White Privilege and Racial Injustice

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco.

John Perry
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner at Stanford. That’s where Ken works. He teaches he goes to committee meetings and all sorts of things. And I just hang around and do philosophy.

Ken Taylor
You’ve been doing for a long time. Today, we’re thinking about white privilege and racial injustice.

John Perry
Whether us let’s admit it, it has a long and sorry, history when it comes to racial injustice. It also has a long history of favoring the needs concerns and narratives of of white people over those of people of color. But how are these two things white privilege and racial injustice related? That’s our question for this week.

Ken Taylor
Well, it’s so obvious, John, don’t you think I mean, just think about how many times we’ve had to witness the tragedy of unarmed black men and boys, little boys getting shot and killed over practically nothing. White people just aren’t subject to this kind of crap. And imagine if they were, how loud? Do you think the uproar would be? Well,

John Perry
you get no disagreement from me on those facts, Ken, but do you have a point?

Ken Taylor
Yes, I do have a point. Eliminate white privilege. And with it, the unequal treatment of whites and people of color, and racial injustice just goes away white privilege is racial injustice?

John Perry
Well, I mean, I’m just not convinced that the rampant mistreatment of blacks is an instance of or even proof of the existence. So what you’re calling white privilege calm again. Well, okay, we’re philosophers. Let’s start from the beginning. What exactly do you mean by white privilege?

Ken Taylor
I mean, the fact that whites enjoy so many unearned advantages relative to others, not just in the criminal justice system, but in just about any sphere of life, you can name

John Perry
John. So you think the fact that whites are much more likely to be treated with respect by cops is a sign of unearned white privilege?

Ken Taylor
Well, what did they do to deserve that privilege except be born white? In a racist society? Yeah, I do

John Perry
know they were born doesn’t everybody, black, white, brown, anything in between, deserve to be treated with respect just because they’re born? Of course they do without being born, as all anyone ever has to do to deserve respect.

Ken Taylor
So it’s not a privilege? What are you trying to say? I’m not sure what you’re trying to say

John Perry
that you’re misconstruing two different things related, but different violations of black rights and protection of white privilege,

Ken Taylor
I don’t get it. Look, I

John Perry
grant you that cops too often trample the rights of black people. That’s not to say that they don’t trample the rights of white sometimes to or that they often treat everybody just as they should be treated. But violations of black rights are routine and are done with far with impunity. And when whites are mistreated, there usually isn’t impious. Well, you’re just proving my point. No, I’m refuting your point. The problem isn’t that cops are wrong to respect the rights of whites. The point is, they’re wrong to disrespect the rights of blacks.

Ken Taylor
Wait, wait a minute. Are you denying that there’s such a thing as white privilege?

John Perry
No, not at all. But I’m saying that having your rights respected is not an example of white. Jana is blocked and you want to eliminate racial injustice? Don’t focus on white privilege, right. Closing the country clubs won’t help much focus on securing the too often trampled rights of people of color.

Ken Taylor
Okay, I kind of see your point. I mean, it’s not like I want the cops to go around violating everybody’s rights. I don’t want to do that.

John Perry
Yeah, no, we don’t want to get equal treatment by getting everybody’s rights trampled on. So I’m really glad of that.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, but But look, white privilege is still a problem separate and distinct from the problem of black rides, I think of that phenomenon of implicit bias where people unconsciously judge minorities more harshly than white men. That implicit bias, I think that leads directly to white privilege.

John Perry
You’re talking about experiments that show implicit bias even in people who say they aren’t biased. Yeah, experiments

Ken Taylor
where exactly the same paper is submitted to exactly the same journal, one under say a black sounding name like Jamal, and one under a white male sounding name like John. I mean, pretty reliably. John is evaluated higher than Jamal even though it’s exactly the same paper. Yeah,

John Perry
but that doesn’t in and of itself, EO ipso prove the existence of white privilege. You’d have to know whether John’s paper was valid. You waited higher than it deserved to be. That’s privilege, or Jamal’s paper was evaluated lower than it should have been. That’s racist. Now,

Ken Taylor
back to that same kind of riff, you’re still thinking about privileges versus rights. Yeah, I’m not really convinced. But look, I’m going to grant you something. There’s a lot for us to think about here.

John Perry
And to help us move the conversation forward, we send our roving philosophical reporter Shuka call and try to speak to two of her neighbors one black, one white, about their experiences of racial injustice in Oakland, California. She files this report.

Shuka Kalantari
When Audrey Esquivel moved to Oakland from North Carolina a few years back, one of her neighbors invited her to join a community listserv. It was a forum where people could post about neighborhood potlucks, or so called high crime alerts. It was the ladder that became a problem. Some of these high crime alerts were really vague,

Audrey Esquivel
vague to the point where one of the messages that caught my attention actually might have described

Shuka Kalantari
to me. Escobar is a black woman.

