Actually, a racial offense DID occur, Jesse. You missed the point entirely, apparently.

The Hispanic officer was doing her job: Trying to REALLY be random in her search. Being suspicious of Tim, THE WHITE MAN, WAS the right thing. You are right in that the Hispanic security guard was in this story "innocent" of any offense - hell, she was actively doing something POSITIVE in challenging white racial supremacy, however subtly (and likely subconsciously).

The officer afterwards who waved Tim on was protecting the ol' boys club of white men.

Tim's privilege was real in that situation, and quite clear.

You seem to define, as most people new to the topic of white privilege (funny that your ostensibly critical response indicates mere inexperience with the topic), "racism" as being something only bad that can happen TO someone.

But this was "racism", or racial distinction, that occurred FOR someone, a BENEFIT they acquired because of their skin color. Tim got the BENEFIT of getting out of a search because of his skin color. The fact that he SHOULD have gotten out of the search is moot, because plenty of Arabs, Sikhs and blacks should get out of the search and have nothing to hide and yet the dispro searches targetting them (thanks not least to assholes like Bill Mahr who defended racial profiling) occur and help to demean them and delay their rightful entry to their plane.

Get it?

Putting that aside: You're the first person here to have found Tim's hypothetical implausible. Everyone else seems to have bought it. Maybe they (just puttin' it out there) have some superior knowledge or awareness you don't, know what it's like either first-hand or second-hand for a black man in the same situation, and thus found the hypothetical not only plausible but indeed funny and insightful?

The fact that you just assume it can't have been racism smacks of exactly the kind of white denialism Tim talks about in the next post.

Incidentally: Apologizing to someone for a racist search doesn't make the search's motives less racist, the search itself less racist, or compensate for the search afterwards. You're also reading far too much into this.

A far more interesting question than the abusive ad hominem-charged one you post at the end is this: Why are you incapable of honestly quoting someone?

"Frederic -- That's just silly. First you say  the Hispanic security guard was doing her job in searching Tim, but the whitesupervisor was letting Tim go due to "white privilege." Then you conclude that the search was "racist.""

Wrong. I conclude that a RACIAL OFFENSE occurred: That is, that someone got an unfair break. The SEARCH wasn't racist - in fact, it was ANTI-racist in that it undermined the norm that only black and brown people should be searched. Tim getting OFF it was a case of white pirvilege, yes.

"The fact is neither you nor Tim know a damn thing about the white supervisor's thoughts, motivations, loyalty or feelings. You're just extrapolating on the basis of what you already think you know or FEEL TO BE THE CASE, reducing the situation to a cartoon that aligns with your ideological prejudices."

Sure, and a man who calls someone "Nigger" may have accidentally said that and instead meant to say "Juice box". People read into people's behaviors all the time based on the evidence. You don't give us any reason to think the situation is WRONG. You just say we are. Nice try.

Oh, and another thing: Let's say that the white supervisor's intent WAS just to facilitate a customer of the airlines getting to their flight.

That'd STILL be white privilege. And the fact that I have to explain this, again, shows that you don't spend a lot of time on these issues. (Not your fault, we have all sorts of commitments).

Because we KNOW that this does not happen nearly as often to blacks.

If someone hires me as a white man because they like my resume, that's STILL white privilege, even if they have not an ounce of racist intent in their minds. Because my whiteness gave me dispro access to recommendations, reference, letters of rec, opportunities to attend better education and get better jobs, etc. EVEN if this one employer hires blacks fairly according to their resume, the fact that everyone else doesn't has caused the labor market to become racist in toto. And for a variety of other reasons.

In short, white privilege and race play out constantly, every day, and indeed every second insofar as white privilege changed the environments within which we grew up.

So, yeah, we read white privilege into it, because it HAPPENED, largely irrespective of what everyone in the situation intended and desired.

"Yes, it is possible that the white supervisor waved Tim on out of loyalty to "white privilege," and that he wouldn't have done the same for a black man; but there's no particular reason to think so."

Except that's not what Tim alleged happened, so your lack of agreement with that claim is moot and only proves you're just beating up straw men vigorously.

Rather, Tim is arguing that a combination of formal airline and state policy, informal airline and government policy and signals (e.g. people just picking up through observing behavior that some people just need to be pulled over more often), and subtle (probably subsconscious but nowhere CLOSE to always), caused the set of circumstances where him being pulled aside for a search is rare and him being moved along is an institutional "fix" to that violation of the institution's normal norms.

