Other factors offer far more privileges

The argument

Proponents of this position do not deny that some people enjoy advantages others lack. Their claim is that race is the wrong variable to attach those advantages to, and that once the data is examined the real predictors turn out to lie elsewhere. The advantage they identify as decisive is growing up with two parents, which they argue does far more to determine a person's prospects than the colour of their skin. The comparison offered is meant to isolate the two factors from each other. Two-parent Black families have a poverty rate of just 7%, while single-parent white families have a poverty rate of 22%. If being white conferred a general advantage, proponents argue, these figures should not fall this way round, since here the Black households are the better off by a wide margin. What separates the two groups is not race, which runs against the outcome, but household structure, which runs with it. On that reading the real privilege is not being born white but being born into a two-parent household. The second line of evidence concerns which group does best overall. If privilege did track race, proponents argue, the advantaged group should be identifiable from outcomes — and the group that emerges is not white Americans. Asian-Americans perform far better than white people across several measures at once: they have lower suicide rates, they tend to outperform whites in school, they have better credit, and they are on course to surpass whites as the wealthiest racial group in the United States. A theory of racial privilege that places whites at the top, proponents conclude, does not fit a country in which another group is ahead of them on these measures. Because other factors offer far more privileges than race does, they argue, white privilege does not exist.

Context

There are other privileges that dwarf white privilege. We do not identify these as drivers of inequality or seek to address them in the way we do white privilege. Therefore, white privilege, as a major contributor to racial inequality, is a myth.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue the comparison confounds the very variable it claims to isolate. Setting a two-parent household of one race against a single-parent household of another mixes family structure with race, so it cannot show that race carries no advantage; the like-for-like comparison — two-parent with two-parent, single-parent with single-parent — is what the claim of white privilege actually concerns. Showing that family structure matters does not show that race does not. They add that white privilege, as usually defined, is not the claim that white people are the most advantaged group on every measure or face no hardships. It is the narrower claim that race is not among a white person's disadvantages. Pointing to other privileges — class, family structure, or the outcomes of another minority group whose 'model minority' framing is itself contested — is compatible with racial advantage existing, since privileges intersect rather than cancel out. On this view the argument refutes a caricature, not the position it targets.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics note the statistic compares two-parent families of one race with single-parent families of another, confounding household structure with race; a like-for-like comparison is needed to show race confers no advantage. [Rejecting P2] That some Asian-Americans outperform white Americans on certain metrics is compatible with white privilege existing, since the claim is that race is not among a white person's disadvantages, not that whites lead every group on every measure. [Rejecting C] Privileges of class, family and race intersect rather than cancel; showing other factors matter does not establish that racial advantage does not exist.