Belief in “white male privilege” is belief in white male superiority

The unorientable Möbius strip is reminiscent of asymmetries in certain ideological concepts

I’m a black, foreign-born British man and I keep hearing that I should be critical of white people—especially men—because of their privilege. Apparently, their privilege lifts them up and keeps me down. I know the definition of white privilege—“the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements, benefits, and choices bestowed upon people solely because they are white”—but I’m not sure of its truthfulness. While this concept initially drew me in—to my younger self, it carried a facade of fairness—I’m increasingly frustrated by the low-resolution thinking of those who tell me I’m at its mercy. There’s such an unrelenting unwillingness to look at the details of this phenomenon (which, apparently, carries catastrophic consequences), that attempts to do so are considered by many to be necessarily racist.

Since there are few things I hate more than the idea of the “phenotypic monolith”—the suggestion that people who share superficial phenotypic traits (e.g. race and gender) can be grouped and understood as one—I decided to use my race card for good. I decided to unpack the idea of “white privilege” knowing that I am immune from accusations of white supremacy (or, at least, I should be).

Here’s a summary of the propositions underlying my analyses in this article:

1. No human group (defined based on any phenotypical trait) began life with systemic advantages over others , because no (modern, man-made) systems existed at the advent of our species.
2. Different environmental (selective) pressures were applied to all human groups without premeditation or a discernible pattern.
3. Different human groups created different systems, across different dimensions of life (e.g. morality and economics), to cope with the often fatal consequences of the environmental pressures placed on them.
4. As the population size of humans increased, occurrences of inter and intra-group competition for the same resources increased. This meant (on average) more effective systems wielded by more capable humans, won against less effective systems wielded by less capable humans.
5. Today’s accepted standards of legality and morality, designed to moderate self-destructive behaviours that exist at the extremes of the human drive to dominate, should not be used to judge the decisions of actors who lived in a world where these artificial (but helpful) standards did not exist. This is because it is impossible to break a law that does not exist.
6. Therefore, if a group has acquired such an overwhelming advantage over all other groups, that these outside groups can now only achieve parity if this dominant group chooses to surrender most of its power, then that powerful group could only have attained its power by being vastly competitively superior to all other groups.
7. The superiority of this powerful group cannot be claimed to be unfair, because it began competing with all other groups under equally oppressive (environmental) circumstances, which came with no legislation on fairness or unfairness about how one might escape them.

Therefore, if we claim that white men are unfair beneficiaries of exclusive privileges, then we must be able to answer:

• Has being white always (since the advent of homo sapiens) been a privilege?
• If being white has not always been a privilege, then when did it become a privilege?
• If it is indeed proven to be a privilege, when did the conferment of that privilege become an act of unfairness — and why is it unfair?

These are difficult considerations because inherent in the idea of “privilege” belonging to one group is the idea that other groups must be afflicted with “inferiority”—else, one group would not be able to so roundly and decisively dominate all others.

In short, with every accusation of “privilege” levelled against a group, can we also answer:

At which point did fair competition under universally oppressive circumstances turn into unfair oppression of selected competitors?

Now, for the deep dive…

Let’s start with a mental model that I love, called Hanlon’s razor. It goes something like:

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect.”

On one level, it’s simply good for helping you avoid entirely unnecessary battles (and battle scars). Is there a panel of male of speakers? Don’t jump (in outrage) to the conclusion that they hate women and have chosen to systematically exclude them. Maybe they didn’t have enough time or money to pay extra attention to the gender split of speakers. Or, maybe they just didn’t think about the gender split of their speakers at all. That is not the same as being sexist or even anti-diversity (although diversity should not be invoked as some kind of inherently moral state of affairs). Was that white lady at the coffee shop rude to you? Don’t assume she did it because you’re black. Maybe it’s been a long day. Maybe she just got a terrible medical diagnosis. Or maybe she’s just a bitch to everyone (regardless of gender or race).

