White privilege, or white skin privilege, is the Social privilege that benefits white people over non-white people in some societies, particularly if they are otherwise under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. With roots in European colonialism and New Imperialism,
and the Atlantic slave trade, white privilege has developed in circumstances that have broadly sought to protect white racial privileges, various national citizenships, and other rights or special benefits.In the study of white privilege and its broader field of whiteness studies, both pioneered in the United States, academic perspectives such as critical race theory use the concept to analyze how racism and racialized societies affect the lives of white or white-skinned people.
For example, American academic Peggy McIntosh described the advantages that whites in Western societies enjoy and non-whites do not experience as "an invisible package of unearned assets". White privilege denotes both obvious and less obvious passive advantages that white people may not recognize they have, which distinguishes it from overt bias or prejudice. These include cultural affirmations of one's own worth; presumed greater social status; and freedom to move, buy, work, play, and speak freely. The effects can be seen in professional, educational, and personal contexts. The concept of white privilege also implies the right to assume the universality of one's own experiences, marking others as different or exceptional while perceiving oneself as normal.Some scholars say that the term uses the concept of "whiteness" as a substitute for Social class or other social privilege or as a distraction from deeper underlying problems of inequality.Hartigan, Odd Tribes (2005), pp. 1–2. Others state that it is not that whiteness is a substitute but that many other social privileges are interconnected with it, requiring complex and careful analysis to identify how whiteness contributes to privilege. Other commentators propose alternative definitions of whiteness and exceptions to or limits of white identity, arguing that the concept of white privilege ignores important differences between white subpopulations and individuals and suggesting that the notion of whiteness cannot be inclusive of all white people. They note the problem of acknowledging the diversity of people of color and ethnicity within these groups.
Some commentators have observed 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. 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 recent opposition from right-wing critics since approximately 2014.
According to the American Anthropological Association, the general public has been conditioned to view different human 'races' as true separate divisions of the human species; contrary to genetic evidence which clearly shows that all human 'races' are closely genetically related. The mistaken belief that race is real has led to the assignment of some groups (such as Black people) as inferior, while permitting unfair access to privilege, power, and wealth for others (such as White people).
White privilege studies seek to explain how racism gives advantages to white people. As such, most definitions and discussions of the concept use as a starting point McIntosh's metaphor of the "invisible backpack" that white people unconsciously "wear" in a society where racism is prevalent.
Neville, H., Worthington, R., Spanierman, L. (2001). Race, Power, and Multicultural Counseling Psychology: Understanding White Privilege and Color Blind Racial Attitudes. In Ponterotto, J., Casas, M, Suzuki, L, and Alexander, C. (Eds) Handbook of Multicultural Counseling, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
William Miller Macmillan suggests that the Great Trek was an attempt to preserve the racial privilege of White South Africans. Anti-slavery policies were seen as a threat by the Dutch-speaking settlers, who were afraid of losing their African and Asian slaves and their superior status as people of European descent. Contemporary news reports made similar observations.
What infinite cruelties and injustices have been practiced by men who believed that to have a white skin constituted special privilege and who reckoned along with the divine rights of kings the divine rights of the white! We are all glad to take up the white man's burden if that burden carries with it the privilege of asserting the white supremacy, of exploiting the man of lesser breed, and making him know and keep his place.
In his 1935 Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois introduced the concept of a "psychological wage" for white laborers. He wrote that this special status divided the labor movement by leading low-wage white workers to feel superior to low-wage black workers. Du Bois identified white supremacy as a global phenomenon affecting the social conditions across the world through colonialism. For instance, Du Bois wrote:
It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.Du Bois, W. E. B., Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1995 reissue of 1935 original), pp. 700–701. .
In a 1942 edition of Modern Review magazine, Ramananda Chatterjee accused Winston Churchill of hypocritical policy positions, in his support, as Chatterjee viewed it, of racial equality in the UK and US but not in British India; "Mr Churchill can support white privilege and monopoly in India whilst opposing privilege and monopoly on both sides of the Atlantic." In 1943, during World War II, sociologist Alfred McClung Lee's Race Riot, Detroit 1943 addressed the "Nazi-like guarantee of white privilege" in American society:
White Americans might well ask themselves: Why do whites need so many special advantages in their competition with Negroes? Similar tactics for the elimination of Jewish competition in Nazi Germany brought the shocked condemnation of the civilized world.
