The entire point of 'privilege' is that some people are given the gifts of race, socio-economic status, or even nationality that others don't get. There's a famous saying that "he was born on 3rd base and went through life thinking he hit a triple". THAT is privilege. If you have it, you can refuse to acknowledge it, but you still have it.
Yet America has the most income mobility of any developed nation in the world. Sure, you can get a head start, but it's still up to you to make something of it, and to say someone like Trump succeeded because of his privilege really takes away from the success in his life. So because I grew up in a two parent, middle class family in a low crime area, my success has nothing to do with all the hard work in my life, the 70+ hours a week I work right now? The struggles I've had to go through in the process of getting there? No, my success must be attributed to my privilege?
There are plenty of privileges, like being born into two parent households. Living in a low crime area. I strongly disagree with the fact that I should prostrate myself in the name of social justice because my parents made good decisions in their life. Further, I disagree with this privilege having anything to do with ethnicity. Studies have been done to death linking crime rate to single parenthood rate. I would argue that the 67% single parenthood rate in the black community has more to do with poverty and crime and less to do with race. No one is in these communities MAKING black people have babies, contraceptives are anywhere between free and cheap as hell, so what's the problem?
In black, two parent households, the poverty rate is 7%. In white single parent households, the poverty rate is 22%. Where's the white privilege there?
Are you saying that black people in the US aren't pulled over substantially more often because they are black? That there's still a LOT of racism ("real racism") in the US regarding housing?
Studies done have proven this to be false. An example is the DOJ did a study in NJ where they clocked speeding. They found that black people counted for 25% of the speeding, yet counted for 23% of those ticketed. There are lots of other studies done, but when you consider that black people make up the majority of the crime happening in America, it stands to reason that they'd get the most exposure to the police. I don't call that discrimination, I call that common sense.
Housing, we saw what happened when we went through subprime lending. People still ended up defaulting on their home loans, crashing the entire market. I don't think banks care about your race, so much as they care about your FICO score and your income. What the black community needs is to stop having kids they can't afford to take care of, finish high school, get a job, get off of welfare and accept a higher police presence to bring down crime in those areas. Lower crime means more businesses in that area, means more jobs, more money for everyone.
What Trump *said* wasn't sexual assault. And it wasn't that he was engaged in objectification like 'wow, look at her legs' or whatever -- although there's some that likely took offense to it. I didn't.
But saying that you walk up to women and 'grab them by the pussy' is admitting to sexual assault. Period. Full stop. Grabbing someone by their genitals without their consent is part of the legal definition of sexual assault. What outraged most people is Trump is essentially saying in that clip that a woman's consent doesn't matter - the subtext is "I'm rich so either women want to get with me, or they'll be so afraid to speak up that it doesn't matter what I do". This attitude should be a big, big problem for anyone who isn't a sociopath. Trump is practically the dictionary definition of someone born on 3rd base and thought he hit a triple.
Except we've known for a long time that a lot of women DO let celebrities do this. We also know that verbal consent isn't always used or needed in consensual encounters. I have never, EVER asked a girl point blank "Can we have sex now?" It was always 100% clear in subcommunication, and she always had the option to say no. That's true especially in Japan, and in the west since the myth that women who had too much sex were considered sluts, whores, etc. There's a lot of societal pressure on girls to avoid being "easy." I mean the climate in America feels like I need to have a girl fill out a contract and have it notarized before I can sleep with her.
Its the difference between positive affirmation vs negative affirmation. I do not deny for a second that some guys are idiots at reading subcommunications and go way too far and do rape girls. However, going too far in the other direction is where we're at now. Then, we have cases where a girl changes her mind AFTER having sex with the guy and reports him for rape. Yea, if you want to extend the definition of rape and sexual assault to include regret, then yea, there's a massive rape culture spawning across the planet. Reality is, rape has been on a steady decline for years. What you do by expanding the societal definition of rape vs the legal definition of rape is waste the time of police resources investigating bullshit, and make the police less likely to believe real rape victims.
However, I was at a club sometime last year, dancing with a girl. She reached over and started grabbing my junk and massaging it, sizing me up. If I had gone to the police crying sexual assault, I'd get laughed out of the police station. I guess that's female privilege?
It's not a 'new norm'. Women have been getting sexually harassed and minorities have been discriminated against for a long time now. It's just now they've gotten a lot more noisy. And yeah, there's a lot of rigidity and radicalism on college campuses and elsewhere that's getting into true 'political correctness', where some minority college students don't want ANY discussion of certain topics, even in a negative sense.
When you can attribute a lot of these things to a number of other factors, yet instantly jumping to the racism/sexism/etc I would argue doesn't help solve the problem. Show me policies, specific cases, people that are racist/sexist and I'll happily fight it with you. But to sit there and say it's some shadowy, ambiguous figure called white privilege or racism or sexism is a cop out. When you actually go and analyze all these things with data, you find out most of them are lies anyways. No, in America 1 in 5 women are not raped. No, there is not a 30% wage gap between women. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
And sure, having a female Democratic President in the White House might lead to some things that some upper class men might have issues with. Every social change or law passed has winners and losers. And as someone who lives a comfortable lifestyle and is somewhat liberal I don't have a big problem with changes Hillary is in favor of. I don't see her or her followers to be heavily redistributionist, or 'feminazis' or whatever. She's arguably more conservative than Obama is, and I think just like Obama as first black President she's not going to use her status as first woman President in an overly 'partisan' manner. Gender and sex are as big, if not bigger, of hot button issues as race has been. There's obviously going to be more focus on those with a female President, but I personally think that's a good thing.
That's your call, personally I disagree heavily with this, but I'm hungry and gonna leave it here.
