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White privilege in Japan?

I especially don't see any legitimate reason why Jim Crow and now police abuse have been brought up at all. They don't have even the slightest to do with not being handed out flyers or being complimented on your chopstick use because you're non-Japanese. They are very complicated topics with a whole lot of variables, and they are very specifically American.
 
To be honest with you I thought the thread started with the survey that Mike posted about white privilege in America (but he chose to treat it like it pertained to Japan). I didn't realize he was necroposting.
 
To be honest with you I thought the thread started with the survey that Mike posted about white privilege in America (but he chose to treat it like it pertained to Japan). I didn't realize he was necroposting.

I wasn't aware that I had pretended any such thing.
 
I also took Mike's checklist, written by a professor at a US college, as being pertinent to white privilege in America; and I thought the scope of the original thread had expanded.

I had to check a lot of the spaces on the checklist. I'm white, and I'm privileged, and I like it that way.

I don't mean that I want special treatment because of my race. I just want to be treated fairly and honestly, the way I treat others. But I guess an assumption of fair treatment is privilege itself. Not having to wonder whether someone is treating you unfairly because of your race must be an advantage or privilege. This makes me feel bad for people of other races who do have to think about their race.

But when it comes down to it, I don't want to give up the luxury, the privilege, of not having to think about my own race.

I like it that cops are polite and respectful when they have contact with me. Of course, that may have more to do with the fact that I was polite and respectful to them in return, because my parents, as part of their white European-Christian heritage, had raised me to respect law and order and the police who represented law and order.

I like it that I can walk into a Porsche dealer, wearing jeans, suspenders, a tee-shirt, and several days past needing a shave, and be offered a test drive. Of course, the offer may have come because of my age and the fact I looked them in the eye, but I bet being white and male didn't hurt. I honestly have to say that I doubt a black or Native man would have been offered a test drive of a $120,000 sports car.

I found being white a mixed privilege in Japan. On the one hand, landlords wouldn't rent to me because I was white. On the other hand, most Japanese I encountered were very gracious and solicitous without regard to my race. I think they would have treated me the same whether I was white, black, red, or yellow.
 
I also took Mike's checklist, written by a professor at a US college, as being pertinent to white privilege in America; and I thought the scope of the original thread had expanded.

That wasn't the intent.

I spend the vast, vast, bulk of my time as a "racial minority of one" no matter where I go, what I do, or who I interact with. If one substitutes "majority privilege" for "white privilege" in regard to the survey, making it no longer U.S.-specific, and gets an extremely low score...such as my "3"... then what becomes abundantly clear is that it is based on an automatic presumption of rampant racism and discrimination on the part of the majority. I have always found presumptions of racism based on race morally and intellectually indistinguishable from and equally repugnant as the racism it presumes. The author is unwittingly that which she decries.
 
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