Audrey Esquivel
So I kind of answered back and was like, well, what’s the what’s criminal about this a brown woman’s walking by your house, that could be me.

Shuka Kalantari
So Escobar joined neighbors for racial justice, a group of Oakland Community members working to curb racial profiling on listservs and social media sites. But the profiling continued.

Audrey Esquivel
The thing that really affected me and drove me to tears was when I had posted on the website, I was making this recipe that I needed a lot of lemons for and had noticed all my neighbors had these overflowing lemon trees. And I said, Hey, you know, who can spare some lemons? And this woman said, I don’t care if I’m not home. She was like, There’s lemons on the ground in my yard. She was like, just come and pick is take as many as you want. And so I go to this woman’s house, and I noticed her inside. And I thought, oh, gosh, I’ve taken so many like, I should just say thank you, you know,

Shuka Kalantari
Escobar knocked on the door. She heard a voice on the other side say, No, absolutely not. I’m not going to open the door.

Audrey Esquivel
It never crossed her mind that someone that looked like meat was going to show up. There’s this mindset that people of color. I don’t know if people think we are not of the class that can afford to live in this neighborhood, or what right, but I do thank you very much.

Ginny Berson
First of all, I know our tree. And so it just hurt me that she was so dismissed, that an assumption was made about her as a dangerous person because of the color of her skin.

Shuka Kalantari
Ginny Berson is Audrey Esquivel’s neighbor and a founding member of neighbors for racial justice. She’s also white.

Ginny Berson
I have never been at a neighbor’s house, knocked on the door and had them not answer, or had them only speak to me through a closed door. That’s never happened to me.

Shuka Kalantari
Escobar says this kind of racism is a daily occurrence in her life.

Audrey Esquivel
This happens all the time in the public transit system. I take Bart in from Oakland over to my job here in the Financial District in San Francisco

Shuka Kalantari
Bar is the Bay Area’s transit system. I’m usually dressed

Audrey Esquivel
pretty nice in my corporate office outfit. This particular day I had on my hoodie, right? And there was one seat left open right next to me. And three people got on the train. They were all appear to be white, European, and the guy kind of motion that the girls like, you know, what have you take this one MTC that’s open.

Shuka Kalantari
The girls looked at the seat, looked at Escobar, a black woman in a hoodie and said no, they’d rather stand. That’s never happened to Escobar as a white friend.

Ginny Berson
I don’t think I’ve ever had an empty seat next to me on BART or on a bus or on a train and had somebody look at me and decide not to sit next to me.

Shuka Kalantari
Burson and Escobar have a lot more examples of racial profiling and white privilege, at restaurants, at grocery stores with the police. Escobar says she meets with her neighbors every month to talk about these issues and work towards a shared goal,

Audrey Esquivel
raise awareness in people’s lives, that when you walk down the street and you see someone who doesn’t look like you that you don’t immediately assume that that person is up to some kind of suspicious or criminal behavior.

Shuka Kalantari
Audrey Escobar and Ginny Burson don’t think neighbors for racial justice will end racism in the world, or in the US, or even in their community. But raising awareness about racial profiling online isn’t a bad start. For Philosophy Talk, I’m sure Coachella anti.

John Perry
Thanks Shaka for that interesting piece about racism right here in the Bay Area and how some people are working against it. I’m John Perry, with me as my fellow Stanford philosopher Ken Taylor,

Ken Taylor
and today we’re talking about white privilege and racial injustice. We’re joined now by Naomi Zack. She’s a professor Philosophy at the University of Oregon. She’s author of the very fine book white privilege and black rights, the injustice of us police, racial profiling and homicide. Naomi, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Naomi Zack
Hi, how are you?

John Perry
I’m doing all right. So Naomi, the concept of white privilege is used a lot these days, fairly uncritically, even by philosophers, your your book is kind of I don’t know if it’s unique, but it’s certainly unusual and insightful in questioning interrogating the concept of white privilege. But what what led you to take on this task?

Naomi Zack
Well, I’m sort of a philosopher nerd. And when I was watching the reports of some of the recent high profile shootings of young black men, it occurred to me that there was a big disconnect, and how well meaning people were responding. A lot of whites were talking about white privilege. And I don’t think that these cases were examples of white privilege, I think they were examples of violating black rights. In other words, I think when, when a 12 year old is executed for doing nothing, that’s a violation of rights, that’s a palpable destruction of his life, it has nothing to do with white privilege, per se.

