Gangrene Elemental1BGW
Creature -- Elemental Zombie {?}
[1/1]
CARDNAME must be blocked if able.
If CARDNAME would be destroyed, regenerate it. When it does, destroy all creatures blocking or blocked by it this turn.
Privilege theorists don't really seem concern themselves overmuch with actual data when it comes right down to it. Pick your favorite "privilege list" and look at it closely -- you will find that most of the entries read like "You can be pretty well sure that maybe, sometimes, like, often possibly, in my experience occasionally white men will not never always sometimes fail to be catcalled by an Elvis impersonator, mostly on Tuesdays inside of a 3 mile radius of downtown Chicago plus or minus 7 light years, but not before roughly 7pm, give or take 24 hours."
Or more succinctly,
- X, Y, and Z are examples of [foo] Privilege.
- And if you don't agree that you have [foo] Privilege, that's just [foo] Privilege for you.
First, that we should eradicate all privileges that are race-based.
This is not a position typical of the American Right. Since that's more the realm of conservatism, the typical conservative position seems to be to assume as much as possible that there are no unearned privileges, so whatever the current situation is must be just. There's a key temporal component. You'll probably get a certain subset of libertarians to agree with it, though, as long as you can convince them it's the government's fault.
But egalitarianism (such as you outlined) is great so damn the left-right axis altogether on this one.
The other camp though says that we should eradicate white privilege, specifically.
To the extent that it's framed in a sort of class-struggle dialectic, then it's more Leftist, yeah. The best formulation I can think of is one that makes a distinction between "white" as commonly thought of as a skin color or "race," and "whiteness" as a categorical concept that underpins the Euro-American conception of race, and how it's really a reskinning (ha!) of the usual "Us"/"Them" dichotomy (Good stuff for "us", none for "them"). That way it helps to contextualize things in a solidly Euro-American framework, so that you don't have idiots saying things like "people of color can't be racist" when talking about places that aren't in America or Europe... the theory simply doesn't apply there.
But even then it's a specific example of a broader issue, the tendency of humans to wish that they and their friends could rule everyone else, and be unquestioned. And if there's one thing we're good at, it's rationalizing things. Why do I deserve to rule? Uh... because of Reasons! Whiteness! Masculinity! Religion! And totally not because my grandfather conquered your tribe, because any old schmuck with a warband could do that..
That's clearly still metaphorical. I get that it's very easy to take his words at face value, because he presents things in such stark terms. It's especially easy to take a paragraph of his and see that it reads as a very literal endorsement of death and murder. But you have to read it through his framework of metaphor.
To be fair, Rush Limbaugh uses the same sort of defense.
Re: "but how would we make sure that they don't spend it on drugs/bad stuff?"
We can't. We can't even do that with regular food stamps, since a person would just change up their existing cash budget. $100 in food stamps frees up $100 in cash for other things.
Oh, that's cute. Does this mean that I can call myself a Christian despite the fact that I don't believe in the Trinity, the Crucifixion, or even monotheism?
More like calling oneself a theist and then being a bit miffed when people take that to mean "Christian of a certain type." I usually take small-l libertarianism to be one direction on a spectrum (against authoritarianism or something) and then big-L Libertarianism to be an area on a very complicated political map. The Libertarian Party in the US has some bad positions, but ask a European what "libertarianism" is and you're prone to get a very different answer.
2) How is the government going to ensure those close to the poverty level are not spending this extra money on unneeded things?
It's probably slightly inflationary, but probably would be offset by (a) the reduction in government spending (this is bureaucratically cheap and relatively painless to GDP) and (b) faster growth in the economy than in the money supply. A guaranteed basic income provides a nice cushion for people to quit their jobs and find better ones, or start their own businesses. A more liquid labor supply and a more vibrant small-business sector seem like Good Things to me.
And then, after a certain amount of the population blows through the money and their kids are wearing rags and don't have anything to eat, you need to spend more money on them.
One would assume that various community support programs would still be in place. It'd just be the welfare "handout" programs that would be rolled into this guaranteed basic income business.
One would also assume that the money would come in the form of a monthly check like Social Security (hell, it could just be rolled into the existing SSec structure), to reduce risk of "blowing it all."
My point is this: any equal standard of physical fitness in the military will favor men over women, since men tend to be significantly stronger (on average) than women. Thus men will have an easier time qualifying for the military and their higher PT scores will tend to assist them in getting things like promotions and pay raises.
