gimmeonereasontostay

I'm not a sociologist and I'm not a very active follower of the social justice culture war thing. But I do in general buy the idea of privilege, although I think it's more complex than people on either side claim, and I think there's a sort of class privilege which is more significant than white privilege per se.

The fact that upward social mobility is much more difficult than we like to pretend means that being born/adopted into a reasonably well-to-do family is a huge privilege. It just so happens that white people are more likely to belong to this category than black people, for obvious historical reasons and probably structural constraints. So I think being born white per se is not a huge source of privilege, but being born white and well-off is undoubtedly a big advantage.

I do also think that being a carrier of white American culture is a privilege in itself, given the prestige assigned to that culture. In my case, I'm privileged in that I can pick up the phone and "sound white" without any effort, and I can identify more closely with the sort of mainstream Anglo-American culture and assimilate into it more easily.

All that being said, I certainly don't subscribe to the idea that all white people are more privileged than all black people, although I think that's kind of a strawman argument used by opponents of the concept of privilege. I have (white) relatives on my mom's side of the family who didn't finish high school and live in total squalor, I am 100% more privileged than them. Basically, I think that in 2017, economic status is a better determinant of a person's chances of being successful than skin color, although the two factors interact/amplify one another in many ways.

Given that 99% of my friends and family are white and that I'm surrounded all day every day by white people, yeah, I'm sure that'll be happening any minute now. And unlike some people I don't spend all my time thinking about Colin Kaepernick and have no opinion on him.

I think I would be a lot happier if I had grown up with a more stable sense of identity. I have dealt with major depression since I was a teenager and it is completely connected with my self-esteem issues and the fact that I have never been able to feel at peace with myself specifically as a black person. Still, I don't have much of a motivation to "become black" at this age, especially because blackness is something which is so alienating and confusing to a lot of people.

Estonia. Long story short, yes, quite a bit, but people here for the most part are pretty non-confrontational. Naturally, people are very very very curious, as black people are extremely rare here, so I do get stared at everywhere I go, but I have trained myself not to make too big of a deal out of it. Most of my racist "incidents" have been with random drunk people, although I did have a run-in with some psycho neo-Nazis once.

Absolutely not, what made you draw that conclusion?