John Perry
So let’s grant that distinction. But just let me ask you can I wonder whether it even makes sense to talk about white privilege? Is it a clear or concept or just worthless? Do you think there is such a thing as white

Naomi Zack
privilege? Yes, I think white privilege is real, I think, given the history of slavery, and Jim Crow, and, you know, the kinds of the legacies of bad manners that we just heard in the earlier segment of your show, definitely, what is referred to by white privilege is very real. So what, really,

Ken Taylor
what do you what do you think white privilege? What do you mean by white privilege, then this real thing? That’s gonna we’re gonna separate out, like privilege and black rights, but what do you mean by privilege?

Naomi Zack
All right, I would prefer to talk about white advantage. I think there are tremendous advantages in being white in a in a racist or even a post racist society. A privilege is a perk. So to call it a privilege to call these advantages, privileges, makes it seem as though white people have got in all cases, something extra just from being white. And in many of these cases, they haven’t gotten anything extra. They just being treated as human beings because they were born. Well, John said that,

Ken Taylor
okay, but no, I think there was a time. I mean, see, if you agree with this, I think there was a time when America was a system of white privilege, because but in that time, that’s slavery. The the Jim Crow era in the cell, a white person had something over any any white person, any white person, just in virtue of being white had something over a black person that they at least weren’t black. Right. So the least of the of the White could claim a kind of superiority to the best among the black, because they could say to that, primacy, yeah, white supremacy. That was a system. That was a system

Naomi Zack
that was a system of whatnot, it was a system of white supremacy and from the fact that white supremacy, there came certain privileges. So you see, white supremacy is an ideology and it was also a legal system, you know, blacks were not allowed to vote, slaves couldn’t be taught how to read and write. So but that’s a that’s an ideological system, where whites are officially held up as superior. A privilege is a perk, you know, you mentioned country clubs. If you belong to the country club, you have certain privileges, you can use the tennis courts, you know, you can have private dinners in the main dining hall, whatever the perks are belonging to the country club. But but a white supremacy is a lot more serious. just a fact of why so

Ken Taylor
that you’re making a nice, some nice distinction who had to dig more deeply, more deeply into them. They’re important distinctions. But right now, I’m going to remind our audience, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk, and today we’re thinking about white privilege and racial injustice.

John Perry
It’s eliminating white privilege the key to achieving racial justice, or is it really a matter of securing the rights of blacks? Does it really matter whether we use the language of privilege or the language of rights to describe our racial situation? Can’t we just try to fix it and forget about semantic debates,

Ken Taylor
privilege, rights and justice, plus your calls and emails? When Philosophy Talk continues.

John Perry
Stick around Yeah. Is it really a privilege to be white? And all right? Or is there a deeper wrong to write? I’m John Perry, this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything,

Ken Taylor
including your poetry, but not your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. And we’re thinking about white privilege and racial injustice. is the key to achieving racial justice, eliminating white privilege? Or is it advancing black rights or do those amounts to the same thing?

John Perry
Our guest is Naomi’s Zach from the University of Oregon, author of white privilege and black rights.

Ken Taylor
So Naomi, I think we can all agree on the existence of a certain phenomenon. He’s got various dimensions, black people are often treated with less respect than white people in many contexts, have less and less access, on average to the good things of life and all that everybody can agree about that phenomenon. But practically speaking, I wonder why does it matter? Whether we describe this phenomenon in terms of white privilege or black, right? What is the matter practically speaking?

Naomi Zack
Well, it matters because there’s been an erosion due to a couple or or more US Supreme Court rulings of constitutional rights. So the Fourth Amendment is supposed to give us all protection against unreasonable search and seizure. And the 14th Amendment is supposed to give everyone equal protection under the law. Now, these amendments seem to have been violated in these recent high profile cases and the violators, the killers are not punished, you know, they’re either not indicted or else they’re not convicted. No, but

Ken Taylor
are you saying that if we, I mean, okay, that’s all sounds right. To me. But are you saying illegal? Yeah. Right. It sounds like you’re suggesting and I just trying to make clear whether you are or not, you sound like you’re suggesting if we adopt this discourse of white privilege, instead of the discourse of violations of black rights, we’re going to be blind to exactly what’s wrong, what’s going wrong in a situation? That’s

Naomi Zack
right. You know, the problem with is with white privilege is not the reality that whites are better off. I mean, that is a problem. But that’s not what I’m disputing. I’m just saying the discourse of white privilege, especially when white people engage in this discourse is kind of decadent, you know what it’s like? It’s like, it’s like foodies talking about how wonderful their meal is in response to hearing about world hunger.

