Can't say I think much of the documentary.
I do think he's holding whites to a double standard compared to the non-whites featured - the non-whites weren't really picked up as much for their usage of stereotypes and outright racial slurs (I'm thinking of the bit in the Lakota school in particular). While Wounded Knee was horrific, I also wonder whether the history of the Lakota and other first nations are whiter than white (phrasing).
The bit with the girl who felt she'd been discriminated against on scholarships was downright aggravating. Even if the stats show whites are nationally at an overall advantage, that says nothing about the situation in her state, county, college. It was not shown that she was not discriminated against. And I found it interesting that she said it was her experience that she felt that way. If you're not white, and you feel oppressed, then in the realm of discussing racial equality today, that "lived experience" is sacrosanct. The treatment that white girl received was the complete opposite treatment many non-whites seem to expect in this arena - their claims of oppression are taken at face value. Any other mitigating or confounding factors are generally ignored. They feel oppressed, and how dare you whitesplain otherwise! Check your privilege!
I find it very telling that the one time a participant in that documentary was personally confronted with an actual statistic, it was towards a white person. Their claims of discrimination got scrutinised further.
This experiential focus muddies the waters - one of the "privileges" in the white privilege workshop that one of the participants read out was "not having to think twice about anything". Are they actually serious? The privileges he had posted were vague and wishy-washy, and couched in experiential language rather than facts. Plenty of those things apply to plenty of white people, but because the majority of cases may not happen to white people, their downside is ignored and it's spun as "privilege" instead.
I think the man running that course wasn't respectful of what his father experienced online - the simple fact is, concepts like privilege are very often wielded as weapons. They are wielded with the intent of making people feel ashamed and uncomfortable. As with the girl who felt discriminated against over her scholarship, they were simply told that it wasn't sensible for them to feel this way. No non-whites in the documentary were treated this way. For a guy they had pigeonholed as old, white, male (gasp!), conservative and a FOX news and Bill O'Reilly viewer (double gasp!) I thought it was quite interesting that he did try and research white privilege on his own initiative, and that he went along to the privilege workshop.
The lead-in to the segment on colour blindness was quite disingenuous IMO - Vargas asked his white audience do they notice the race of someone they're talking to. Most said no. This was used as a lead-in to stats about how white people think we should be colour-blind. The question he asked in the Q&A was provided without context. Did he mean how white people behave during an intellectual discussion amongst a group of old friends, or how they behave to someone they meet for the first time?
There were a few interesting points - I think it'd be great to have history classes from both the white and Lakota perspectives, and it's rather surprising that there weren't any Lakota teachers in that school. The Italian Brooklynite could very easily have taken a Chinese friend along with him to sort out the block party, I'm not entirely sure why he didn't, although maybe that in itself says something about the state of affairs in that neighbourhood.
But overall, I think while Vargas might want to get away from a dialogue on race he sees as simplistic, he's guilty of perpetuating the very thing he criticises. The fact is, these concepts like privilege massively oversimply things. I'm part Irish - as the typical stories go, the Irish claim to have been oppressed by the British for over eight centuries, they were nearly wiped out in the 19th century by circumstances imposed on them by the British, they also suffered slavery, relocation, dispossessed of property, etc.
Oh but hang on, both the English and Irish were white. So they both have white privilege. And that's the problem here.
Not that Ireland was systematically oppressed by Britain. Being white was no advantage for the Irish. They were still thought of as subhuman, less evolved, an inferior race. But reducing racism to interactions based on skin colour is a huge oversimplification, and it erases history like that between Britain and Ireland.
I think this is maybe a particularly American thing - not least in the specific racial dynamics involved. But equally, I feel like with race and gender, Britain is exporting a lot of biased, baseless and unnecessary neurosis from the US when it comes to race - hence my pushback against it.
(As an example, to answer the first Q&A questionI don't think of myself primarily as white. If you pushed me "Anglo-Irish" would probably cover it.)