In the 1960s, Theodore W. Allen urged White Americans to renounce their "white skin privileges".Allen, Theodore W., "A Call . . . John Brown Memorial Pilgrimage . . . December 4, 1965," John Brown Commemoration Committee, 1965 and Jeffrey B. Perry, "The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights from Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight against White Supremacy," "Cultural Logic" 2010. In the same era, the Students for a Democratic Society called "for an all-out fight against 'white skin privileges'".See Ignatin (Ignatiev), Noel, and Ted (Theodore W.) Allen, "'White Blindspot' and 'Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?'" (Detroit: The Radical Education Project and New York: NYC Revolutionary Youth Movement, 1969); Thomas R. Brooks, "The New Left is Showing Its Age", The New York Times, June 15, 1969, p. 20; and Perry, "The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights from Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen. . . "
Allen extended his analysis of white privilege to the colonial period.Allen, Theodore W., Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race (Hoboken: Hoboken Education Project, 1975), republished in 2006 with an "Introduction" by Jeffrey B. Perry at Center for the Study of Working Class Life, SUNY, Stony Brook.Allen, Theodore W., The Invention of the White Race, Vol. I: Racial Oppression and Social Control (New York: Verso, 1994, 2012, ) and Vol. II: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York: Verso, 1997, 2012, ).Allen, Theodore W., "Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race", Part 1 , #8, Cultural Logic, I, No. 2 (Spring 1998), and Jeffrey B. Perry, "The Developing Conjuncture and Insights from Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy" . Cultural Logic. July 2010, pp. 8, 80–89. Allen maintained several points: namely that the concept of a "white race" was invented as an element of social control. Central to this process was the conferring of privileges to White working people that were against the interests of Black people and other minorities. Allen also argues that this privilege is the main retardant of working-class consciousness in the US.Perry, Jeffrey B., "The Developing Conjuncture and Insights from Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy," "Cultural Logic,'" July 2010, pp. 10–11, 34.
In the 1980s, Peggy McIntosh developed one of the earliest theoretical concepts of white privilege. Her early work is still routinely cited as a key influence by later generations of academics and journalists.
In the same time period, the American feminist movement was criticized for exhibiting "class privilege" and "white privilege".Bennett, Jacob (May 2012), "White Privilege: A History of the Concept", Master's Thesis at Georgia State University. In later years, the theory of intersectionality also gained prominence.
By 2003, most scholars of race relations had embraced the concept white privilege.
One report noted that white students often react to in-class discussions about white privilege with a continuum of behaviors ranging from outright hostility to a "wall of silence". A pair of studies on a broader population by Branscombe et al. found that framing racial issues in terms of white privilege as opposed to non-white disadvantages can produce a greater degree of racially biased responses from whites who have higher levels of racial identification. Branscombe et al. demonstrate that framing racial inequality in terms of the privileges of whites increased levels of white guilt among white respondents. Those with high racial identification were more likely to give responses which concurred with modern racist attitudes than those with low racial identification. According to the studies' authors, these findings suggest that representing inequality in terms of outgroup disadvantage allows privileged group members to avoid the negative implications of inequality.
A 2019 experiment found that white privilege studies did not increase empathy for minorities, and that White students even lost empathy for minorities. One of the study's authors said that this demonstrates the importance of recognizing individual differences, when teaching about white privilege.
According to Robin DiAngelo, when white privilege is challenged, the resulting racial stress can trigger a range of defensive responses. For example, some white people, when confronted with racial issues concerning white privilege, may respond with dismissal, distress, or other defensive responses because they may feel personally implicated in white supremacy. DiAngelo also writes that white privilege is very rarely discussed, and often defines race as something that only concerns blacks, excluding other minorities. DiAngelo argues that white defensiveness is not irrational, but rather is often driven by subconscious, sometimes even well-meaning, attitudes toward racism.
DiAngelo's book has been criticized for being "self-fulfilling" and "oversimplified".
