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.