To me, this kind of structure resembles a male privilege. The system, on average, favors men over women. Even if this discrimination isn't caused by malice toward women, it still necessarily results in unequal outcomes. Are you ok with this?
I'm okay with it, since it would reflect an equitable outcome: that is, the outcome is not dependent on any rule that selects for gender, it's strictly correlated with performance (which is correlated with gender, but you're not arbitrarily shutting anyone out, is the point). Gender isn't really important to the armed forces, but physical and mental fitness are. If you make the grade, want to serve, and there's an open position, you should get it.
Gender roles are not natural, by definition they are artificial
Then why did every culture have them (with some variation yes but vastly more in common), why did they follow the exact same pattern over and over as different cultures (some seperated by millinea and great distances from each other) transitioned between the same stages of development?
There's a difference between individual behavior (as it relates to various hormones and in particular sex-linked hormones), and cultural perceptions of what sort of people do what.
For example, a society that recognizes two genders ("man" and "woman"), wherein the men are expected to hunt game, go to war, and lead the society, and the women are expected to raise children, conduct mercantile transactions, and perform religious ceremonies. (Or another society that recognizes three genders, etc., it's not out of the question.)
It may be that males tend to fall into the "man" category and females tend to fall into the "woman" category (to the point where the sex is identified with the gender), but some males might not want or like to do "man" things, etc. That would be a case of gender expression not lining up with gender roles (all going back to the underlying biology of the individual in question).
Multiculturalism is the notion that one can rationally expect to live by the cultural practices of one's own culture without impediment from or judgment by the surrounding culture(s).
That's certainly how a lot of people put it, yeah. The thing I find weird is that the argument, taken further, is basically admitting that assimilation is more powerful: feel free to practice your own culture and don't try to mix because oh god don't ruin the diversity! It's less multiculturalism than, perhaps, diversity fetishism. The idea that diversity per se is inherently good rather than for any other reason. (See also the nonsense to which phrases like "cultural appropriation" are too often used. Learning another language? Really?)
This multiculturalist program basically adopts the exact opposite stance of cultural conservatism ("Rejecting outside influence is good in itself") while, with no sense of irony, enforcing it at the community level.
I would think that a better multiculturalist program would reject the supposed sameness of assimilation, but would realize that cultures change over time, and it's better to have a wide variety of possible vectors for that change than just a few. But ultimately it's up to a society to widely adopt or reject various policies or practices based on all their merits and demerits, not just "because it came from a foreign culture!" or "because it came from the currently or historically dominant culture!"
I take, for example, two Muslim politicians who are only elected due to the concentration of ethnic minorities in their constituency; they spend much of their time serving interests that are not part of the mainstream agenda - such as equality for sexuality, women's rights and the removal of church from state affairs.
So they were elected by a constituency of mostly minorities and they spend their time in legislature advancing the interests of that constituency (which happen to be.. ah... minority interests)? Shocking. And good thing yours is a majoritarian system, so two people can't possibly wreak too much legislative havoc... right?
I don't see it as racist to wish to protect the nature of my culture; Celtic culture has survived for thousands of years despite persecution throughout the ages - none so apparent than the Scottish and Irish who faced many slaughters from Anglo forces - and to this cause I do not see modern multiculturalism being beneficial to society.
Do you regularly paint your face with woad and engage in warfare with rival clans...?
It's possible to preserve traditions in the interest of the cultural heritage and become a melting pot to generate new culture. That said, I'm with you with regards to hate-speech laws (there's another epic thread in this forum about that in itself) and other such stuff that makes my radical American free-expression sensibilities tingle. Then again banning minarets or burqas or whatever is equally iffy.
Western society does not protect minorities from themselves - when we allow radical and dangerous preachings but do not arrest or challenge them through the legal frame work then we are not only putting the native population at risk from terrorism and other forces, but also the minorities who may find themselves more inclined to follow radical teachings.
Uh. Well, free speech, you can't pick and choose what things are good and bad to say (like, for example, harsh criticism of Islam). Also are you saying that minorities "can't help themselves" when faced with radical agitprop?
Am I a racist? No. Am I someone who is scared that his culture is slowly degenerating due to external forces within our nation? Yes.
I guess I sympathize, but somehow I've developed a knee-jerk reaction against concepts like "cultural degeneration" or "decadence." I just don't think that world-view holds up, though it's very Spenglerian and cool in a capital-R Romantic, quaint sort of way.