White backlash has been described as a possible response to the societal examination of white privilege, or to the perceived actual or hypothetical loss of that racial privilege. One study suggests that backlash results from threats to white privilege. George Yancy likewise suggests that the backlash is an extreme response to loss of privilege.
In some accounts, global white privilege is related to American exceptionalism and hegemony.Bush, Melanie E. L., " White World Supremacy and the Creation of Nation: 'American Dream' or Global Nightmare? ", ACRAWSA e-journal 6(1) , 2010.
Research conducted by the Journal of Southern African Studies in 2008 has investigated how white privilege is generationally passed on, with particular focus on the descendants of German Namibians, who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2010, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies further analyzed white privilege in post-colonial Namibia.
Many scholars say that 'whiteness' still corresponds to a set of social advantages in South Africa, and conventionally refer to these advantages as "white privilege". The system of white privilege applies both to the way a person is treated by others and to a set of behaviors, affects, and thoughts, which can be learned and reinforced. These elements of "whiteness" establish social status and guarantee advantages for some people, without directly relying on skin color or other aspects of a person's appearance. White privilege in South Africa has small-scale effects, such as preferential treatment for people who appear white in public, and large-scale effects, such as the over five-fold difference in average per-capita income for people identified as white or black.Matthews, Sally (September 12, 2011), " Inherited or earned advantage?", Mail & Guardian.
"Afrikaner whiteness" has also been described as a partially subordinate identity, relative to the British Empire and Boerehaat (a type of prejudice towards Afrikaners), "disgraced" further by the end of apartheid. Some fear that white South Africans suffer from "reverse racism" at the hands of the country's newly empowered majority,Vice, Samantha (September 2, 2011), " Why my opinions on whiteness touched a nerve", Mail & Guardian. "Unfair" racial discrimination is prohibited by Section Nine of the Constitution of South Africa, and this section also allows for laws to be made to address "unfair discrimination". "Fair discrimination" is tolerated by subsection 5.
White English speakers are privileged in their ability to gain employment teaching English at Eikaiwa schools in Japan, regardless of Japanese language skills or professional qualifications.
Professor Helene K. Lee has noted that possessing mixed white people and Korean heritage, or, specifically, its physical appearance, can afford a biracial individual white privilege in the country.
In 2009, writer Jane Jeong Trenka wrote that, as an adoptee to a white family from the United States, it was easier for her to recognize its function in Korean culture.The culture of US military camptowns in South Korea (a remnant of the Korean War) have been studied as a setting for white privilege, and an exacerbation of racial divides between white American and African American soldiers located on bases, as well as with local Korean people.
In 2019, the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences suspended a man from attending their annual meeting for three years for racially profiling a black Canadian scholar. The federation stated that it required the offender to demonstrate that he had taken measures to increase his awareness of white privilege before he would be allowed to attend any future congress.
Later in the year, a former First Nations in Manitoba grand chief stated how many indigenous Canadians perceived the court system of Canada to discriminate against them under the structure of white skin privilege. Journalist Gary Mason has suggested that the phenomenon is embedded within the culture of fraternities and sororities in Canada.
In Blum's analysis of the underlying structure of white privilege, "spared injustice" is when a person of color suffers an unjust treatment while a white person does not. His example of this is when "a Black person is stopped by the police without due cause but a White person is not". He identifies "unjust enrichment" privileges as those for which whites are spared the injustice of a situation, and in turn, are benefiting from the injustice of others. For instance, "if police are too focused on looking for Black lawbreakers, they might be less vigilant toward White ones, conferring an unjust enrichment benefit on Whites who do break the laws but escape detection for this reason."
Blum describes "non-injustice-related" privileges as those which are not associated with injustices experienced by people of color, but relate to a majority group's advantages over a minority group. Those who are in the majority, usually white people, gain "unearned privileges not founded on injustice." According to Blum, in workplace cultures there tends to be a partly ethnocultural character, so that some ethnic or racial groups' members find them more comfortable than do others.
A 2019 found that reading about white privilege did not increase empathy for minorities, especially among white participants, who actually lost empathy. One of the study's authors said that this demonstrates the importance of nuance, and recognizing individual differences, when teaching about white privilege.