Hanlon’s razor also prevents you from becoming your worst interpretation of the people around you. If you assume, based on contrived and unsubstantiated leaps of (il)logic, that women around you are angry “feminazis”—when the truth is you’re an unpleasant man—then you adopt a combative stance. Because you believe the potential for harm is ubiquitous, you behave as one would in an arena of battle—even though no battle is imminent.

People aren’t conspiring to be mean to you (or your kind)—your threshold for suspecting malice is just so low that perfectly innocuous phenomena begin to trigger ominous associations.

But, perhaps, the best thing about Hanlon’s razor is that it stops you from giving undue credit for superhuman feats, to those who could never earn it. It encourages you to think things through—to consider possibilities that are plausible, even if you really (really) hope they are invalid.

Let us take the (inexplicably) popular narrative of “the patriarchy” as an example. I hate straw men, so I’m not going to use the least thought-out, most inflammatory definition of patriarchy that I can find. Instead, I will use the least inflammatory, most thoughtful definition of patriarchy that I can find:

“The underlying principle of patriarchy, as I understand it, is separation and control. The separation is from self, other, life, and nature. The fundamental structures we have created over these millennia are based on dominance and submission, and the worldview we have inherited justifies them as necessary to overcome both our basic nature and “Nature”, seen as separate from us. We pride self-control and frown on “emotionality”; we operate, organizationally, in command and control forms; we have been treating nature as a thing to exploit, use, subdue, and, most recently, convert to commodities for sale.”

Miki Khastan still makes several unsubstantiated claims in her article—such as the very specific, yet evidence-free claim that paternity was not central in human cultures for 97% of our history. I don’t know which metrics she’s used to measure the periods of matriarchal and patriarchal centrality, let alone how she defines all of those terms.

But, suffice it to say, if you believe that certain negative behaviours have overwhelmingly shaped human interactions with each other AND that those traits are possessed predominantly by men, then you believe in the patriarchy. According to Miki’s definition anyway. Some adherents of the “patriarchy worldview” take things a step further by believing in the concept of “white male privilege”—the position that white men, in particular, are beneficiaries of unearned privilege, bestowed by the unlawful activities of their ancestors— and that they use this privilege (consciously or unconsciously) to oppress others.

In this article, I will focus on one logical contradiction, which I believe is enough to decisively undermine the whole idea of patriarchy. This logical contradiction emerges concurrently from the positions that male ideas *unfairly* dominate the world and that whiteness bestows *unfair*, intergenerational benefits on people who bear it.

We must remember that today’s societies are the net effect of 200,000 years of building and development. We didn’t land on Earth with careers, currency, governments, police forces and all other foundations of modern society in place. We built them from nothing. Our species started its evolutionary journey, literally and figuratively, naked. Men were not bestowed a head start by the gods, just as women were not. Neither were white people. Or black people. Or Chicano people. Or Polynesian people. We started off in a world where if I could kill you and take your stuff, then I won. No courts. No fundamental human rights. No police. Nothing. Let that sink in.

So, all humans started off playing a game of survival—and, for the longest time, it was a game where anything went. Let’s take slavery as an example. The most recent, large-scale operation that people care about was transatlantic slavery… so, that tends to dominate our attitudes towards the issue. But, for much of our history, slavery was a fully accepted consequence of losing a dominance, inter-tribal battle. Slavery wasn’t good or bad—it was just our imperfect response to environmental pressures. This is a very difficult fact to accept, but it’s also an impossible one to argue against. One race didn’t teach all the others how to enslave—they all discovered it separately, as an effective tool (at the time) for managing the bloody consequences of having to kill people to survive. If you did not enslave people whose resources you’d taken, and whose friends and families you’d killed, then those people would almost certainly kill you.

