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There two ways in which people try to dismiss the existence of white privilege. The first is to deny social privilege in toto, which is very stupid. The second is to accept the reality of social privilege but dispute the existence, or the scale of existence, of "white" privilege.
This second dismissal only exists when the entire existence, or a proportion of the scale that resembles the entire existence, of "whiteness" as a form of social privilege is denied. There are always reasonable questions about white privilege that question but do not dismiss it.
Within the second dismissal, we find a category mistake assuming that whiteness is a simple racial identity like any other one. This mistake can happen in goodwill, but it is still a mistake. Whiteness is not a simple identity, it is the rotten core of the modern concept of race.
What this understanding of whiteness yields is the absolutely essential fact that the modern concept of race, with whiteness at its center, is the key source of white supremacy which creates the conditions of white social privilege in turn.
What I am calling the second dismissal of white privilege is usually unwilling to accept this antecedent reality of white supremacy as something built into the very fabric of the modern concept of race that created, and was created in turn, by colonialism and chattel slavery.
None of this means that there's a stable and settled concept of white privilege to be accepted out of hand. Some proponents of the idea are poorly or only marginally aware of its meaning and, as a result, can treat it like an ideology instead of an idea that rest upon ideology.
There is a serious moral difference between the one who uses their ignorance to shield their heart from a discomforting idea and the one who perhaps too hastily accepts it. We should not play like they are all the same thing. The former need a different kind of conversion.
Recap: I claimed that there are two ways to dismiss white privilege; one which is the stupid denial of social privilege in toto and, secondly, the goodwill denial whiteness as a form of social privilege because of a mistaken understanding of the modern concept of race.
What is sometimes still missing if one accounts for everything required to hold a reasonable and informed understanding of white privilege is the specific *anti-Blackness* of this idea in the USA. This is something I am presently working to better understand and account for.
I'm a critic of the Peggy McIntosh, "invisible knapsack," account of white privilege. I think the concept is better to be found in the Black Intellectual tradition, interwoven into a number of ideas. What one finds in that tradition is far more than dogma or workshop definition.
I am also not sure how much the idea of white privilege in its anecdotal, first-person authority, centered on the individual helps. I suspect it does more harm than good. This doesn't mean that testimony is over, it means it must bear witness to something greater than the self.
None of these major reservations emerge from cynicism of or even skepticism in the idea of white privilege. Like most things, we should begin with faith and seek understanding. A defensive attitude is identical from the first stupid to the second not stupid kinds of dismissal.
As I have shown, I see limits to the idea, but I cannot see any of them as just reason to dismiss the core reality. Anyone acting in good faith, I believe, must accept this disposition as the only reasonable one available in order to begin a serious and honest investigation.
I realize how dogmatic I sound in closing, but there are things that are real and things that are not real, there are truths and half truths and lies, there is goodness and evil which preys upon it, and so on. White privilege is an idea as real, true, and good as any other.
Finis.
Thanks to all for reading and sharing. For more reading in a US Roman Catholic context, I would turn to the brilliant @gloria_purvis in this interview I did with her for @ChurchLifeND: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-gift-of-blackness/