Over the past 40 years, there has been less formal discrimination in America; the inequality in wealth between racial groups however, is still extant. George Lipsitz asserts that because wealthy whites were able to pass along their wealth in the form of inheritances and transformative assets (inherited wealth which lifts a family beyond their own achievements), white Americans on average continually accrue advantages. Pre-existing disparities in wealth are exacerbated by tax policies that reward investment over waged income, subsidize mortgages, and subsidize private sector developers.
Thomas Shapiro wrote that wealth is passed along from generation to generation, giving whites a better "starting point" in life than other races. According to Shapiro, many whites receive financial assistance from their parents allowing them to live beyond their income. This, in turn, enables them to buy houses and major assets which aid in the accumulation of wealth. Since houses in white neighborhoods appreciate faster, even African Americans who are able to overcome their "starting point" are unlikely to accumulate wealth as fast as whites. Shapiro asserts this is a continual cycle from which whites consistently benefit.
These benefits also have effects on schooling and other life opportunities.
According to the distinctiveness theory, posited by University of Kentucky professor Ajay Mehra and colleagues, people identify with other people who share similar characteristics which are otherwise rare in their environment; women identify more with women, whites with other whites. Because of this, Mehra finds that white males tend to be highly central in their social networks due to their numbers.
Royster says that this assistance, disproportionately available to whites, is an advantage that often puts black men at a disadvantage in the employment sector. According to Royster, "these ideologies provide a contemporary deathblow to working-class black men's chances of establishing a foothold in the traditional trades."Other research shows that there is a correlation between a person's name and their likelihood of receiving a call back for a job interview. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan found in field experiment in Boston and Chicago that people with "white-sounding" names are 50% more likely to receive a call back than people with "black-sounding" names, despite equal résumé quality between the two racial groups. White Americans are more likely than black Americans to have their business loan applications approved, even when other factors such as credit records are comparable.
at p. 104Black and Latino college graduates are less likely than white graduates to end up in a management position even when other factors such as age, experience, and academic records are similar.Williams, Constraint of Race (2004), p. 359, fig. 7.1.
Cheryl Harris relates whiteness to the idea of "racialized privilege" in the article "Whiteness as Property": she describes it as "a type of status in which white racial identity provided the basis for allocating societal benefits both private and public and character".
Daniel A. Farber and Suzanne Sherry argue that the proportion of Jews and Asians who are successful relative to the white male population poses an intractable puzzle for proponents of what they call "radical multiculturism", who they say overemphasize the role of sex and race in American society.
The "single greatest source of wealth" for white Americans is the growth in value in their owner-occupied homes. The family wealth so generated is the most important contribution to wealth disparity between black and white Americans.
It has been said that continuing discrimination in the mortgage industry perpetuates this inequality, not only for black homeowners who pay higher mortgage rates than their white counterparts, but also for those excluded entirely from the housing market by these factors, who are thus excluded from the financial benefits of both capital appreciation and the tax deductions associated with home ownership.Brown, Carnoey and Oppenheimer, in "Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society", write that the financial inequities created by discriminatory housing practices also have an ongoing effect on young black families, since the net worth of one's parents is the best predictor of one's own net worth, so discriminatory financial policies of the past contribute to race-correlated financial inequities of today.
For instance, it is said that even when income is controlled for, whites have significantly more wealth than blacks, and that this present fact is partially attributable to past federal financial policies that favored whites over blacks.
According to Stephanie Wildman and Ruth Olson, education policies in the US have contributed to the construction and reinforcement of white privilege.Wildman, Stephanie M. "The Persistence of White Privilege." March 18, 2010.Olson, Ruth. "White Privilege in Schools." Beyond Heroes and Holidays. 1998. Endid Lee. Teaching for Change, 1998 Wildman says that even schools that appear to be integrated often segregate students based on abilities. This can increase white students' initial educational advantage, magnifying the "unequal classroom experience of African American students" and minorities.