But, over time, this paradigm became unnecessary due to advancements in technology, society and agriculture. It became possible to acquire resources without fighting, killing and enslaving those outside one’s community. The vulgarity of the costs of slavery did not seem worth it anymore—we could survive, even thrive, without them. We decided (with good reason) that slavery wasn’t such a good thing and we outlawed it. This is a good thing and one might expect humanity to look forward to a brighter future. Not if you believe in the concept of privilege—for you, someone must pay for the slavery that happened before we agreed that slavery is a bad thing. And even then, it’s not all slavery that captures our imagination—just the most politically exploitable instances, like transatlantic slavery. But what makes transatlantic slavery so much worse than other instances of slavery, before the practice was outlawed? I can think of nothing except that transatlantic slavery is more recent than other instances of slavery. So, time is the key concept here, in more ways than the one I just highlighted.

If you believe in white privilege, that means you believe that from humanity’s initial beginnings—free from privilege and structure (our “ blank slate”)—white people have been able to:

1. Surpass all other “competing” races in the accrual of resources
2. Accrue such an excess of resources that these were used to acquire power
3. Maintain this advantage of resources and power across generations, such that cultural paradigms of white men’s creation could consistently dominate all others

You must also believe that other cultures are inherently incapable of repeating the feat achieved by white people—dominance in competition against all other cultures, under the most unfavourable and least contrived circumstances possible. You must believe that the only way for other cultures to “catch up” is for the competition to be removed (e.g. affirmative action), and for “white cultures” to charitably share the advantages and resources which they’ve accrued over time—and which they accrued fairly based on the rules of the ages in which they did so.

If you disagree with this, then you must point out exactly at which point in history we went from “humans simply competing for survival”, to “white people constructing a framework that unfairly benefits them” and imposing that framework on all others. The impossibility of this task exposes the ridiculousness of any attachment to the idea of “white privilege”.

The same logical framework I’ve delineated here applies to the argument that women (as a group) are being oppressed by the privilege of men (as a group)—or to any other group power-based model of societal hierarchy. Because if you believe that any one group could successfully amass such a far-reaching and co-ordinated advantage over others, across such a long period of time—having started out with exactly the same environmental pressures and disadvantages as the so-called oppressed group—then you are making the strongest possible argument for the superiority of the so-called oppressor group. If “white” and “male” approaches to doing things have come to dominate our world, then (by definition) they did so under the fairest possible conditions while competing against “non-white” and “non-male” approaches to doing things.

Arguing that white male privilege exists is analogous to arguing that white men are just better at solving the problems life throws at us than any other groups of people are.

I don’t believe that there are actually “white” or “male” ways of doing things, in the way that intersectional, identity politics advocates say that there are. For one, if there are “white” and “male” tendencies, that means there are inherent differences between races and genders—a position that contradicts the foundational tenets of social justice movements, which state that all differences in outcome across races and genders are artificially constructed (rather than inherent). So, I don’t think that white people or men are actually superior. I think there are simply approaches that work and those that do not. What I think is broken is our value system(s), but I’ll get to that a little later.

What’s actually happening is that, in this pocket of time, power is concentrated in the institutions that favour the natural instincts of men and the cultivated values of Western European cultures. But this hasn’t always been the case—there have been times in human history when being a man or European was equivalent to drawing the short straw. Nor is today’s reality thanks to the conspiracies of white men. Looking at the gender or racial split in board rooms and spuriously concluding that men must be discriminating against women, is just as ridiculous as looking at male versus female life expectancy and deciding women must be killing men.

It’s easy to look through a narrow window of time and say that white people attained their status through slavery, but not all groups that engaged in large-scale slavery are world leaders today. Just look at the Ottoman empire or the Oyo empire. Plus, in those pockets of time when white people engaged in slavery, the act (however horrific) was the norm. Blacks enslaved (and were ethnically prejudiced against) other blacks, just as people of the same race all over the world did to each other. It’s just that white people enslaved black people on a large scale, just as we decided to stop doing the whole slavery thing. It is not helpful to look back on the activities we now consider immoral and construct a worldview on behalf of the people who executed them, under different moral standards. Especially because if we look a little further back in history, we’ll see that white people themselves were invaded by Asians. And Middle Easterns have been invaded by black people. And basically that we’ve all taken turns enslaving other people. So, if we want to talk about things like privilege, where do we draw the line? Somewhere arbitrary based on the argument that suits our current agenda?

