I suppose there is always an inherent benefit to being within the majority. Even something as small as the psychological benefit of feeling "more at home" in your community is technically a privilege. In that sense there is no way white privileges does not exist in the US. The real question is whether it prevails to the point that it is worth addressing over the multitude of variables that are more controllable. Racial distribution can not be controlled as easily as the choice to wait until 21 to have children, or actually sticking around once they are born.
That is something I feel that critical race theorists neglect to consider... whether that inherent benefit of whiteness overrides other privilege of circumstance, or whether additional factors such as the choices of individuals can override racial privilege when it comes to predicting success. If that were the case a debate about how to solve white privilege would be moot and a net harm (think of all the racial tensions cultivated by critical race theory so far in the US). Even in the rare scenario we managed to quell white privilege in some fashion, if other factors outweighed it anyway, then we would have just been pissing in the wind. A better debate to have then would be "well, which controllable variables predict the most success and how do we encourage everyone to positively correlate with as many of those variables as possible?"
The evidence is in on that front... controllable factors easily matter more and we have specifically identified many of the important ones.
"Let politicians, schoolteachers and administrators, community leaders, ministers and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class.Consider an example. Today, more than 40 percent of American children, including more than 70 percent of black children and 50 percent of Hispanic children, are born outside marriage. This unprecedented rate of nonmarital births, combined with the nation’s high divorce rate, means that around half of children will spend part of their childhood—and for a considerable number of these all of their childhood — in a single-parent family. As hard as single parents try to give their children a healthy home environment, children in female-headed families are four or more times as likely as children from married-couple families to live in poverty. In turn, poverty is associated with a wide range of negative outcomes in children, including school dropout and out-of-wedlock births."
So, then, maybe we should reallocate our focus.
But that doesn't make for good politics, does it? Now you must take some form of responsibility for where you are in life, and you can not simply label "group X" as the reason for all your problems. I suppose, though, that this phenomena is to be expected. The tribal mentality of humanity is not so easily overridden after a few million years of development.