Ken Taylor
Right. Well, so you’re saying do that? Does that sounds like a pretty darning, can I say the word damning, indict indictment of a discourse of white privilege? And it also sounds like you think, is it mostly white people you think who engage in the discourse of, of, of white privilege and kind of for self service?

Naomi Zack
It may not be for self serving reasons, it just may be oblivious, oblivious reasons. Oblivion? I think one has to at this point, be a little delicate in in distinguishing who’s saying what, about what, and it’s very different if black people talk about see how whites are better off and talk about white privilege than if white people in answer to Stark injustice is start talking about how privileged they are. And we’re hearing a lot of that from otherwise well, meaning white people. That’s what I’m trying to make a little intervention. Concerning.

John Perry
So Naomi, philosophically speaking from Plato’s Republic, to Rawls, theory of justice, philosophers who think about justice tend to go off to thinking about an ideal society. Now, I guess in an ideal society, we certainly wouldn’t be trampling the rights of blacks. But we also wouldn’t have at least undeserved privileges for individual whites and no privileges for for people because of their race. But it’s focusing on an ideal society and ideal justice, leading us to kind of mush two problems, one of which is much more grave and serious than the other together.

Naomi Zack
Well, yeah, I mean, you yourself said it if we had an ideally just society, we wouldn’t have these discrepancies. But we don’t. And if you actually look at real history, not the history of philosophy, but real history, people don’t care about justice, what they care about is injustice. So you see that today, you know, the Black Lives Matter. Movement didn’t come out of philosophy club wanting to perfect the chandelier of ideal justice hanging from the ceiling of the universe? I mean, that came that came from an impassioned gut reaction to blood on the street.

Ken Taylor
Do you have quite a way with words, I have to tell you that I love your way would work? No, but I’m gonna ask you a question. I’m gonna ask you a question, though, about white privilege. I mean, I will get back to the ideal versus, you know, non ideal justice. But I want to, I want to focus on white people just for a little bit. Because there are lots of white people who will I don’t like to generalize, but there are lots of white people who will acknowledge white privilege. And they, they take it to be a sign of their bonafides as an ally, to marginalize people that they are willing to acknowledge their white privilege. There are others who will deny vehemently deny a white privilege, they will they will turn to their own individual virtue and efforts and blah, blah, blah. So I mean, it’s a complicated thing and how I wonder whether the you think that those who deny white privilege are those who who are willing to acknowledge white privilege are any way morally different? Are they birds of a feather? Are they two sides of the same coin, or what?

Naomi Zack
Well, it’s political, its political. And in several different levels. I mean, there are a number of whites who are pretty upset about issues of social injustice. And they’ll do more than just acknowledge that they’re privileged, they may actually do some research or support some causes that lead to legal reforms. And then there are whites who are sort of appalled who are comfortable, who like to think of themselves as nice people. And they suddenly become aware that they’re privileged because they’re white, and their response to social injustice, is to talk about how nice their privileges are. And I think that’s useless, I think that energy could be much better directed. And then in political terms, there are a number of whites who are under educated, who believe that all the ills that befall minorities are their own faults. And therefore they, in contrast, as hardworking white people deserve all the good things that happened to them, and they have no privileges that this is just like a slick con and created by the chattering classes to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes, there are no privileges, they actually think that the the tide has turned. And it’s really black people who have all the privileges now. So so that’s the political, you know, that that this last thing is, is a is an issue of political rhetoric and under education. I don’t know too much that can be said about that. Except, you know, if you can come up with a few good one liners here and there. Maybe that works?

John Perry
Well, look, I pretty much agree with you. But it does seem to me, there’s one case where the concept of white privilege might be useful. I mean, it has to do with that third group, you’re talking about probably, in US universities, particularly Ivy League universities, and private universities, the concept of white privilege has been used to call attention to some kids of privilege that not about facts about society, but about their own internal conception, they’re acting as if they had white privilege, or often male privilege. So for that purpose, it seems to me it’s a useful concept, don’t you agree?

Naomi Zack
I’d like to I’d like to finesse it a little bit. You mean, kids, undergraduates, white undergraduates who are racist who think they’re entitled to certain kinds of benefits? Because they’re white? Is that what you’re talking about?

John Perry
Well, I think talking about the first step in getting undergraduates who probably don’t think they’re racist to realize that, is that that they may be because they’re not just getting white privileges. They’re kind of expecting it. And, you know, then the next day, why do you expect it? Yeah,

Naomi Zack
yeah, no, obviously, you know, I mean, these things operate on many levels. And people have different degrees of awareness. What I’m rather narrowly talking about is that when we have egregious incidents of rights violations, rights to privacy and protection of one’s person, and actually death by police, with no probable causes, violates the right against unreasonable seizure, rights to equal protection under the law, regardless of race, creed, religion, and so forth. We talk about these issues. The discourse of white privilege does not get us very far.

