[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on White Privilege in American Society
The debate concerning white privilege in American society is not that new but a number of factors have made this debatable issue really a hard nut to crack. Talking about conceptual definitions of white privilege, there are scads of definition scholar have devised but as per its most common and widely used definition, the phenomenon of white privilege is a testament to the ingenuity of white male politicians, using the race card, that they can exploit the historically ingrained prejudice against black Americans in the direction of the small black middle-class. For the last twenty-five years, the use of racial code issues, such as law and order, revising the welfare system and the tax revolt has served to transform the southern states from a Democratic stronghold to a Republican majority among its white population.
As per the manifestation of white privilege, the current furor over white privilege has many of us perplexed. Somehow, black Americans have shifted, in image, from being violent criminals, drug dealers, wife beaters, sexual harassers, welfare cheaters and underclass members to privileged members of the middle-class, who acquired their jobs through some racial quota system at the expense of white males who had superior qualifications for those same jobs. (Alberti, John 2001) However, Republicans are increasingly becoming victims of their own success.
White Democratic candidates have become as vigilantly anti-crime and welfare as their Republican opponents. In the Louisiana gubernatorial race of 2001, even the black candidates reached out to those whites seeking harsher sentences for criminals, the overwhelming majority of offenders being black in that particular state. While this situation illustrates that there is no honor among thieves, i.e. politicians, it also demonstrates that the diminishing returns of the racial code issues have created a dilemma among the Republican right. (Talbot, Margaret 2002) Into this void steps the issue of affirmative action, an innocuous program devised......
