“White Privilege” Term Definition

Subject: Sociology
Pages: 2
Words: 350
Reading time:
2 min

The term “white privilege” is a result of racism that comes as doctrine related to three key components. The first component is the fact racism is aimed to determine racial differences in such fields as beliefs, features of character, and intelligence level. The second component represents racism as the assertion of one race’s superiority over another. Last but not the least, maintenance of the abovementioned domination using complex social, education and language systems. Those systems were created to make children feel as if they were equal to the rest of the white students, but “special education identification practices became the way to ensure that they were not in the same classrooms”.

Racism can be individual as well as institutional. However, both forms are mainly based on the idea that white people are smarter than people who have different colors of skin. This issue can be used as the main background for such terms as “white privilege”. Of course, it does not mean that all white people tend to express their domination over others. However, white privilege has already turned into an inevitable and sometimes unconscious element that has been saturating the U.S. society for several decades. The idea of such racial domination traditionally serves several functions.

On the one hand, it delivers additional benefits to white people. On the other hand, it shapes the society in which people live and interact with each other. The key factor is the problem of awareness. When white people are asked if racial discrimination is spoiling modern society and shaping the world in a wrong way, only “six percent, 6 out of 100, said yes, that it was a significant national problem”. In other words, some of the recent surveys show that people’s awareness of the problem is not at a necessary level. However, the situation is improving. There appear special preschool and college programs that provide different experiences and teach to “respect black authority figures”. Such programs will bring up a new societal generation that may eliminate the problem of white privilege.