Ken Taylor
I get you and I think I think we went just want to add one thought that you I’m thinking now for the first time listening to you, I think The discourse of rights has a universalistic appeal. And we agree that we have the right our constitution enshrines the right to protection from unreasonable search and seizure, it doesn’t say black people have it white people, the white privilege is highly contestable discourse, because you outline some of the ways in which people contested. I mean, there are people who deny that they have people asserted, but then don’t do anything about it, people who, you know, for all kinds of reasons, it seems it’s a place of contestation in a way that seems to me that fundamental basic rights are not and target fundamental, basic right, as a kind of automatic call to action and all of us. So it seems a more practical, useful action,

Naomi Zack
it’s a good is a very good point, that there’s unity. In talking about basic human rights. However, rights can only can sometimes just being unrealistic posits I mean, what you need for REITs to be real is they have to be protected in legal jurisdictions, they have to be written into constitutions, they have to be upheld in the courts. And they have to be implemented by by police and other officials. And what’s happened with with the fourth and 14th amendment rights, in a few Supreme Court cases in past decades, is that when it comes to encounters with police, they have been struck down they have been they it has been decided that the relevance so for example, in in Graham, you know, I don’t want to bore you or your listeners by talking about specific legal cases. And I’m not a legal scholar. But but the final, the bottom line is that the standard is not whether or not a fourth or 14th amendment right has been violated. The standard is whether or not the officer could say that he was afraid.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re talking about white privilege and racial injustice. And we’ve got a caller, Mika from San Francisco. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Mika.

Speaker 1
Oh, hi, good morning. I think that your discussion of white privilege is screaming for context, universal context and historical context, okay. The fact is that everywhere in the world, some societies privileged in Africa, blacks are privileged, in China and Japan, white people are discriminated against. In my field of work, I applied for grants. And if I was a person of color, I would have had a much better chance of getting getting my my grant accepted. So and also our history since the dawn of time, whenever you have a group of people getting together, some of them become privileged. So if you want to talk about what, how to eliminate privilege, we have to first discuss how is it serving human beings? Was it part of human nature to have some people become privileged?

Ken Taylor
So thank you for the comment makes me want to respond to that. And know what anyway?

Naomi Zack
Well, I think it’s true in general sense to me, we have hierarchies in human society. But again, when we’re talking about basic human rights, the right to safety, the right to equal treatment under the law, that is not negotiable. As a matter of privilege, unless you accept the fact that we all live in a in a terribly oppressive, totalitarian system. And anybody can be killed in any time with for no reason than those who get off those who escaped could be called privileged, if that’s how you want to talk fine. But otherwise, we have to distinguish between pervasive human hierarchies which are real and basic human rights.

Ken Taylor
Michael from Boston’s on the line Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Michael.

Speaker 1
Yes. Well, I think the elimination of privilege in this case, white privilege is a prerequisite to the rule of general law, because it doesn’t matter how the laws are written. If they’re only enforced for one group, or if they’re enforced favorably for a group. I’ll give a concrete example in one you might use with college students. I went to a small technical school in Pasadena, and out of about 850 people there. I would say they’re probably around 500, drug users, illegal drug users, maybe 400. And over the course of four years there, I didn’t know any of them who were arrested. Yeah, so thanks. If they had been arrested, I’m pretty sure none of them would have met with an unfortunate accident in jail. And so it doesn’t matter that the laws made it illegal for everyone. The fact is that privilege that is private law made it such that they didn’t have to worry about it. And the final thing I think we could say that might be more popular because you know, every white person who’s not a success can see in the media 10 Black people doing better than they are, if you can say we want everyone to be treated as well as a rich white man. People may be afraid that if they lose their privilege, they’ll be treated as badly as a poor black woman.

Ken Taylor
Thank Thanks a lot for the call. Michael, what’s your call? We were about to go to a break. So what’s your brief comment there? Naomi?

Naomi Zack
Well, there’s no such thing as private law. You know, when we’re talking about law, it’s not just a question of what’s written, it’s a question of what how it’s enforced and how its implemented and how its interpreted by the courts. And people need to take a closer look at those three things.

Ken Taylor
But I think he was, I think he was confused on the point you’re making, but we’ll we’ll get to that. Because I think that if you respected everybody’s rights equally, this apparent privilege would just go away. So it’s a problem about the disrespect for rights. But you know, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re thinking about white privilege and black rights with Naomi Zak of the from the University of Oregon.

