A friend who is a passionate supporter of Bernie Sanders recently got into an email discussion with some other MIT alums regarding whether it was racist to seek treatment from a black dentist rather than a dentist with some other skin color. He thought that choosing a dentist by (black) race was a sign of virtue while others felt that a dentist should be chosen based on other factors.
Why was it okay to search for a black dentist? “The point is that because of white privilege your dentist is so likely to be white anyway that explicitly searching for a white one is a joke, like ‘searching for a gasoline powered car’ or something like that.” The author also uses the phrase “male privilege” in most arguments.
I pointed out that, according to this statistical study, “white males decided to use their privilege to cut themselves back to about 25% of dental school enrollees in 2012.” and asked “Is a white female dentist privileged because she is a dentist and white or a victim because she is female?”
The Sanders supporter responded with “individual results may vary” and “Is the sun hot, or bright? White privilege and male privilege are not the same thing, though they obviously overlap in some cases.”
I then raised the question “What is the practical value of white privilege and male privilege if people who have both of these privileges had to watch non-white, non-males snatch up 75% of coveted spots in dental schools? What can they do with these privileges if not prevent others from gathering up valuable credentials and cash?” He responded with “Well, privilege is a diagnosis, not a cure. Individual results may vary…”
I pointed out “But those weren’t individual results, Q. That was an aggregation of thousands of dental school applicants and enrollees. If white/male privilege is powerful/valuable, how can you explain the apparent lack of value in this situation? If I enjoy the privilege of being a country club member, I can keep the rabble from using the tennis courts and golf course when I want to use them, right?”
His response was “As usual you fail to understand that just because something exists does not make it universally applicable. To find out how this works, try asserting male privilege with your wife.”
me: “So white/male privilege can’t be used to assure career success, e.g., via preferential entry into dental school. And it can’t be used in the domestic (non-career) realm. But you’re saying that it is somehow powerful in another area?”
him: “It’s a statistical effect, not a secret weapon you can reliably use to slay your opponents. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t. … Since we cannot examine every human interaction including the mental states of the participants we cannot individually diagnose every instance of X privilege. Only a general pattern if it appears in the data.”
I think the exchange is interesting because the believer in white/male privilege thinks that it is something that can be confirmed by “data” but his faith in white/male privilege was not shaken by data apparently showing the ineffectiveness of white/male privilege in dentistry. (The apparently contradiction could be resolved if white males were especially unsuited to being dentists and/or underperformed dramatically on the things that dental schools look for among applicants.)
Readers: Does this mean that Americans will be explaining events with statements about “white/male privilege” pretty much indefinitely? If any factual or statistical situation can be shaped to conform to the white/male privilege idea then how could the disappearance of such privilege ever be confirmed?
“White/male/cis/straight” privilege is used as a trump card in an overwhelmingly huge number of exchanges now, based on a population of 300,000,000, I’m estimating 10,000,000 per day, easy. Homeopathic theory suggests the cure is a treatment of 1/10,000,000th diluted trump, so with just one Trump per the entire US population, we can all be treated…
Actually I don’t know what the cure is and suspect we’re doomed.
I’m sorry your friend is such an imbecile. What kind of job does he have, that requires so little understanding of logic and probability that he could do it?
I would bet that your friend is not a religious believer, because he seems to be treating leftist politics as a substitute religion.
I assume you deliberately misread the stats to be provocative?
He’s slowly retreating toward: the privilege of not being white and the privilege of not being male are at last, rightly, more powerful than the privileges of being white and of being male. BUT! YOU STILL HAVE YOUR WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE. Checkmate.
This guy’s a supremely annoying “how to sanctimoniously squirm out of acknowledging being wrong about anything” rationalization machine.
Your opponent should just say “yes, it’s all sorted out in the coming generation, but there are still fossils out there practicing dentistry who graduated 20 years ago when we lived through the horror of Bill Clinton putting more police (mostly men!) on the streets.
He’s obviously clever enough to know that you’re making him look foolish. Why won’t he go that one step further and have a *real* second thought?
His lived experience. Lived how, I wonder.
‘Does this mean that Americans will be explaining events with statements about “white/male privilege” pretty much indefinitely?’
