Does White Privilege Exist in the US

Before starting I would like to first thank my opponent for being willing to debate me. To start, I will mention that I did provide my definition for White Privilege in the description (I will also put it here so that other individuals notice it as well), which is defined a “White privilege refers to the unearned advantages afforded to people who are assumed, based largely on complexion and related physical features, to be of European ancestry.” (Rider). In addition to this, I will also definite racism as “the incitation of discrimination, hatred or violence towards a person or a group of persons because of their origin or their belonging, or not belonging, to a specific ethnic group or race” (Cornell), and individuals racism as “support or perpetuate racism in conscious and unconscious ways” (Cornell). In addition to this I will also define institutional racism as the process by which racial oppression is imposed on subordinate racial groups by dominant racial groups through institutional channels” (California State University Northridge). The importance of defining these terms are important, because having White privilege doesn’t make someone racist, but racism is called to be the item that pollutes the atmosphere for white privilege to happen. (Salsbury.edu). To make my case I will provide a methodology to determine truth and several sub categories to make my point. Occasionally I will cite history, because my opponent and I will probably differ on how much racism impacts society.

To start, I will say that I am not claiming that there aren’t white individuals who work hard to obtain success. I start with this, because I know individuals who feel white privilege is an attack on how hard they work (I am a PhD student at the University of Southern Mississippi. That took hard work and I am still broke lol!) (Salsbury.edu). This debate is also not to say that minorities can not achieve success. We have seen minorities reach great levels of success in the U.S., but we even noticed this back during the time racism was more apparent (Givens, 2023). I mention this, because White Privilege does not mean this, but more so shows that there are advantages that white individuals have based on the color of their skin (Salsbury.edu). This of course is shown on multiple metrics.

To start, my method will focus on reliability as stated by Andy Field, which states “ which is whether an instrument can be interpreted consistently across different situations” (Field, 2018). In addition to this I will use a variety of different studies with different methodologies that are meant to get to causation (Myers et al., 2017). These methods reduce bias, because they are used in a variety of different fields such as biology, education, behavioral science, and medicine (Field, 2018; Myers et al., 2017) (I say this, because with this being a political topic, individuals do like to claim items through media outlets alone. I’m not claiming my opponent will lol!).

To start, most minorities are shown to be discriminated in the hiring process. This can be shown with multiple studies through different time periods. To start, from multiple studies dating back from 2003 and heading to our modern era, we see that minorities are 50% less likely to obtain a call back from jobs (Chicago booth; Quillan & Le, 2023). In addition to this we see that the wage gap between minorities and white people is giant, and is shown to be like this when factoring equal credentials (Berkeley).  Along with that the pay gap between minorities can be shown to possibly be discriminatory, because when we look closer into the data, we see that this difference is also shown when comparing highly educated individuals of both races, and individuals without degrees when comparing minorities with white people. To further the claim of racial discrimination between hiring practices, a meta analysis of 90 studies from 1985-2019 show hiring practices towards callbacks for jobs have remained the same, with most minority groups inside 6 different countries including the U.S. (Quillan & Le, 2023). With the scope of this study focusing on the U.S., I will focus primarily on the United States as much as possible. When reading this study viewing the U.S. only, it showed hiring practices with callbacks remained the same with white individuals receiving far more call backs than minorities, with the exception of this studies inability to predict hiring practices towards Asians, and Latin Americans (Quillan & Le, 2023). In addition to this, there was a major spike towards hiring practices with Muslims (Quillan & Le, 2023).

As shown by Berliner & Hermans, economic distribution can be cited as white privilege due to individuals in white family's being able to have better opportunities on average (Berliner & Hermans, 2022). This is typically shown in a significant way when we view data on how unevenly income distribution is shown (Pew research). One could obviously try and say that there are poor white people as well, but the system itself has been set up to disadvantage minorities since it was created. This can be shown with how slavery affected outcomes in the U.S., due to white people having access to more opportunities, which affects minorities due to white people being able to place money back for more generations compared to other minorities (Givens, 2023; Berliner & Hermans 2022).  This also matches with discriminatory hiring practices as well, that also affects this due to minorities being given less opportunities, even in our modern era. 

DEI, is something one may argue doesn’t affect white privilege, but I would argue that it does. Simply put, a study was conducted to show how minorities were affected within a workplace program due to hiring managers viewpoints towards certain political parties, especially involving Donald Trump (Rice et al., 2024). Minorities who worked under bosses that claimed to heavily support Trump (These individuals are ones who are very open about it), claimed to have experienced worse treatment when compared to when they were hired by more left leaning, or not as vocal hiring managers (Rice et al., 2024). I could argue how Trump is racist, with policy decisions and actions with how he did not reject the support of former KKK members and his call to remove DEI from various institutions and work places (Rice et al., 2024; Osterage, 2025). 

Most individuals would admit that slavery was a harmful practice, which hurt obtainment for success of minorities in the future. One can see my citations in relation to discriminatory hiring practices, but individuals such as African American Scholar Cater G. Woodson (The second African American to hold a PhD), mentioned that after slavery, minorities did not have skills to help them achieve success right after slavery (Woodson, 2018). With White individuals not going through this harsh practice in a wide spread manner, allowed more resources to be saved over a longer period of time. In history, we can see that opportunities have been taken from minorities throughout history from unfair racial practices, which lasted all the way through the 60s (Givens, 2023). An example of this would be unfair distribution of resources, through Plessy vs. Ferguson and has even been fought against after Brown vs. Board of education happened (Givens, 2023). Even after the fight to desegregate school happened, it was never successful which still impacts funding in the school systems (I will go more in detail later). From this, we see the same issues with underfunding, which came all the way back from separate but equal due to the way funds for schools are obtained. Schools obtain funds through local property tax, which means that minority schools have remained underfunded over time (Berliner & Hermans, 2022).

