White Privilege is an idea concocted by Leftist and radical-Leftist academics starting about the mid 70's and gaining steam in academic circles since. It's tied closely to
Critical Race Theory which in turn is an offshoot of
Critical Pedagogy. For those unfamiliar with Critical Pedagogy, it is a teaching methodology and theory of the radical-Left in which all education becomes a tool of indoctrination and propaganda that seeks to radicalize students into like-thinking with the academics and teachers using it.
If you read the books and articles that the academics have published on it, you find it's pretty much an idea made up out of thin air and supported by the sort of "academic" fraud that should get those purveying it fired.
For example, take this widely cited work on the subject:
Picca and Feagin are professors of Sociology. Their book is based on an "experiment" they ran in their classes. Each student (626) was given a notebook and instructed to write down each time they encountered racism over the semester.
The results the professors give you argue that racism is endemic and widespread. They claim over 9,000 racial events were recorded by their students. Of these over 7,500 were "blatant."
The problems with their study, such as it is, starts with the students themselves. There was no control or repeated observations made by them. That is, the students could individually at any time write in an observation which would have no substantiation other than the student's word it happened. Students could, and probably did make up incidents since to have an empty notebook, or one with few entries, would likely be feared to get them a poor grade in the class.
Next, there was little or no objective measurement of the incidents. Instead they were subjectively determined serious or not.
But, the worst flaw was how the professors used the data. They kept it aggregate. When you divide out the incidents over the semester (roughly 100 days or 14 weeks but the professors didn't state the exact length) this comes out to about 14 to 15 incidents per student with 12 being "blatant." This then divides out to less than 1 per week per student.
Their study is crap. Their results are meaningless. But, this book is widely cited as proof on the radical-Left as showing how endemic White Privilege is. The concept is nonsense made up by quack academics and purveyed by the radical-Left to a public that rarely, if ever, deeply questions it.