Williams and Rivers (1972b) showed that test instructions in Standard English disadvantaged the black child and that if the language of the test is put in familiar labels without training or coaching, the child's performances on the tests increase significantly.Williams, R.L. and Rivers, L.W. (1972b). The use of standard and nonstandard English in testing black children. As presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association According to Cadzen a child's language development should be evaluated in terms of his progress toward the norms for his particular speech community.Cadzen, C.B. (1966). Subcultural Differences in Child Language: An Inter-disciplinary Review. Merrill–Palmer Quarterly, 1966, 12 pp. 185–214 Other studies using sentence repetition tasks found that, at both third and fifth grades, white subjects repeated Standard English sentences significantly more accurately than black subjects, while black subjects repeated nonstandard English sentences significantly more accurately than white subjects.
According to Janet E. Helms traditional psychological and academic assessment is based on skills that are considered important within white, western, middle-class culture, but which may not be salient or valued within African-American culture.Helms, J.E. (1997) The triple quandary of race, culture, and social class in standardized cognitive ability testing. In D.P. Flanagan, J.L. Genshaft, & P.L. Harrison (Eds.), contemporary intellectual assessment: theories, tests, and issues (pp.517–532). New York: Guilford Press. When tests' stimuli are more culturally pertinent to the experiences of African Americans, performance improves.Hayles, V.R. (1991). African American Strengths: a survey of empirical findings. In R.L. Jones (Ed.), Black Psychology (3rd ed., pp. 379–400). Berkeley, California: Cobb & Henry Publishers.Williams, R.L. and Rivers, L.W. (1972b) The use of standard and nonstandard English in testing black children. A presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association Critics of the concept of white privilege say that in K–12 education, students' academic progress is measured on nationwide standardized tests which reflect national standards.But see,
One report noted that white students often react to in-class discussions about white privilege with a continuum of behaviors ranging from outright hostility to a "wall of silence". A pair of studies on a broader population found that framing racial issues in terms of white privilege as opposed to non-white disadvantages can produce a greater degree of racially biased responses from whites who have higher levels of racial identification. These authors demonstrate that framing racial inequality in terms of the privileges of whites increased levels of white guilt among white respondents. Those with high racial identification were more likely to give responses which concurred with modern racist attitudes than those with low racial identification. According to the studies' authors, these findings suggest that representing inequality in terms of outgroup disadvantage allows privileged group members to avoid the negative implications of inequality.
African Americans are disproportionately sent to special education classes in their schools, and identified as being disruptive or suffering from a learning disability. These students are segregated for the majority of the school day, taught by uncertified teachers, and do not receive high school diplomas. Wanda Blanchett has said that white students have consistently privileged interactions with the special education system, which provides 'non-normal' whites with the resources they need to benefit from the mainline white educational structure.
The United States housing market has historically discriminated against Black Americans, through practices such as redlining.
Because home ownership is one of the lucrative sources of wealth in America, with home values appreciating at an extraordinary rate since the 1990s, this has effectively denied a massive source of generational wealth to a significant number of Black Americans, which has profound implications beyond personal wealth alone; it also affects the quality of Black neighborhoods and Black schools. The vast majority of schools placed on academic probation as part of district accountability efforts are majority African-American, and low-income.Diamond, John B., & James P. Spillane (2004), "High Stakes Accountability in Urban Elementary Schools: Challenging or Reproducing Inequality?" Teachers College Record, Special Issue on Testing, Teaching, and Learning, 106(6), 1140–1171.Inequalities in wealth and housing allow a higher proportion of white parents the option to move to better school districts or afford to put their children in private schools if they do not approve of the neighborhood's schools.
According to Lawrence Blum:
When Blacks are denied access to desirable homes, for example, this is not just an injustice to Blacks but a positive benefit to Whites who now have a wider range of domicile options than they would have if Blacks had equal access to housing. When urban schools do a poor job of educating their Latino/a and Black students, this benefits Whites in the sense that it unjustly advantages them in the competition for higher levels of education and jobs. Whites in general cannot avoid benefiting from the historical legacy of racial discrimination and oppression. So unjust enrichment is almost never absent from the life situation of Whites.