John Perry
In our final segment, we’ll try to work towards getting some practical prescriptions for achieving racial justice. Soon, in our troubled society,

Ken Taylor
justice for all black, white or brown when Philosophy Talk continues.

John Perry
The country salsa, Beyonce and a song called formation which she sang at the Superbowl. According to Saturday, live white people all over America, were shocked to find out that Beyonce was black, or at any rate, a person of color. Some people thought that performance was too focused on race and identity politics, with a white singer have the privilege of avoiding that kind of criticism. I’m John Perry, this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ken Taylor
except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor, our guest is Naomi’s act from the University of Oregon, and we’re thinking about white privilege, and a black rights.

John Perry
So Naomi, we want to get a little bit practical here. But let me give you a kind of a different example. And the sort we’ve been using. If I’m kind of old, and my Salinas, let’s say if it ever existed as long in the past, if I try to go to a Hot Club, I’ll be turned down. But by the guy at the door, I’ll feel bad about that. I’ll think young people have all these privileges they can, they can read stuff and nine point fonts, they can go to good clubs. But then if I’m beat up by the police for complaining, I would feel a much more serious problem was there, you know, my rights had been violated. Whereas in the earlier case, maybe just there was kind of an unfairness involved a little less serious. Now, how shouldn’t philosophers think about these things? If we’re not going to just do this kind of let’s figure out the ideal society. But let’s figure out the basis for the difference. This for the distinctions we made for things that are outrageous violations of justice and things that are just kind of sad facts about our society? How should we get started doing that?

Naomi Zack
Well, I think there is a priority for egregious violations of justice, if you’re if you’re talking if you’re looking at the whole social political picture. On the other hand, if you’re if you’re a specialist in social philosophy and Media Studies, you might not care that much, and that’s fine. That’s just not what you’re working on. But if you’re looking at the society, if you’re looking at what’s happening in contemporary times, I think we have certain things that need to come first.

John Perry
So as a practical example, a lot of people think about how should we think how do you think of affirmative action? In this context of privilege versus violation of rights?

Ken Taylor
Right? Some people would think of affirmative actions as breaking down barriers of white privilege, right, rather than I mean, it’s no nobody has a right to be admitted to it. It’s not that the people people’s rights are being violated, but certain structures of privilege are being broken down.

Naomi Zack
Yeah, affirmative action is interesting. In that case, I think that was one of the results of white advantage, you could call it white privilege is that if people are in a position of power, they’re going to use it for people they know. So if you can admit students or or hire other faculty, you’re going to go to people like you to children and friends to people you already know. And if you’re white, it’s likely to be other white people. Affirmative action, and that’s called cronyism. Now, affirmative action is a way of, of breaking into that and and creating more opportunities. It’s not, it’s not just creating opportunities for people of color or for women. It’s, it’s creating opportunities in the structure. It’s, it’s angling into that structure of cronyism, which is lined up with white privilege.

Ken Taylor
So that sounds like so you think it’s hot? It means that improving justice that is, if you cronyism is anti justice, kind of distributing. I mean, this is a kind of distribution of thing. cronyism, right? Who do I distribute this club memberships to? And it’s kind of it that sounds unjust. So it sounds like even though you think a kind of justice is better served by the language of pursuit of a kind of justice is better served by adopting the language of rights and protecting right? This is a sphere of justice in which breaking down systems of privilege, breaking down these distribution of systems is also a part of justice. Is that right?

Naomi Zack
Yes, yeah, there are different. There are different forms of justice, there’s immediate justice, you do not want the police to be able to come up to you or your children and shoot them on site. That’s extremely unjust. I mean, that’s an emergency situation of injustice. But you know, there are wider structural forms of social justice you want you want if we, if we were to have a democracy, if we’re to continue to work on having a democracy, you want everybody to have a reasonable opportunity for the goods of fan, one of the ways that that can happen is to break into systems that are closed because of tradition, or because of racial hierarchy. And affirmative action is a way of doing that.

Ken Taylor
Okay, that’s that’s good. Charles from Montclair is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. Jarls.

Speaker 1
Yes, I have a different take on this. And I think it’s more of a matter of class, that if you are rich in America, or part of the establishment, regardless of color, you get treated differently than if you’re a poor, white, or black or poor or anything, or even the middle class. And to give you an illustration, former President George W. Bush got into Harvard Business School, the toy you’ll see difficult to get into, as he proudly announced he was a C student at Yale. Now, you know, could I do this? Could you do this? thing you take General Petraeus,

John Perry
I might have been able to earn a seat at Yale.

Speaker 1
Yes. Well, I could have to be mentioned do that in Berkeley. Yeah.

Ken Taylor
But that was a long time ago, it would not be pretty hard to replicate George Bush’s success. don’t advise young people coming up to rely on family connections to get them into Yale or Harvard. It doesn’t work. Well.