We’re left with two choices:

1. To acknowledge the harshness of existence on all human groups and our imperfect reactions to mitigating the impact of these pressures. For example, if resources (human and otherwise) weren’t scarce, we probably wouldn’t have developed the drive to war over them. And if we hadn’t developed the culture of war, we probably would not have developed the imperfect response of taking slaves.
2. To assume, without evidence, that someone (or some group) must be responsible for the harsh conditions of our existence and to dole out punishment based on that assumption.

The one frees you to focus on building a better future—the other cages you in the tragedies of the past. Sadly, many people prefer to remain chained to the past, so they can avoid taking responsibility for their future. But it is much more productive to identify the person responsible for your future—which is always you—than it is to try to identify the person at fault for your past.

According to Hanlon’s razor, the first mistake is to perceive as co-ordinated and malicious attacks, honest (but imperfect) attempts to cope with the challenges of existence. Inequalities aren’t proof that some group is trying to keep you down—they’re proof that we haven’t yet found perfect solutions to all the challenges in our society. It all depends on whether you think we started from a utopia which we ruined (a manifestly false fantasy), or that we’re slowly improving the torture chamber into which we were delivered (a view more akin to reality).

All the signs suggest that we live in a world where people, generally, do not want to be racist or sexist if they can help it. The biggest proof of this is that the world is becoming less sexist and racist, with every passing generation—not more so.

If the white men who were skilled enough to dominate all other groups in the world are really trying to create a racist, sexist patriarchy, then they’re doing a surprisingly terrible job. How can a system that is designed to do the opposite, be so good and so metronomic at removing racism and sexism—and, presumably, diminishing the privilege of the white male? Shouldn’t systems, outside the remit of white males—such as those in the Middle East, Africa or South America—be so much better at achieving these outcomes?

The second, more damaging mistake, is to insist on finding an offender (or offenders) to punish for these misrepresentations of flawed aspiration as co-ordinated and malicious attacks.

The third, and (in my view) most damaging mistake, is to unwittingly subjugate oneself to the inferior status of “loser” in the game of life—and bestow on strangers (who don’t even believe themselves worthy) the status of “winner”. The inferiority complex (and accompanying adversarial attitude) this gives people is enough to disadvantage them in situations where they otherwise would not be disadvantaged.

In summary…

Have there been large-scale injustices in history? No doubt. But, the only people who think these injustices can be neatly divided along gender or racial lines, are those who haven’t studied seriously enough the pervasiveness and multifaceted nature of human-to-human cruelty.

I don’t believe men or white people (or any other group) is substantively at the top of a privilege hierarchy—I believe such a narrative is just a way of distracting ourselves from the fact that anyone who deems attractive such a lens, doesn’t (deep down) like who they are.

It’s not that men or white people have won the existential lottery and are keeping everyone else out—it’s that we’ve defined success based on the qualities that white people and men happen to embody, in this window of time. Because “male” (e.g. hyper-competitiveness) and “white” (e.g. economic wealth) qualities are used to define success, we’ve set ourselves the nonsensical and needless task of overturning a deficit that does not exist (and therefore cannot be overturned). So, instead, we busy ourselves with creating a new deficit (such as correcting gender underrepresentation, but only when it is women who are underrepresented), to create the illusion that the non-existent (original) deficit has been balanced out. We care about the overrepresentation of men in engineering positions… but I’ve never once heard a rallying cry for equalising the overrepresentation of women in psychology. Even though top psychologists can earn as much as top engineers.

As a society (and even as individuals), we could decide to have any kind of value system we like, but the same ones always seem to dominate—the ones most invested in vocations which white people and men *are perceived* as dominating.

