Erik Engheim
2 min readJul 15, 2020

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I understand your argument, but the key thing you never addressed is: Is WHITE PRIVILEGE a useful term?

At the end of the day the goal is to raise up the less fortunate among us regardless of skin color, gender or class.

When using the term WHITE PRIVILEGE, you got to ask yourself whether you are advancing that cause or not.

My firm belief is that you don't. In fact I would argue, that you simply make that struggle harder. "White privilege" is one of those ivory tower self indulgences of modernist woke white liberals. They love to theorize and overanalyze language, but do never consider how anybody outside of their highly educated circle of friends actually think about anything.

I try to articulate the problem with the term more in detail here: https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/why-white-privilege-is-a-bad-term-415c303cef8d

Basically privilege is something that implies something you should not have. But what white experience. Getting treated as a person, is what EVERYBODY should have.

Focusing on white privilege makes about as much sense to me as focusing on the privilege of the healthy rather than talking about the needs of the sick and disabled.

I could use another white liberal favorite term "self centering." That is what "white privilege is about." Once again you center the whole discussion on white people. When what people really need to grasp are the challenges faced by various minorities.

Talking about whites alone dumbs down the discussion because the challenges of different minorities are vastly different. Asians and blacks e.g. face profoundly different challenges. Simplifyign the discussion then to "the whites" and everybody else, is thus not of very much help.

E.g. African-Americans and Africans in general have faced some profound and unique challenges almost no other ethnic minority have faced, perhaps with possible exception of Jews.

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Erik Engheim
Erik Engheim

Written by Erik Engheim

Geek dad, living in Oslo, Norway with passion for UX, Julia programming, science, teaching, reading and writing.

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