Speaker 1
Let me give you a different example of General Petraeus, you know, he was caught handing his Mr. Secrets. Okay, and so he pays $100,000 Fine. And now he’s employee establishing my goal, Goldman Sachs, making a lavish salary, whereas the SEC whistleblower found you whoever it was, is being pursued ruthlessly for the rest of his life by our fine government. Now, is that not a difference?

Ken Taylor
Thanks for the job, I’m going to turn this over and ask Naomi what she thinks?

Naomi Zack
Well, I think class will only get you so far. And then you run into issues of status. For example, Henry Louis Gates was African American professor at Harvard, had that incident a few years ago, where he was stopped after returning trying to get into his own house, he was got into an altercation with police was arrested. President Obama has been treated with incredible disrespect, which after a while, one can only conclude has a racial component. It’s not it’s not class. So yeah, sure class. And, and you know, class is not one monolithic matter of income. I mean, it has to culture it has to do with networks of social capital, education, class, and money at class is important, but it’s not the whole story. Because there have been studies on every level of class. Whites are better off than blacks on every socio economic. Yeah,

Ken Taylor
I want to take you back to a distinction you made at the top that I like, but I want to interrogate it a little bit more. Uh, you you distinguish white privilege, as a system of perks from white supremacy as an ideology and all that. And I get your distinction. I think it’s an important distinction. But I want to push you a little bit because I was recently reading some stuff of Cornel West. And he diagnoses the problem with President Obama by saying President Obama refuses to address the fact he’s too afraid to address the fact that the US is still a white supremacist society. It’s not legally so I mean, the laws aren’t the same, but the root problem in the US is white supremacy. And you see, if you look at it critically, he thinks you see it everywhere. Now, why do you think Cornell was is is assume you think Cornel West is wrong? Why do you think he’s wrong? I like your distinction. But tell me why. You’re right. And he’s wrong.

Naomi Zack
I in Cornel West is is is is great rhetoric petition. Okay. So so in general, especially when bad things happen from the standpoint of people of color, it feels like the word philosophers like to use this phenomenology. phenomenologically. It’s a white supremacist society. But it’s very important to realize it’s not a white supremacist system, because people of color can vote. Discrimination, education is against the law, discrimination in housing, even though we have the highest rate of residential segregation since about 1970. Despite that discrimination is illegal. So you have formal equality. And as Descartes would have said, That’s not nothing but you

Ken Taylor
make a distinction between like the formal law, yourself and the formal rights of material rights, I think you call it write a book that somebody like, West would say, Well, my formally your right now me but materially, materially, it’s still this, these structures of white privilege are the material implementation without formal white supremacy of supremacy.

Naomi Zack
Okay, so that so more work needs to be done? It would, it would be a very naive view of law and society to think that all you had to do was pass a few pieces of legislation, and that automatically, that formal equality would result in real material equality, there’s more work that has to be done, and to call to, to just rest and say, Well, we have a white supremacist system and the president should do well, what do you want the President to do? Yeah,

John Perry
I kind of tend to agree. I mean, with all due respect to Cornell rest, I don’t think whatever misapprehension of the racial situation Obama might have is his problem. I think his problem is basically Republicans, and in particular, the gerrymandering, that means they have a majority in the House, even though they got less votes than the Democrats. But But

Ken Taylor
there’s something you said that was really striking, and I really want to think about it. And we’ve only got a little minute, but you talked about the phenomenologically. So I’m thinking, okay, as a press black person, if I felt myself to be that, right, phenomenologically, can I distinguish phenomenologically? In my own experience, from a structure of white privilege from a white supremacist society? I mean, how would I distinguish that for a while? Look,

Naomi Zack
it might, it might feel the same Emotionally, it might feel the same. Spiritually, it might feel the same. But if you want to do something, it’s not the same. Because if you want to do something, things can be done in the present situation. Do you think that that a movement called Black Lives Matter could have arisen and survived under Jim Crow?

Ken Taylor
Yeah, I see your point. I see your point. And this is, you know, what, we’re just getting to something really good. I really wish we had like another half an hour, because I really want to dig into what you just said. And I want to dig into the phenomenology of the black activist in this kind of situation. But unfortunately, we’re at the end of the hour, and I’m going to have to thank you for joining us. It’s been a fascinating conversation. Naomi.