Probably not indefinitely. If morons like your friend Q have their way — and it seems increasingly likely that they will — there will come a day when keeping your head and other appendages attached to your body will take precedence over arguing about who suffers/benefits from x-privilege.
Simple answer–white female dentist is privileged because she can bang a married male dentist (black, white, or green) at the next ADA convention and quit putting her hands in mouths. Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, and California are options http://www.ada.org/en/meeting/attendee-information/future-meetings/ . Where does she get the most child support?
Answering above questions…
What kind of job does he have? He’s an MIT graduate with a well-paid software engineering job and he is married to an Ivy League professor. They have two children who are learning about this style of reasoning and should thus do well at an American college!
Where is child support following a dental convention encounter the most lucrative? http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Colorado and http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Georgia are both bad choices, with child support essentially capped, albeit at 4-5X the German maximum. Obtaining custody of child in these states is lucrative, but not as lucrative as going to dental school and practicing.
In http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Hawaii she could get roughly $72,000 per year per child and live in paradise. http://www.realworlddivorce.com/California is the best option if her sexual partner owns a chain of clinics because child support there is truly unlimited and the formula generally governs.
Another option for venue is to relocate to her sex partner’s home state to have the baby and sue for child support. The fact that the litigants had sex in Georgia, for example, shouldn’t impair a plaintiff’s entitlement to unlimited child support revenue under, e.g., http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Massachusetts law (assuming the defendant lives in Massachusetts and the baby will reside in Massachusetts).
http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Relocation has some tips on obtaining venue.
A single pregnancy won’t yield the same earnings as a median dentist unless the sex partner is dentist with an above-median income. However, two pregnancies with two different median-income dentists should get a plaintiff pretty close to the after-tax earnings of a dentist (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/ChildSupportLitigationWithoutMarriage ).
Can someone mansplain this to me: Is it now cool to select your medical provider based on a feeling of racial or sexual solidarity?
Supermike – only if your provider is underprivileged.
You friend is so stupid stupid stupid!
The statistics regarding dental school enrollment aren’t really relevant here. If a person with a toothache chooses a black dentist over a white one, he’s choosing some individual who went to dental school over another individual. Even if there was massive discrimination against black applicants to dental schools, patronizing a black dentist who able to become a dentist wouldn’t do anything to help those blacks who suffered from discrimination.
On the other hand, you should look up income disparities among dentists. It’s quite possible that black dentists have lower incomes. Choosing to make appointments with black dentists would help to reduce that disparity.
I get that virtually all uses of language aim at obtaining things of value rather than discovering what’s true. I get stuck when I find people with world class logic and probability training display Deepak Chopra levels of metarationality fail*.
Do you play video games? Consider everything that was difficult or painful in your life, the entire legitimate story of suffering and joy, the whole show of your human condition, and now realize: you are playing on easy mode.
You often casually slander Barack Obama. He won the highest level on hard mode and made it look easy. The foreign female dentists on the UCSF shuttle who are the best kind of obsessive nerds? Hard mode, medium-high level, high score.
You: easy mode, high level, amazing output, community of code, art and more. Just from the stuff that you’ve made public a thoroughly excellent use of the privileges you were afforded.
The offense is not in having them. Everyone should have them! But when you suggest that they don’t exist some nonwhite or nonmale people will dismiss you as too obtuse to talk to. You will then receive positive reinforcement from people similarly confused (see above comments) and silence from the rest. Thus (like privilege itself) you’ve constructed an encapsulated self-reinforcing delusion.
*Sam Harris (and me) also sometimes not so MR, but here he continues to attempt communication even when the room is in collective eye roll. Idk if this is hubris, chutzpah or deranged self-delusion but somehow Deepak Chopra thought his shtick would sell at Caltech: https://youtu.be/hU6TkfCGlX8?t=529. You are approximately this wrong here.
Because of affirmative action, black students tend to fall at the bottom of the class in almost all professional schools. Whites with equivalent grades and board scores could never get in. There may be a few outstanding ones who are statistical outliers but if you friend chose just on skin color, chances are he got a dentist from the bottom of his dental school class, one that barely scraped (no pun intended) by. I hope that his teeth survive his stupidity. If you friend didn’t want a white dentist, he should have chosen an Asian one – that’s a “safe” choice both on a PC basis and on the basis of typical academic achievement.
