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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3420 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Explaining white privilege to a broke white person

But that's just the point - if the whole argument is that individuals can't see their privilege, and they answer with a personal anecdote, you're not going to advance the argument by taking the individual experiences of the person entirely off the table. The appropriate tactic is to relate the individual experience to the demographic, not dismiss it.

Data, as you're using it, is ample and abundant. It's pretty much impossible to dismiss and the people who are arguing the data are not going to be swayed by an argument of privilege; they tend to be the ones arguing that black men go to prison more often because blacks are inherently more violent and that discussion requires an entirely different strategy. The whole problem with "white privilege" discussions is that they are wielded by people who want to say "the plural of anecdote is not data" rather than "I hear what you're saying, but here are the problems you didn't face growing up regardless of how shitty your life was."