This is the way institutions operate, which means you must not think racism is institutional, which means we already have a major problem with communication and models...

"Every player in this little vignette is an individual, with a history and a personal outlook; not an automaton acting out a pre-ordained drama of privilege and oppression"

Actually, they're both.

We all play out "pre-ordained dramas" determined by society, constantly. Putting in a resume at a workplace, even putting aside the above discussion about employment discrimination, involves a process that we've accepted wherein our resume is reviewed, possibly called back, interviews probably set out, etc. That drama IS largely pre-ordained, coming from the way those institutions operate, and we have very little control over how it happens.

You wouldn't deny that in the case of a resume, but mysteriously when it comes to racism... 

"You guys are just making stuff up so that the scene plays out with the message you want it to have. It's dishonest, silly, and unhelpful. You can't build a case on what MIGHT have happened if things weren't as they actually were."

Why not?

Tim made a case and presented an argument. He said the scene had that meaning. You didn't say he was wrong, just that he couldn't make the argument, for some arbitrary reason.

An interesting question is why you found the scene's meaning implausible, yet seemingly no one else did, and many found it so plausible as to actually be comical. Any hypothesis for that?

The fact is that, WHATEVER THE INTENT of all the people involved, the scene did in fact play out under the contours of white privilege, given the overwhelming play of the factors. No black or Arab man could expect to have a white man intervene so easily to protect them. And since so many black folks find such stories plausible and resonating with their experience, you are also implicitly dismissing what they suggest about their own experience, a position ITSELF mired in white privilege. How unsurprising.

An interesting question is WHY you want the scene to have the message that you think it does. Could it be that your ideological commitments are more comforting to you than facing reality without them -- in all its complexity and subtlety -- would be?"

Would be a fantastic question if your premises were right. Since they're wrong, a counter-question emerges: Why DON'T you see race and white privilege where anti-racist activists do?

"The problem here Tim, is that you manufactured this out of thin air. Nothing happened. What should you have "challenged" the "boss" about? He didnt do anything wrong. How do you know he would have said something different had you been black?"

Statistics, subtext, pattern recognition, decades of experience...

Again, we have a very interesting sociological fact before we even begin to attend to the arguments. You and people like you, seemingly generally white (and probably middle-class by the looks of it - I'm noting the pattern here), don't find plausible what anti-racist activists and people of color do. Repeatedly, I ask why, and point to hypotheses. Repeatedly, I get no answer. Funny, that.

The fact is that, by statistics alone, Tim would not have had reason to have been so blasé and secure. Yes, it could have developed differently. Hypotheticals do that. But the point remains fairly clear. Anyone who can just read statistics knows that, if they are black, the odds are stacked against them. Why this simple point flies over the head of so many, I wish I didn't know.

More importantly, part of the article was that he didn't stand up for the Latina guard. Everyone misses that one. He should have acknowledged that she should have searched him and been suspicious about the cash. But you don't mentiong that, of course.

"You dont know that. Your mind-reading these people. Worse yet, you locate Logan Airport as outside of Post Racial America based on something that you did *not* see happen."

No, he's making a deduction. "Your" [sic] disagreeing with him, based not on any better evidence of their internal state, but just based on your own different suppositions. You provide no reason to prefer your model over his, and your model flies in the face of all the statistics you concede and all of the experiences that people of color have. Yet, using your white privilege, you continue to parrot it. Staggering.

"I dont know where post racial America is either, and I dont know if Boston or Logan is there, but nothing that happened to you at the airport that day can tell us anything about it either way. The rest was just a story you made up."

I suppose for utterly pedantic readers such as yourself, yes. Other people saw something quite interesting and took the point. The fact that you think that your interpretation is correct is the most galling part.

Incidentally, we DO know where "post-racial America" is: It doesn't exist. The statistics prove that, which you long ago conceded. Funny...

"No thats not a privilege. Its not even a "vis-a-vis" privilege. We cant know if the rate you are searched at is fair or unfair based simply on how it compares to mine. We could both be searched at unfairly high, but differing, rates. Something I am sure you would believe if one were black and the other latina."

I would believe it because the evidence suggests it. Both my personal experience and the committing data indicate that whites believe that they can traffic contraband without being caught, not to mention break traffic laws. This contempt for the law, shown by things like the Wailer concert I attended, is really quite deep.

But, of course, there's plenty of other such privileges if this one is marginal for you. Take the ability to create 99% white communities to satisfy white folks' racist comfort zones. That right should NEVER exist. Similarly, the right to discriminate at all on an institutional level shouldn't exist, but whites have it.