Are we really going to be surprised that a country with a predominantly caucasian population has a predominantly caucasian parliament?
It's more like almost everyone in Congress is rich, white, male, and (Protestant) Christian, which one wouldn't expect if there were equal odds of anyone achieving political office. True, there would be quite a few WASPy people in Congress, but probably more than what, two black people? Et cetera.
Because it's the right of every nation to be able to maintain their own culture within their nation; no-one asked the English citizens if they wished to be flooded with foreign entities, or immigrants, and yet somehow it happened.
So aside from pockets of sharia law, what's the problem with immigrants? A mixed culture is a healthy culture, I think.
This strikes me as a reframing that ascribes a motive to the pro-life movement that may very well be true in some cases but may also simply be melarky.
It's true in a lot of cases, unfortunately. It's often a short hop from a pro-life stance to more specifically gendered (and rather regressive) norms. I'm not sure how it's distributed among individuals but if you look at the main pro-life political voices they're very much in that sort of place. Nobody's framing it like Blinking_Spirit did, but a lot of people are framing it like LadyLuck described.
Well, what you wrote is a false dichotomy, but it's not what I wrote. There is no need for institution bias, etc., to take the form of a conscious conspiracy enacted by an identifiable group of people.
That's why I said "smells like" But I understand your meaning. And I don't think a lot of subscribers to this theory claim that there is any sort of secret white-supremacist cabal running the show. This only raises the question: how did the system get started in the first place? Something had to erect the invisible labyrinth of advantages and disadvantages, if (a) it's not inherent (i.e. white people are inherently racist and somehow uniquely predisposed to oppress people of color), and (b) it's something affected by our behavior (i.e. one either works with or works against the racist system).
To ironically paraphrase creationists: design implies a designer!
Edit: I have now found what I believe to be a sufficient justification for my claim:
http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/uminnesota.pdf
This survey shows that only 59% of white people asked "believed that prejudice and discrimination in favor of whites is important in explaining white advantage," compared to 83% of black people and 84% of Hispanic people (63% overall).
So... popular belief? I would've accepted that one resume study at least.
EDIT: I guess (to use a math analogy) we have to wonder whether any specific gap (e.g., in household wealth) is more dependent on the rules of the system or on initial conditions. So (because of different rules) the affluent areas got white people and most of the black people went to poor areas (note the careful wording)... when those rules went away, the conditions remained, and now under the usual socioeconomic rules (simplistically, "it takes money to make money" and "it's who you know," etc.) we see "the rich" staying mostly white and blacks staying mostly in "the poors." But the privilege isn't in being white, it's in being rich.
When we are talking about the right wing, are we lumping (in decreasing order of authoritarianism) neo-conservatives, the Tea Party, minarchist libertarians, voluntaryists, and ancaps all with each other?
Those ideologies are certainly no barrier to racism. (Probably because racism often operates at a deeper level than mere politics.) For example, Lew Rockwell is a prominent libertarian and he's written all sorts of Bell Curve-style nostrums about "inherited intelligence" or criminality among brown people. The difference is that libertarians offer this up as "merely" an objective analysis of the world, rather than a policy prescription.
So many people on the left have spent so much energy and tortured so much logic to try to define "racism" such that prejudice against white people cannot be racist, and for the life of me I can't understand why.
I used to roll my eyes at the term "Cultural Marxism" when it was bandied about as a snarl word by right-wing types, but the more I encounter this crazy-left ideology the more I start thinking about it. Near as I can tell they're trying to (American-centrally) frame culture in Marxist class-warfare terms. So they need a dominant class and an oppressed class. Enter the white/hetero/cis/patriarchy "theory." It's all the more infuriating because they often refuse to entertain even complimentary points of view.
The idea of white privilege is primarily that white people have unearned advantages in our society. A related aspect is that white people often deny the existence of white privilege. If these things are "negative characteristics" sufficient to satisfy one's definition of "racism," then one's definition of racism is overly broad so as to be almost meaningless.
Here's why this theory creates a problem:
Assertion: "White people have unearned advantages in society."
Assertion: "White people often deny the above assertion."
That's a sort of strange loop. Or a kafkatrap, to borrow a phrase. Once a person is slotted into the class of "white people," that person cannot escape the trap of the theory. If I accept that white privilege exists, that confirms the theory. If I don't, that also confirms the theory. (If I'm white, it's because of white privilege. If I'm not white, it's because of "internalized racism." Turtles all the way down!)
