Whilst White Privilege does not mean that any White person who achieved anything didn’t work hard, it is nevertheless a concrete phenomenon that manifests in observable ways, and can be summarily defined and understood as:
White privilege: n. The quantitative (and qualitative) advantage of whiteness
These advantages can be seen in a Historically rooted access to better opportunities in Education, Employment, Income, and can also be additionally expressed in Psychological Terms.
White Privilege As A Psychological Wage
It obviously follows that improved access to the material benefits provided by access to better Education, Employment and Income will create individuals and communities that thrive more both materially and Psychologically.
The ‘Psychological Wage of Whiteness’ (or the promise of it), has also been used to divide and conquer the lower White working class from the days of the Slave Plantation in which the White working class performed the hard manual field work of ‘Overseer’.
The Land-Owning Plantation Owners were not inclined to do this field work which included such unsavoury tasks as Slave discipline. Nevertheless, it was necessary that the ‘dirty’ work be done for the success of the Plantation, and by extension the entire Economy.
As Capitalism expanded into Colonialism, it was the members of the White working class that did the dirty work side-by-side with the Colonised in the Mines, Farms and other sites of exploitation as ‘Manager’ or ‘Foreman’ to ensure that the profits sought by the Colonial project were extracted from the Colonies to the ‘mother country’.
It is in this role that the White working class has also been exploited, divided, and deceived as Capitalism has encouraged the White working class to, in historian David Roediger’s words, “define and accept their class position by fashioning identities as ‘not slaves’ and ‘not blacks.’”
According to W.E.B. DuBois, anti-black racism grants lower and working-class whites a “public and psychological wage” – a false and dysfunctional measure of status used to compensate for alienating and exploitative class relationships.
As Martin Luther King Jr. observed in 1968, racialized capitalism has given its White Proletarian prey the “satisfaction of…thinking you are somebody big because you are white.”
Conclusion
Our own era has witnessed the aging throes of Global Capitalism with the accelerated death of the Middle-Class in order to ensure that wealth transfer to the very top continues, thereby finally exposing the satisfaction provided by the ‘Psychological Wage’ of White Privilege as a lie to Whites themselves…Its now clear that no Race is immune to the Machiavellian machinations of the Elite class.
The White workers’ subordinate and expendable status is now exposed as equal to that of Blacks, and thus making it clear that we are and have always been divided in what is essentially a Class War.
Just prior to his death, Martin Luther King Jnr pursued this insight and saw the need for Racial unity as a means of subverting division by the Capitalist Class. Dr King decided to support a Worker’s strike in Memphis Tenessee in order to mark the launch of this new united ‘Class Struggle’ beyond Civil Rights.
Somebody wasnt willing to allow him to live long enough to embark on what would essentially have been an assault on firstly, American Capitalism and eventually Global Capitalism.
The struggle continues…