You'll undoubtedly argue that this doesn't "benefit" them. This is moot, because they have the capacity, even if it doesn't help (just like the fact that the rich COULD hire private armies was relevant in the 19th century but is less relevant now). But it's also false: Whites clearly have fought tooth and nail to keep those powers.

This whole discussion brings up what may actually be the single biggest problem with your resistance. You reject "white privilege" as a concept, or at least a terminology, because many whites are below a threshold YOU believe they SHOULD be at. You reject the idea that whites should be searched more often because in YOUR mind everyone should be searched less often.

That this is deeply arrogant is obvious. That this is a view steeped in white, American, male privilege is equally obvious to the trained observer. Only we white guys have the ability to think that only deviations from the world WE happen to think should exist matter. Because YOU think that white people should be richer (even though an ecological argument could be made for them being much poorer: everyone owning a car, for example, is almost undoubtedly ecologically unsustainable), the fact that blacks are poorer is irrelevant.

While the arrogance is revealing, the problem with this approach is that it's bad social science. The first thing we do is look at the real world, our preferences having been put aside. We find that whites in almost every social arena have massive advantages, above and beyond their class, gender or political position. We call those advantages "white privilege". Your responses are bad social science, because they assume that your beliefs trump reality.

"Latina privilege? I doubt you would characterize the differntial with blacks as the result of Latina "privilege"."

In this instance, I would note that Latina/os and Asians have an advantage over blacks.

This is an abusive argument that suggests that you are lightyears away from honestly wanting to engage with the topic. I could just as well say, "Man, look at how much people HATED George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Never mind class privilege", or said, "Man, Christopher Reeves  was disabled. Looks like the poor were privileged".

Let's say that this bar of justice you think that should be set is $100,000. Is $101,000 "privilege"? $102,000? At what exact threshold is rich "too rich"?

At marginal cases, ANY assessment of privilege and power break down. Your argument reduces to denying class, race, state and gender power. It's deeply illustrative how absurd the logic is, how special it is, how much you only deploy it for race and gender.

The reason why we use white privilege isn't because whites get searched less than blacks at airports. It's not because they make more, or are more likely to get into the first school of their choice, or get more access to executive positions, or get treated better by the media, or can rely on the police to protect their interests. It's because of ALL of those things. Just like class privilege forms not just because of having a little more money but having a LOT more money, so much more and with so many more means to use that wealth and the power that emerges from it that one can boss around entire nations, and particularly ownership of productive means, so too does white privilege not emerge because of one or two advantages but because of HUNDREDS of advantages. Whites are on the top of almost every social indicator that one looks at, no matter any indication of merit, and you still seem to think that this is some kind of arbitrary declaration.

The worst part? Peggy McIntosh, a feminist, in her "Unpacking the Knapsack", opens by noting that she as a woman wanted to deny white privilege but looked and realized that, even as a woman, being white gave her advantages. Similarly, Tim recognized in White Like Me that he was far from rich, but that he still had critical advantages that indeed made his entire career. Everyone else can recognize this, that being white is an advantage even with other disadvantages in their life.

"Considering that non-citizen Asians had the lowest rates, maybe they need to acknowledge their "non citizen Asian privilege" and talk about what they may need to do to make sure they get X-rayed alot more often!

That sure sounds like a productive use of time!"

Wow. You're not even trying.

The difference between not being scanned at airports and having the entire country's power structures be oriented towards your needs is so colossal that it is below me to reiterate it, and below you to make this argument.

Incidentally, Asians DO have enough advantages over blacks and Latina/os that they are routinely pointed to as the "model minority". So even when you try to make an argument YOU find as absurd, you make one that is commonly made in the real world. Further, it's not just conservatives that say it. Many Asian activists say that it is their obligation to use that privilege, as scant as it is, as a means to stand in solidarity with other minority groups and to deconstruct their whole group being used as a means to deprive others. So even a group that faces real racism (Asians with a college degree make as much on average as whites with a high school degree) can acknowledge their own responsibility to use what privileges they DO HAVE to their best.

But, of course, you don't think whites should. Because, in your worldview, it is obvious that whites can do no wrong, that poor whites have no obligations or responsibilities of their own.

What if poor men beat their wives? Is their poverty an excuse, Michael?

We all benefit from a racial opportunity structure that we didn't earn. We can either stay silent and thereby implicitly defend it or we can resist it. You are doing far worse than silence: You are actively apologizing for racial privilege.