Nachtrag:
Siehe auch:
Tag: 28. Mai 2019
Was bewirkt es anderen Leuten etwas über „die Privilegien der Weißen“ beizubringen?
Die Besprechung einer interessanten Studie bei Quillette:
Her team was curious about the impact of teaching people about white privilege. Would it make people more sympathetic toward poor blacks? As part of their research, Cooley and her colleagues offered study participants a reading on white privilege—based partly on the seminal work of Peggy McIntosh, who originally formulated the concept in the 1980s—and then described to them the plight of a hypothetical man, identified as either white or black, who is down on his luck.
What the researchers found is that among social liberals—i.e., participants who had indicated that they hold liberal beliefs about social issues—reading a text about white privilege did nothing to significantly increase their sympathy toward the plight of poor blacks. But, as Cooley told me, “it did significantly bump down their sympathy for a [hypothetical] poor white person.” (Among conservative participants, there was observed no significant change in attitudes at all.)
What accounts for this? One possibility is that social liberals are internalizing white-privilege lessons in a way that flattens the image of whites, portraying all of them as inherently privileged. So if a white person is poor, it must be his or her own fault. After all, they’ve had all sorts of advantages in life that others haven’t.
Also es erzeugt so ziemlich genau das, was man sich denken kann: Es individualisiert die jeweiligen Gruppen und weißt Schuld nach Gruppenzugehörigkeit zu, wobei der Blick für die jeweiligen Lebensumstände bei der konkreten Person verstellt wird.
Das ist eben auch die klassische Funktion eines Sündenbocks: Er ist an allem (selbst) schuld und man darf ihn hassen.
Racism exists, of course, and its impact is disproportionately felt by society’s minority populations. I have personally spent a decent chunk of my reporting career documenting this. But the fact that disparate treatment is inflicted on racial minorities doesn’t prove the existence of an all-encompassing pattern of white privilege. “If you’re white, chances are seeing a police officer fills you with one of two things: relief or gratitude,” writes one advocate of a privilege-centric worldview. But around half of the people who are killed every year by U.S. police officers are white. True, police violence falls disproportionately on ethnic minorities, especially African Americans. But if you’re white and you’ve been abused by a police officer, your individual experience may be just as painful as that of a black person who’s suffered similar abuse.
Genau so schlimm? Welch ketzerische Ansicht. Aus deren Sicht natürlich etwas vollkommen anderes. Allerdings werden meines Wissens nach prozentual nicht weniger schwarze von schwarzen Polizisten getötet und gleichzeitig ist der Anteil Schwarzer an der Kriminalstatistik in den USA deutlich höher als es ihrem Anteil an der Bevölkerung entspricht.
If we extend the logic of privilege beyond the issue of race, it’s easy to see the flaws with this approach. We know, for instance, that 93 percent of people in U.S. federal prisons are men. In nearly every part of the criminal justice system, in fact, men on average have it worse than women do. But does that then mean we should be discussing “female privilege”? Would it be beneficial to the men behind bars for women to proclaim awareness of their “privileged” status?
Ja, das sind dann die klassischen Beispiele, bei denen die simple Betrachtung eben nicht wirklich hinhaut und man es mit so etwas wie „Männer leiden eben auch am Patriarchat“ und „Männer können nicht privilegiert werden“ überspielen muss.
what I would suggest is that we change the way we talk about this inequality. Asking whites to publicly confess their white privilege—in a manner that often resembles a religious ritual more than anything else—may lead us to unfairly flatten the experience of whites while, ironically, actually shifting attention away from those who are underprivileged. The Cooley study shows that this isn’t just a hypothetical concern; it’s a reality that has been demonstrated through research.
One alternative to white-privilege discourse would be to focus on the causes and consequences of deprivation rather than on naming groups of people we believe to hold special advantages—and to stop referring to things that we should expect for all people as “privileges.” It is not a privilege to have a decent and safe childbirth, or avoid harassment by the police, or to have enough to eat. All of those things should be something we expect. While we can and should aggressively address inequality, we should make sure the methods we employ serve to strengthen our sense of empathy rather than sap it.
Oder anders gesagt: Lösungen mit nur einer Variable (Rasse) verdecken oft eine Vielzahl anderer Faktoren, die evtl. gehäuft bei einer bestimmten Gruppe vorliegen und die man tatsächlich angehen und ändern kann.
Aber die Variante mit nur einer Variablen macht eben das Leben deutlich einfacher und ermöglicht klare Feindbilder.
Alles Evolution 