I’m a bald, young man and if I decide to follow a standard of beauty that says men must have hair, then I’m going to be miserable. Hating men with luscious locks of hair, or the women who prefer them, will not make me any happier with my own life.

The fact that most men and women adhere to that standard does not mean that my agency in choosing not to is diminished— I can still choose to go against the grain, as it were. Societal standards are aggregations of individual standards. Whether society is a macrocosm of individuals (whole reflecting its parts), or individuals are microcosms of society (parts reflecting the whole), each individual is still free to choose their own standards.

Choosing to orient your self-perception around ideas that make you miserable, simply because a majority of people adhere to those ideas, is not evidence of a vice in society—it is evidence of a vice in yourself. And you can’t fix yourself by fixing society… you fix society by fixing yourself.

If most individuals’ choices converge towards certain realities, then that is their prerogative — mine is to decide whether I share the consensus of the majority and to live my life accordingly. Maybe others will follow and a new standard will emerge — but I have no right to expect my standards to be represented in the majority (just as no one else does). That is a projection of the ego and one that will leave you eternally at the mercy of a capricious and shallow crowd .We could decide that tribal, non-industrialised cultures based on trade by barter are better for our species—less pollution, large-scale violence and systemic inequalities (because fewer and less powerful systems would exist). We literally could follow the systems of African and Polynesian tribes worldwide, instead of the systems of Western industrialised democracies. But we don’t. Virtually all societies capable of implementing a Western, industrialised democratic system choose to do so.

My point is, we don’t know what we’re doing—things are happening to us and we’re figuring them out as we go along. At no point in our history have we “figured it all out” and then decided to build imbalanced societies anyway. Our environment applies pressure and we respond based on our survival instinct, as well as our best understanding of complex issues, at a given time.

What you call the patriarchy (or privilege), I call an unforeseeable (and unfortunate) state of affairs based on imperfect responses to uncontrollable environmental pressures.

Does this mean we should overlook instances of sexism, racism, violence or other instances of people violating the social contracts on which our civilisation is based? No! That’s the point. We built society to reduce each individual’s exposure to such threats… and it’s working. By every meaningful metric, life is getting better (on average) for all groups of humans. The mistake is to draw conclusions about groups, based on observations about individuals. This is a rampant cognitive error, resulting from a poor understanding of the differences between disparate but superficially related phenomena—such as group and individual interactions. In another article, I explain why observations at one level of a complex system should not be assumed to be true at a higher or lower level of the same system.

In short, the fact that an individual can be guilty of racism or sexism, does not mean that there must be a group responsible for the cultural problems of racism and sexism. I know this can be hard to wrap one’s mind around initially… but when you think about it, it’s not all that surprising. A man does more harm to a woman by infecting her with chlamydia, than the other way around—this does not mean men are responsible for the asymmetrical impact of chlamydia on women. A woman has more power over whether a man can be a parent to their child, than a man does over a woman—this does not mean women are responsible for the frustrations of involuntarily celibate men.

My point is, you need to stop yourself from thinking the following way, “If black people suffer disproportionate amounts of racism and most racists in recent history have been white, does that not mean racism is the fault of white people?”

The answer is, “no,” because such statements incorporate so many subtle (and unsubstantiated) assumptions—such as that conditions today can explain phenomena that have been brewing long before such conditions came to be. If I go out to perform a rain dance after it starts raining, and you come to find me dancing and rain falling, it would be completely erroneous to suggest that I caused rain to fall. Yet, this is what we do when we analyse complex issues, spanning several historical ages. We only see the world as it is during our short lifetimes—yet we assume the conditions of our age (and even the ages immediately surrounding it) are sufficient to explain phenomena spanning the history of our species (such race or gender relations).

So, please spare yourself the disadvantage of creating a fictitious hierarchy of privilege, in which you assign yourself the emotional baggage of victimhood—and complete strangers the unearned status of masterdom.