So like when Peggy McIntosh or someone writes up a "Privilege Checklist" and puts some patently ridiculous thing on it, it's impossible to criticize because I'm clearly not checking my privilege. At this point we're solidly in dogma territory, and that's dangerous ground.
If this is the foundational text of the academic theory of privilege, the Principia Privilegia if you will, then postmodern leftism is in worse intellectual shape than even I gave it credit for.
I'm not sure about academia, but a lot of this is done in a very unrigorous way. Like on Tumblr and stuff.
I guess one way to put it is that there isn't a way to earn the advantage of (more or less) exclusively having the thing because the thing itself should be unearned for all.
I see a huge distinction between a privilege that only a few enjoy and a right unfairly denied the masses. Privilege connotes a natural exclusivity, not always arbitrary, but not something everyone could or should have. A right connotes a natural inclusivity, something everyone could or should have.
Example: Self-government by the vote is seen in democratic societies as a right of any enfranchised person. It just so happened that membership in the group of "enfranchised persons" was unjustifiably denied to lots of persons.
Example: Religious organizations have the privilege of skirting many taxes and regulations that are mandated for other organizations and individuals. While some might argue that certain taxes simply shouldn't be levied, it's harder to argue that certain rules on childcare (e.g.) shouldn't be followed at all.
I claim that white privilege must be accepted as existing if one is to take the position that people of non-white races aren't inherently inferior.
This smells like a false dichotomy: either people of color inherently suck, or there's a conspiracy against people of color (masterminded by white people).
Either one is simplistic, and I contend that both deny agency to people of color. (See also the "if your business fails you suck at capitalism, if my business fails it's the government's fault" economics dichotomy among Tea Partiers.)
Because people only experience their own lives, and will thus often be unaware of any "privilege" they have.)
The only useful privilege related to identity, IMO, is the privilege of being ignorant of the problems of identities you don't share. That's a useful reminder.
Perhaps, but some of those things could manifest more often or more severely than others.
It's not even a difference of degree, IMO. Cases of structural or institutional or prejudicial abuse of power — differential sentencing for racial minorities, say — require concerted political resistance. Cases of factual wrongness — statements like "blacks have a higher criminal tendency than whites" or "white people were created by a mad black scientist 10 billion years ago" — require fairly cheap verbal rebuttals.
Turns out that if you increase food stability, education and access to contraceptives, population growth tends to slow down and/or become negative as people focus on careers rather than making sure they have enough children to support them in old age.
Yeah, it's almost as if people generally want to give their children the most love and attention possible, and not (ceteris paribus) have as many as they can.
Gangrene Elemental 1BGW
Creature -- Elemental Zombie {?}
[1/1]
CARDNAME must be blocked if able.
If CARDNAME would be destroyed, regenerate it. When it does, destroy all creatures blocking or blocked by it this turn.
So it's like a Basilisk of the Holy Nimbus.
Or more succinctly,
- X, Y, and Z are examples of [foo] Privilege.
- And if you don't agree that you have [foo] Privilege, that's just [foo] Privilege for you.
Strange loop! No way out!
This is not a position typical of the American Right. Since that's more the realm of conservatism, the typical conservative position seems to be to assume as much as possible that there are no unearned privileges, so whatever the current situation is must be just. There's a key temporal component. You'll probably get a certain subset of libertarians to agree with it, though, as long as you can convince them it's the government's fault.
But egalitarianism (such as you outlined) is great so damn the left-right axis altogether on this one.
To the extent that it's framed in a sort of class-struggle dialectic, then it's more Leftist, yeah. The best formulation I can think of is one that makes a distinction between "white" as commonly thought of as a skin color or "race," and "whiteness" as a categorical concept that underpins the Euro-American conception of race, and how it's really a reskinning (ha!) of the usual "Us"/"Them" dichotomy (Good stuff for "us", none for "them"). That way it helps to contextualize things in a solidly Euro-American framework, so that you don't have idiots saying things like "people of color can't be racist" when talking about places that aren't in America or Europe... the theory simply doesn't apply there.
But even then it's a specific example of a broader issue, the tendency of humans to wish that they and their friends could rule everyone else, and be unquestioned. And if there's one thing we're good at, it's rationalizing things. Why do I deserve to rule? Uh... because of Reasons! Whiteness! Masculinity! Religion! And totally not because my grandfather conquered your tribe, because any old schmuck with a warband could do that..
