Donald Trump: The Incarnation of White Privilege
Donald Trump is the personification and the embodiment of the White Americans who believe that they are entitled to do and say anything they wish and get away with it.
Donald Trump is the personification and the embodiment of the White Americans who believe that they are entitled to do and say anything they wish and get away with it.
10/05/2020 @ 9:23 pm
Oh, there’s privilege all right, but I wouldn’t call this White Privilege because the vast majority of White people don’t enjoy it. This is Wealth Privilege and Power Privilege.
10/05/2020 @ 9:55 pm
Yeah but then you have to be able to find a black person who could behave in the same way and have it tolerated to the same degree. Good luck with that.
10/06/2020 @ 12:31 am
True, but to call it White Privilege presumes that the majority of Whites have to benefit from it. We don’t. Not close. The big line between who has Trump’s privilege and who doesn’t isn’t drawn at race and Ron’s assessment (and possibly yours) presumes that it is.
I’m not telling you that belonging to any other subgroup would have zero effect on one’s chances to do what Trump is doing, but there is absolutely no way you can say: Mr. X doesn’t have this privilege, therefore he’s probably Black. In point of fact, the probability that he’s Black isn’t a whole lot higher than the Black proportion of the American population. The person who doesn’t have this privilege is probably White.
10/06/2020 @ 3:20 pm
I disagree, k. “to call it White Privilege presumes that the majority of Whites have to benefit from it.” I think it only needs to presume that if the individual in question were NOT white and everything else remained the same, he would not have the privilege. It’s about race and WP as stand alone – divorced from distribution.
10/06/2020 @ 1:42 am
@Koshersalaami;
“The person who doesn’t have this privilege is probably White.”
This is about as convoluted as it gets…
The vast majority of white people didn’t own slaves either…
No way you can argue that the vast majority of white people didn’t and don’t enjoy the benefits and privileges conferred by slavery, American Apartheid, The Constitution, systemic and institutional racism…
Aware or not, like it or not, acknowledged or not, the vast majority of white people ‘enjoy’ the benefits of white privilege….
The Donald Trump phenomenon doesn’t happen without white privilege…
10/16/2020 @ 4:26 pm
Can I share a petty Trump thought here? There was one moment, the only one I can remember, where we saw him without his orange make-up, when he was shown in a short video prior to leaving in the helicopter for the hospital. He was pale, but NORMAL looking, and even sick with covid, he looked hundreds of times better. Not handsome, not young, just better. Why does he slather all that orange (if mixed with paint, 3 parts burnt sienna to 1 part yellow ochre to 1 part cadmium red) on his face? Everyone jokes about it, and he knows that, yet he keeps doing it. It seems to be if anything, even darker than it used to be.
On the White privilege question, definitely, but even more than that, there is TRUMP Privilege, which is even greater than White privilege. TRUMP privilege is the privilege of only one person in the whole wide world.
10/16/2020 @ 9:39 pm
You could call this White privilege. You could call it Male privilege. You could call it Rich privilege. You could call it Power privilege. You might even call it Celebrity privilege. It’s all of those. Which of these comes closest to describing it? Which of these best distinguishes what Trump can get away with from what most others could get away with?
In this case I don’t think race is the prime candidate. It’s in play but, compared to some other factors, not much.
As to most Whites not owning slaves, any who could afford them were legally entitled to in the South. And slavery insured that the status of every White was higher than that of every Black in the South. So White privilege in the slavery context actually meant something – most of the White population had higher status than they would have without the presence of slaves.
That’s not what’s going on with Trump and COVID. Whites do not generally get this privilege even vicariously.
10/16/2020 @ 9:45 pm
I need to offer a clarification. It depends what “this” is. I know this post immediately followed a conversation on one of mine concerning Trump’s behavior while having COVID, so I assumed, possibly erroneously, that that’s what you were talking about here. If you’re talking about Trump in general, you have a case. If you’re talking specifically about his response to having COVID, I think there are more predictive variables than race.
10/19/2020 @ 9:15 am
@Koshersalaami;
Talking about Trump in general:
“The Donald Trump phenomenon doesn’t happen without white privilege…”
Goes well beyond his COVID behavior…