White Privilege Examples

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Sounds About White Privilege, as defined by Peggy McIntosh, an American feminist and anti-racism activist, exists when a group has something of value that is denied to others simple because of the groups they belong to, rather than because of anything they have done or failed to do. White privilege is an increasingly popular term in society. White people in America have never been oppressed as an ethnic group which results in several advantages over minorities with a history of oppression. Examples of this include assuming that most of the people a person will study in history class will be of the same race as them or assuming that their failures will not be attributed to their race. White privilege is alive in America today, as seen in the …show more content…
And while the war on drugs was completely ineffective at wavering the nation's addiction rate from one point three percent, it was successful in ruining millions of people’s lives, especially young black men. Strangely, white men are arrested about ten times less frequently than black men, despite them committing this non-violent crime at a higher rate. People who argue this point often claim that police officers are not arresting people due to their race, but they are arresting people who are guilty of using drugs. This refutation isn’t completely wrong, police officers do mainly arrest people who are guilty of possessing or abusing drugs, but they do so at a higher rate among one group of people then another. Statistics show that African Americans are being sent to prison for drug offenses at ten times the rate of white, even though whites use drugs five times as much as African Americans. This is just the start for the wide racial divide in the criminal justice system. A perfect example is the contrasting sentences between Brock Turner and Brian Banks. The infamous Brock Turner is a white former Stanford swimmer who, after sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, was sentenced six months in the county jail. Brian Banks, a black high school football player, was accused of rape. The sixteen year old was tried as an adult, received more than five years in prison and five years on parole. His accuser later dropped the charges upon admitting fabrication. Here we see a black man receive a harsher sentence for a lesser crime. Sadly, this is the norm in many cases. Statistically, white offenders typically receive sentences that are about ten times shorter than black offenders for the same crime. “Minimizing the importance of
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