Some studies have claimed that minority students are less likely to be placed in honors classes, even when justified by test scores.Gordon, Rebecca. 1998. Education and Race. Oakland: Applied Research Center: 48–9; Fischer, Claude S. et al., 1996.Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press: 163Steinhorn, Leonard and Barbara Diggs-Brown, 1999. By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race. NY: Dutton: 95–6. Various studies have also claimed that visible minority students are more likely than white students to be suspended or expelled from school, even though rates of serious school rule violations do not differ significantly by race.Russell Skiba et al., The Color of Discipline: Sources of Racial and Gender Disproportionality in School Punishment. Indiana Education Policy Center, Policy Research Report SRS1, June 2000U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System: Youth 2003, Online Comprehensive Results, 2004. Adult education specialist Elaine Manglitz says the educational system in America has deeply entrenched biases in favor of the white majority in evaluation, curricula, and power relations.
In discussing unequal test scores between public school students, opinion columnist Matt Rosenberg laments the Seattle Public Schools' emphasis on "institutional racism" and "white privilege":
The disparity is not simply a matter of color: School District data indicate income, English-language proficiency and home stability are also important correlates to achievement ... By promoting the "white privilege" canard and by designing a student indoctrination plan, the Seattle School District is putting retrograde, leftist politics ahead of academics, while the perpetrators of "white privilege" are minimizing the capabilities of minorities.Rosenberg, Matt (April 11, 2007), "Putting politics ahead of kids", The Seattle Times.
Conservative author Shelby Steele believes that the effects of white privilege are exaggerated, saying that blacks may incorrectly blame their personal failures on white oppression, and that there are many "minority privileges": "If I'm a black high school student today ... there are white American institutions, universities, hovering over me to offer me opportunities: Almost every institution has a multiculturalism committee ... There is a hunger in this society to do right racially, to not be racist."
Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl show that whites have a better opportunity at getting into selective schools, while African Americans and Hispanics usually end up going to open access schools and have a lower chance of receiving a bachelor's degree. Georgetown.edu In 2019, a National Bureau of Economic Research study found white privilege bias in Harvard University's application process for legacy admission.
Holly Randell-Moon has said that news media are geared towards white people and their interests and that this is an example of white privilege.Howard-Wagner, Deirdre, " The performance of whiteness: accounts of Aboriginal marginalization and racism in Newcastle " in The Future of Sociology, ed. Lockie et al., Australian Sociological Association, December 2009. Michele Lobo claims that white neighborhoods are normally identified as "good quality", while "ethnic" neighborhoods may become stigmatized, degraded, and neglected.
Some scholars claim white people are seen presumptively as "Australian", and as prototypical citizens. Catherine Koerner has claimed that a major part of white Australian privilege is the ability to be in Australia itself, and that this is reinforced by, discourses on non-white outsiders including asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants.
Some scholars have suggested that public displays of multiculturalism, such as the celebration of artwork and stories of Indigenous Australians, amount to tokenism, since indigenous Australians voices are largely excluded from the cultural discourse surrounding the history of colonialism and the narrative of European colonizers as peaceful settlers. These scholars suggest that white privilege in Australia, like white privilege elsewhere, involves the ability to define the limits of what can be included in a "multicultural" society.Deirdre Howard-Wagner, "' Practices of Inclusiveness' in Newcastle: protocols of whiteness, Indigenous protocols and power relations", TASA Conference, December 2006.Maryrose Casey, " Colonisation, Notions of Authenticity and Aboriginal Australian Performance ", Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 8 , 2012. Indigenous studies in Australian universities remains largely controlled by white people, hires many white professors, and does not always embrace political changes that benefit indigenous people. Scholars also say that prevailing modes of Western epistemology and pedagogy, associated with the dominant culture, are treated as universal while Indigenous perspectives are excluded or treated only as objects of study.Lester-Irabinna Rigney, " A first perspective of Indigenous Australian participation in science : framing Indigenous research towards Indigenous Australian intellectual sovereignty", Kaurna Higher Education Journal 7, August 2001.Moreton-Robinson, Aileen (2004), "Whiteness, epistemology, and indigenous representation", in Whitening Race: Essays In Social And Cultural Criticism, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Aboriginal Studies Press. .Kelly, Ben, and Nura Gili (2009), " Conflict and collaboration – a sociology of knowledge production in the field of Indigenous Studies", Australian Social Policy Conference. One Australian university professor reports that white students may perceive indigenous academics as beneficiaries of reverse racism.
