White privilege
1.
White privilege refers to the structural advantages and opportunities that white people have just for being white. By structural advantages, we mean the way that society is geared towards them (think lower incarceration rates for white people, higher likelihood of attending university, lower likelihood of living in poverty, etc). It relates to the fact that white people have the privilege of not worrying about being discriminated or oppressed because of their race. It doesn’t mean that white people don’t have disadvantages or hardship, it just means that hardships have not come because of their race.
Defined by Ana-Sofia
2.
White privilege is a concept used to identify the social privileges of white people owing to their race. It is a social privilege that white people do not identify easily because they have often been conditioned to understand whiteness as the norm, and their experiences as universal. This means that those with white privilege often do not consider the experiences of non-white people. This is why recognising white privilege is so important: it helps us to identify how a racialised society (so a society in which race has a big impact on people’s lives) affects people.
Defined by Denisse Calderón
About our contributors
Denisse Calderón
Denisse is a feminist psychologist who has worked in different organizations to stop violence against women in Chile.
Ana-Sofia
Ana-Sofia is a feminist psychologist and the co-founder of an NGO called De-Mentes, that fights against stigma around mental health in Peru. She is currently studying an MA in Gender Studies at the University of Sussex.