In the previous section I mentioned that minorities schools have remained underfunded, which is typically labeled as white individuals having a form of white privilege, due to this unfair issue dating back to the time severe racism was more prevalent (I would argue we are going backwards, which I will in later) (Berliner & Hermans, 2022). These unfair opportunities will continue to arise due to the school choice movement taking away funds from poor public schools, which will affect minorities the most (Berliner & Hermans, 2022). This can be proven, because our schools are becoming more segregated as a result of this movement, where schools that have primarily white students are funded more than schools with black students, which result in worse outcome for minorities (Berliner & Hermans, 2022; Frankenburg et al., 2011). Worse outcomes for education for minorities would impact their ability to improve upon opportunities in the future (Frankeburg et al., 2011).  

Individuals who are minority often have their history covered up to a form of white washed history (Givens, 2023). This is so demonstrably true because we can see how minorities during slavery were forced to wear clothing that felt like pins sticking into someone’s skin, Jefferson saying that the first book a poem written by Phillis Wheatley did not happen through this author because she was black and not smart enough due to her skin color, and mistreatment of minorities trying to learn behind the slave masters back (Givens, 2023). Many didn’t know how cruel white individuals were during slavery and throughout history. Most people don’t know minorities were essential to the creation of public schools and how white people continued to run them out (Givens, 2023). This has implications today, because we still see white washed history and many individuals who are more extremist republicans try to make this white washing even worse. Examples of this is how Trump in his first term tried to create patriot education to further create racist ideals. To start Trump tried to take away the word slavery, and replace it with workers in this curriculum (Pene, 2020). One could see how examples of how this minimizes how horrid this practice was in the previous section based on Jarvis Givens book (Givens, 2023). The sad thing about this, is that this action resembles how the old school confederates, changed history books to make the civil war mainly about state rights, while slavery was downplayed (Pene, 2020). These textbooks in the south continued until 2018 (Pene, 2020). We can see how this has emboldened the movement of these more strongly conservative individuals, based on my previous sections and from the words of this author (Pene, 2020). We will also see this in my next section with the increase in hate crimes.

A statistical website shows that there has been a steady increase in hate crimes over the past decade. In 2023 there was a total of 11,800 hate crimes. There was a noticeable increase in violent crime towards Asian Americans between 2018-2020 with a “73 percent increase, from 161 reported cases in 2019 to 279 cases in 2020” (statista.com). This still pales in comparison to hate crimes on black individuals which resulted in “2,871 incidents in 2020, a 49 percent increase from 2019” during the same time period (statista.com). We can see that white privilege extends to this as well, because this is significantly different when compared to white individuals based on models presented bus statisticians such as Andy Field (Field, 2018). 

Now I am not going to make an argument from white privilege due to prison rates. I can prove racism does exist within the prison system, which will require me to share the statistics to set my argument up to show how racism exists. Remember based on one of my citations, racism is a precursor for white privilege so statistics should be shared more so for academic completion (Salabury.edu). My main argument will be based on qualitative data, that minorities are typically treated worse in the prison system, which would be issues that white individuals are less likely to experience (Anamma, 2018). Adding the quantitative data in as well will improve my reliability (John Hopkins). The prison rates for most minorities are disproportionate especially for black people. Other ethnic groups that are incarcerated at a higher rate than white people are Lantinix individuals, biracial individuals, and Native Americans (Libguides). The table on this page's site shows the top ten states with the highest incarnation rates, and if you view the table which is labeled as table 3, you can see that minorities make up triple the prison rates as white individuals. When viewing this nationwide, minorities are locked up 5 times more than individuals who are white (Libguides). To make my point with treatment in the system, the school to prison pipeline research shows that minorities who are locked up early on are likely to continue repeating this cycle (Anamma, 2018). In addition, this has kept being cycled through for generations which hurts opportunities for minorities. Along with this, we see that many of the issues that got these children locked up in the first case, were simple items that would not have gotten white children locked up for committing the same crime (Anamma, 2018). Additional issues with many of these punishments are that many  individuals of power ignore the situation these students are in (Annamma 2018). Examples of this in the literature are fleeing from abusive parents, joining gangs to be safe in rough neighborhood due to poverty, hitting their own siblings in foster care, or having to take care of younger siblings which causes missed school days/instances of worse things from schools (Annamma 2018). We see from this that many of these individuals become more likely to be criminals after having to go centers such as the ones cited in this book (Anamma, 2018). 

In this debate, so far I have used several different methods to reach causation that my opponent would have to argue against to claim white privilege doesn’t exist. First I cited studies using different research methodologies, which is important in research (Salisbury.edu). In addition to this I used different statistical methods to improve reliability “which is whether an instrument can be interpreted consistently across different situations.”, which even included multivariate testing (This is important, because multiple variables predict different things) (Field, 2018). Finally I mixed qualitative data with quantitative data, which gets to causation through helping interpret quantitative data through interviews and observations (John Hopkins; Campbell & Stanley 1959). Even though this is the end of my methodology section, I have also used multiple historical sources, which is acceptable to use in different research methodologies as well, even though it is not as strong of a predictor at times (Onzbugy & Frels, 2016). Along with using a robust methodology, I have cited a wealth of data, in which most will have to be countered to show white privilege doesn’t exist (Due to this focusing on reliability across multiple areas that link together). In conclusion I continue to thank my opponent, as I wait for his response.

Refrences 

Woodson, C. G. (2018). The Mis-education of the negro. Youcanprint.