Naomi Zack
Thank you very much. My pleasure.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Naomi sacks. He’s a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. She’s author of white privilege, and black rights, the injustice of us police, racial profiling and homicide. So John, are you ready to check your white privilege yet? Well,

John Perry
sure. I must admit, when I when I first started working on this show, it seemed to me a pretty subtle distinction that Naomi was making but as I as I read her book and some other things and listen to her talk, I think it’s I think she’s on to a really important distinction that will help clarify things in particular help clarify what we ought to be focusing on. With what degree of urgency

Ken Taylor
Yeah, I agree with you. And I only wish her book is kind of short. It’s a it’s a good read. You should read it the only thing I wish it was longer in a certain way.

John Perry
Well, there’s Yeah, I

Ken Taylor
know. I know. Cuz the white privilege needs more thought and black rights, needs more thought. But you know what, this is a start. And this conversation continues at our at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers, where our motto is koja toe Ergo Blago, I think, therefore, I blog, and you too, can become a partner in that community just by visiting our website, Philosophy Talk dot o RG.

John Perry
Now let’s hear from a privileged white guy that also happens to have incredible talent for talking fast. Ian shows the 62nd philosopher,

Ian Shoales
he enjoys white privilege is one of those monolithic medical things like political incorrectness that can get me in trouble culturally, whether I’m guilty of it or not. If I insist on a point Well, that’s my white privilege. But if I had a point go, I’m a wuss, who does not stand for what I believe in a perk of being a white man who is as if I venture a strong opinion, which I’ve been known to do. From time to time, I have considered neither a representative of white people, nor a betrayer of white people, just another white guy with a big mouth. I don’t have to worry about ethnic ramifications, just personal ones. On the other hand, though any strong opinion me odor may be considered an example of white privilege, because my opinion assumes a position in society that not only enables me to have a strong opinion, it dictates to me culturally what that opinion should be. In other words, a white guy with an opinion in today’s world, either an ignorant blowhard or a blowhard mouthing received information. These two attitudes seem to be two ways of not having one’s cake and not getting to eat it either. Unless you’re Donald Trump, in which case you get to ride the bloated horse of angry grievance into the sunset. Well, we’ll see that stay less followed Princeton revealed that white privilege real or not is in trouble. Rising death rates in the white middle class are not coming from heart disease and diabetes, but from an epidemic of suicides, and overdoses of heroin and prescription drugs and from alcoholic liver disease. Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife has picked up on this study and speeches. He attributed anger in the electorate to anxiety over changing demographics. He told a group of pharmacists in Las Vegas and December 3, that middle aged middle class white Americans are, quote, dying of a broken heart and quote, which makes white middle class seem like a high school girl dumped at the problem. Some claim that the popular Donald Trump is due largely to support from angry white men. As an egoic guide myself, Alicia, don’t be one I don’t quite see the logic here. He is clearly a bad boyfriend from any angle. If he’s elected president that won’t translate into jobs for white guys. If you open a new resort, maybe we get jobs as dealers or greens keepers or bouncers until they crunch the numbers shut the casino down and declare bankruptcy the way he does. But if he’s president that’s not going to happen. And who is to blame for the old white guys Broken Heart legal immigrants taking all the jobs? India taking the job used to have been doing it for $1 overseas and my right black people and all the welfare spending your tax dollars on bad wine and crack the white leaving you taking the kids with or the bank foreclosing the finance company taking the car. Now they’re trying to get you to vote for a minimum wage. Isn’t that why the Walmarts are shutting down once you pay people enough money to live on that’s the end of capitalism and the end of the white middle class. Still, it seems when it comes to elections the vanishing white middle class remains the electorate of our dreams the cash cow of Smallville, the golden geese that keeps laying golden eggs, the elements of demographics. Once again the poor saps keep hoping I guess that white privilege is a real thing and actually get them something. I can only hope that this delusion will pass along with racism itself and 30 years from now the rainbow people of tomorrow will be living together and peace and harmony and Trump Towers and Trump build the new capital of Trump Sylvania, we better hope we’ll be living there if we’re not well, we’ll be shot on site. That’s just the way it is. I gotta go.

John Perry
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of been Manila productions and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2016.

Ken Taylor
Our executive producer is David Demarest.

John Perry
The program is produced by Devin Stoller, which Laura McGuire is our Director of Research. Dave Milan is our Director of Marketing

Ken Taylor
thanks also to Merrill Kessler and Mark Stone, Erica tapete. And Ted Muldoon

John Perry
support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and the partners at our online community of thinkers

Ken Taylor
and from the members of K LW San Francisco, Local Public Radio, where our program originates.

John Perry
The views expressed or mis expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders,

Ken Taylor
not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophy talks about O RG where you too, can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m John Perry, and I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

John Perry
And thank you for thinking

Speaker 2
is hard enough just to walk through life decent as a person, but another element added to win you black Mama’s got that little air John is enough to make the crazy