To be fair, Rush Limbaugh uses the same sort of defense.
We can't. We can't even do that with regular food stamps, since a person would just change up their existing cash budget. $100 in food stamps frees up $100 in cash for other things.
More like calling oneself a theist and then being a bit miffed when people take that to mean "Christian of a certain type." I usually take small-l libertarianism to be one direction on a spectrum (against authoritarianism or something) and then big-L Libertarianism to be an area on a very complicated political map. The Libertarian Party in the US has some bad positions, but ask a European what "libertarianism" is and you're prone to get a very different answer.
It's probably slightly inflationary, but probably would be offset by (a) the reduction in government spending (this is bureaucratically cheap and relatively painless to GDP) and (b) faster growth in the economy than in the money supply. A guaranteed basic income provides a nice cushion for people to quit their jobs and find better ones, or start their own businesses. A more liquid labor supply and a more vibrant small-business sector seem like Good Things to me.
One would assume that various community support programs would still be in place. It'd just be the welfare "handout" programs that would be rolled into this guaranteed basic income business.
One would also assume that the money would come in the form of a monthly check like Social Security (hell, it could just be rolled into the existing SSec structure), to reduce risk of "blowing it all."
I'm okay with it, since it would reflect an equitable outcome: that is, the outcome is not dependent on any rule that selects for gender, it's strictly correlated with performance (which is correlated with gender, but you're not arbitrarily shutting anyone out, is the point). Gender isn't really important to the armed forces, but physical and mental fitness are. If you make the grade, want to serve, and there's an open position, you should get it.
There's a difference between individual behavior (as it relates to various hormones and in particular sex-linked hormones), and cultural perceptions of what sort of people do what.
For example, a society that recognizes two genders ("man" and "woman"), wherein the men are expected to hunt game, go to war, and lead the society, and the women are expected to raise children, conduct mercantile transactions, and perform religious ceremonies. (Or another society that recognizes three genders, etc., it's not out of the question.)
It may be that males tend to fall into the "man" category and females tend to fall into the "woman" category (to the point where the sex is identified with the gender), but some males might not want or like to do "man" things, etc. That would be a case of gender expression not lining up with gender roles (all going back to the underlying biology of the individual in question).
Yeah, that's what I was going for. I suppose I could have been less ambiguous about it.
That's certainly how a lot of people put it, yeah. The thing I find weird is that the argument, taken further, is basically admitting that assimilation is more powerful: feel free to practice your own culture and don't try to mix because oh god don't ruin the diversity! It's less multiculturalism than, perhaps, diversity fetishism. The idea that diversity per se is inherently good rather than for any other reason. (See also the nonsense to which phrases like "cultural appropriation" are too often used. Learning another language? Really?)
This multiculturalist program basically adopts the exact opposite stance of cultural conservatism ("Rejecting outside influence is good in itself") while, with no sense of irony, enforcing it at the community level.
I would think that a better multiculturalist program would reject the supposed sameness of assimilation, but would realize that cultures change over time, and it's better to have a wide variety of possible vectors for that change than just a few. But ultimately it's up to a society to widely adopt or reject various policies or practices based on all their merits and demerits, not just "because it came from a foreign culture!" or "because it came from the currently or historically dominant culture!"
So they were elected by a constituency of mostly minorities and they spend their time in legislature advancing the interests of that constituency (which happen to be.. ah... minority interests)? Shocking. And good thing yours is a majoritarian system, so two people can't possibly wreak too much legislative havoc... right?
Do you regularly paint your face with woad and engage in warfare with rival clans...?
It's possible to preserve traditions in the interest of the cultural heritage and become a melting pot to generate new culture. That said, I'm with you with regards to hate-speech laws (there's another epic thread in this forum about that in itself) and other such stuff that makes my radical American free-expression sensibilities tingle. Then again banning minarets or burqas or whatever is equally iffy.
Uh. Well, free speech, you can't pick and choose what things are good and bad to say (like, for example, harsh criticism of Islam). Also are you saying that minorities "can't help themselves" when faced with radical agitprop?
I guess I sympathize, but somehow I've developed a knee-jerk reaction against concepts like "cultural degeneration" or "decadence." I just don't think that world-view holds up, though it's very Spenglerian and cool in a capital-R Romantic, quaint sort of way.
It's more like almost everyone in Congress is rich, white, male, and (Protestant) Christian, which one wouldn't expect if there were equal odds of anyone achieving political office. True, there would be quite a few WASPy people in Congress, but probably more than what, two black people? Et cetera.