The real test of virtue is where you send your kids to school.
> how could the disappearance of such privilege ever be confirmed?
White Privilege is like Sin, it will always be with us. If like your friend you seek holiness in the Church of Victimhood then you display your abomination of it, for the approval of other believers. The pleasure of righteousness is occasionally heightened by the fun of burning a heretic (or at least, of getting him fired from his job).
Using logic and facts against the faithful merely shows that you side with the blasphemers. As Lynn Clark observed above, this religion is eventually a self-limiting phenomenon – but many witches will be burned before it’s over.
The relevant statistic for accessing white male privilege in dentistry is not the percent of dental school enrollees who are white males, rather it is the percent of dental practice income that goes to white male dentists–which must be almost 100%.
The problem here is that our overall wealth, as a nation, has allowed a class of people to rise that are impervious to the ineffectiveness of their reasoning. Your friend is allowed, by virtue of his great job and financial situation, to hold thoughts and positions on issue that don’t bear up under any sort of scrutiny. They exist to prove a feeling, but the feeling is the more important than facts, and therefore the facts are “squishy” and transitory. If you disprove one set, he’ll just slide over to the next illogical convolution. He can, because there is no negative feedback mechanism other than being shown to be wrong by some other person, who has no bearing on his financial situation or social standing. That companies can hire people with such specious reasoning is the curse here. If he can fill the niche they need him for, he can do well, and it doesn’t matter how poorly he reasons about sociological issues or the data involved in them. Someone who held such a counter-productive view of the world couldn’t have been afforded in a business up until very recently. And now they’ve proliferated, to the point that I fear putting my real, libertarian/conservative views on social issues on a public web site under my name would make me a target for redundancy at the company I work for. Because, God forbid, I would call attention to just the sort of liberal-logic destroying facts you point out. It’s the notion that matters — the liberal notion of putting the white male in his proper, subjective place as a payment for all the atrocities ever committed in the world — facts be damned. And, yes, they’ll fire you for holding a skeptical view of that notion. Go on and tell me about this “tolerance” that’s to be held in such high esteem…
Sictransit, how do you know that Phil is playing in easy mode? Last time I checked Phil is of Jewish persuasion, something that is famously part of the ‘hard mode’ in games, or life. More generally, how can you make sweeping statements about people whose lives you do not know?
Specifically, let’s cut down the sweeping statements and focus on the one at hand: does being white and male constitute and advantage in terms of becoming a dentist? If Phil’s figures are correct, and if the assumption that dentists are privileged is also correct, how do you explain that privileged people do not enter in this privileged profession as a majority? It might be that the social dynamics and economics of being a dentist are not that privileged to start with. Or maybe the job is losing its perks and thus the privileged class is abandoning it. Also unknown is whether ethnicity and sex play a part, or not, in the final salary of dentists. I presume the data is there to be had for interested parties.
It is perfectly possible that male privilege exists without having any effect on the dental profession. I presume that can be tested with some data. Unless we are talking about data, it’s just shouting. Finally, making general categorical statements about people means you do not see them ‘as people’, just as grist for the your political slant mill.
Measured by current definitions, I actually grew up in poverty. A 1500 square foot house shared by five people (no child support plaintiff in Massachusetts ever settled for 300 square feet per person!), a single car with no air conditioning, a black and white TV added to the household after my birth, a single dial telephone shared by all family members, etc.
I had a project to look at a waterfront helipad the other day. I pointed to the almost-finished three-story 7000(?) square foot nudging up to the seawall and said “Today is special for me because this house reminds me so much of the house where I grew up.” Everyone laughed.
What is your friend’s view about “black male privilege” when it comes to basketball, or marathon to name some? Ask him this, if he was the manager of the Boston Celtics, would he demand more “white” player on the court at the cost of his job?
I think that very few people would describe a family as poor today just because it had an old TV and no cellphones. More importantly, you mentioned in the past that your family had a full time housekeeper when you were a kid. By today’s standards, a family with a servant, old consumer electronics and car with no air conditioning would be considered by many Americans to be rich people with unconventional spending preferences.
Trigger warning.. you are now entering intersectional feminism.
Intersectional Feminism: What is it?
Your friend has mastered the art of sounding authoritative while making no sense. Valuable, I’m sure.