Some scholars have claimed that for Australian whites, another aspect of privilege is the ability to identify with a global diaspora of other white people in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. This privilege contrasts with the separation of Indigenous Australians from other indigenous peoples in southeast Asia.Randell-Moon, Holly, " Racial Legitimations and the Unbearable Whiteness of Being ", Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 8 , 2012. They also claim that global political issues such as climate change are framed in terms of white actors and effects on countries that are predominantly white.
White privilege varies across places and situations. Ray Minniecon, director of Crossroads Aboriginal Ministries, described the city of Sydney specifically as "the most alien and inhospitable place of all to Aboriginal culture and people".Minniecon, Ray (February 17, 2004), " Despair the reality for a race lost in the alien space of Redfern", Sydney Morning Herald; quoted by Suvendrini Perera, " 'Aussie Luck': the Border Politics of Citizenship Post Cronulla Beach ", ACRAWSA e-journal 3(1) , 2007. At the other end of the spectrum, anti-racist white Australians working with Indigenous people may experience their privilege as painful "stigma".
Studies of white privilege in Australia have increased since the late 1990s, with several books published on the history of how whiteness became a dominant identity. Aileen Moreton-Robinson's Talkin' Up to the White Woman is a critique of unexamined white privilege in the Australian feminist movement. The Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association formed in 2005 to study racial privilege and promote respect for Indigenous sovereignties; it publishes an online journal called Critical Race and Whiteness Studies."ACRAWSA: About", Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association, updated January 30, 2012; accessed November 19, 2012.
Academic Huia Jahnke's book Mana Tangata: Politics of Empowerment explored how European New Zealanders, in rejecting the 'one people' national narrative and embracing the label Pākehā ("foreigner"), has allowed space to examine white privilege and the societal marginalization of Māori people.
Similarly, Massey University scholar Malcolm Mulholland argued that "studying inequalities between Māori and non-Māori outcomes allows us to identify Pākehā privilege and name it."In their book Healing Our History, Robert and Joanna Consedine argued that in the colonial era Pākehā privilege was enforced in school classrooms by strict time periods, European symbols, and the exclusion of te reo (the Māori language), disadvantaging Māori children and contributing to the suppression of Māori culture.
In 2016, on the 65th anniversary of Māori Women's Welfare League, the League's president criticized the "dominant culture" in New Zealand, and embedded Pākehā privilege.
Hua Hsu, a Vassar College professor of English, opens his New Yorker review of the 2015 MTV film White People by suggesting that white people have become aware of their privilege. Hsu ascribes this to generational change, which he considers a byproduct of the "Barack Obama era".
The documentary White People, produced by Jose Antonio Vargas, follows a variety of white teenagers who express their thoughts and feelings about white privilege on-camera. Vargas interviews a white community college student, Katy, who attributes her inability to land a college scholarship to reverse racism against white people; then Vargas points out that white students are "40 percent more likely to receive merit-based funding".
In January 2016, hip-hop group Macklemore and Ryan Lewis released "White Privilege II", a single from their album This Unruly Mess I've Made, in which Macklemore raps that he and other white performers have profited immensely from cultural appropriation of black culture, such as Iggy Azalea.
According to Fredrik deBoer, it is a popular trend for white people to willingly claim self-acknowledgement of their white privilege online. deBoer criticized this practice as promoting self-regard and not solving any actual inequalities. Michael J. Monahana argues that the rhetoric of privilege "obscures as much as it illuminates" and that we "would be better served by beginning with a more sophisticated understanding of racist oppression as systemic, and of individual agents as constitutively implicated in that system."Suarez, Cyndi (March 26, 2019), "Putting 'Privilege' in Perspective", Non Profit Quarterly.Monahana, Michael J. (March 17, 2014), "The concept of privilege: a critical appraisal", South African Journal of Philosophy.
A 2022 study found that mentioning white privilege results in online discussions that are "less constructive, more polarized, and less supportive of racially progressive policies."
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