Reply to Serious question: Why are people afraid to admit privilege?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm a first generation immigrant from a poor Eastern European country. [b]I'm also white and beautiful.[/b] I had minimal struggles despite being a poor immigrant only [b]because I'm white and beautiful.[/b] I'm saying minimal, not none, because the vast majority of my managers have been mediocre white men with low intellect, degrees from podunk universities, with no communication or writing skills. Forget about leadership skills. 
Georgetown came out with a great study showing that smarter kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are worse off than white kids with lower intellect. 
The trend continues, at least at my work, where I advocated for hiring some amazing candidates with proven leadership skills, MIT degrees (I'm in tech). So far, for the last 3 years, we've been hiring only mediocre white men as they show the greatest potential for teamwork. 
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I guarantee you that nobody but you thinks you are that beautiful, sweetie.[/quote]

I think she's just being honest; attractiveness confers enormous benefits, and it's silly to think that it doesn't. You're more likely to get hired, more likely to be paid a higher salary, etc. etc. It means privilege, and she's admitting that.[/quote]

I'm at the invisibility threshold now, but being blonde and pretty definitely had its advantages.  People were very willing to go out of their way to help for a smile and a thank you.  At the same time, it's also a hindrance sometimes in a mostly male technical field because everyone is constantly shocked that I have expertise. :roll:

I think privilege has a lot more nuance than typically gets talked about but there are some major things that have been proven over and over to confer benefit -- two parent household, growing up without direct exposure to violence, access to healthcare, having an adult in your life who cares about you personally, etc.  While SES certainly correlates to a lot of these, they can also exist independently of SES.  Meanwhile we know race has significant health and life outcome impacts separate from SES (i.e. black maternal mortality, black neonatal birth weights, redlining and intergenerational wealth, ..)

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