So aside from pockets of sharia law, what's the problem with immigrants? A mixed culture is a healthy culture, I think.
Increasingly those white people cannot be considered to be much like other white people.
It's true in a lot of cases, unfortunately. It's often a short hop from a pro-life stance to more specifically gendered (and rather regressive) norms. I'm not sure how it's distributed among individuals but if you look at the main pro-life political voices they're very much in that sort of place. Nobody's framing it like Blinking_Spirit did, but a lot of people are framing it like LadyLuck described.
That's why I said "smells like" But I understand your meaning. And I don't think a lot of subscribers to this theory claim that there is any sort of secret white-supremacist cabal running the show. This only raises the question: how did the system get started in the first place? Something had to erect the invisible labyrinth of advantages and disadvantages, if (a) it's not inherent (i.e. white people are inherently racist and somehow uniquely predisposed to oppress people of color), and (b) it's something affected by our behavior (i.e. one either works with or works against the racist system).
To ironically paraphrase creationists: design implies a designer!
So... popular belief? I would've accepted that one resume study at least.
EDIT: I guess (to use a math analogy) we have to wonder whether any specific gap (e.g., in household wealth) is more dependent on the rules of the system or on initial conditions. So (because of different rules) the affluent areas got white people and most of the black people went to poor areas (note the careful wording)... when those rules went away, the conditions remained, and now under the usual socioeconomic rules (simplistically, "it takes money to make money" and "it's who you know," etc.) we see "the rich" staying mostly white and blacks staying mostly in "the poors." But the privilege isn't in being white, it's in being rich.
Those ideologies are certainly no barrier to racism. (Probably because racism often operates at a deeper level than mere politics.) For example, Lew Rockwell is a prominent libertarian and he's written all sorts of Bell Curve-style nostrums about "inherited intelligence" or criminality among brown people. The difference is that libertarians offer this up as "merely" an objective analysis of the world, rather than a policy prescription.
I used to roll my eyes at the term "Cultural Marxism" when it was bandied about as a snarl word by right-wing types, but the more I encounter this crazy-left ideology the more I start thinking about it. Near as I can tell they're trying to (American-centrally) frame culture in Marxist class-warfare terms. So they need a dominant class and an oppressed class. Enter the white/hetero/cis/patriarchy "theory." It's all the more infuriating because they often refuse to entertain even complimentary points of view.
Here's why this theory creates a problem:
So like when Peggy McIntosh or someone writes up a "Privilege Checklist" and puts some patently ridiculous thing on it, it's impossible to criticize because I'm clearly not checking my privilege. At this point we're solidly in dogma territory, and that's dangerous ground.
I'm not sure about academia, but a lot of this is done in a very unrigorous way. Like on Tumblr and stuff.
I see a huge distinction between a privilege that only a few enjoy and a right unfairly denied the masses. Privilege connotes a natural exclusivity, not always arbitrary, but not something everyone could or should have. A right connotes a natural inclusivity, something everyone could or should have.
Example: Self-government by the vote is seen in democratic societies as a right of any enfranchised person. It just so happened that membership in the group of "enfranchised persons" was unjustifiably denied to lots of persons.
Example: Religious organizations have the privilege of skirting many taxes and regulations that are mandated for other organizations and individuals. While some might argue that certain taxes simply shouldn't be levied, it's harder to argue that certain rules on childcare (e.g.) shouldn't be followed at all.
This smells like a false dichotomy: either people of color inherently suck, or there's a conspiracy against people of color (masterminded by white people).
Either one is simplistic, and I contend that both deny agency to people of color. (See also the "if your business fails you suck at capitalism, if my business fails it's the government's fault" economics dichotomy among Tea Partiers.)
The only useful privilege related to identity, IMO, is the privilege of being ignorant of the problems of identities you don't share. That's a useful reminder.
Why, normatively, would one not want to use a more specific term to avoid confusion?
It's not even a difference of degree, IMO. Cases of structural or institutional or prejudicial abuse of power — differential sentencing for racial minorities, say — require concerted political resistance. Cases of factual wrongness — statements like "blacks have a higher criminal tendency than whites" or "white people were created by a mad black scientist 10 billion years ago" — require fairly cheap verbal rebuttals.
Yeah, it's almost as if people generally want to give their children the most love and attention possible, and not (ceteris paribus) have as many as they can.