Good god, are we still going round in circles on this? I can only speak from a UK perspective as this is where I have lived all my life but as a woman I have regularly experienced bias from men who have a greater level of natural privilege than I do just because of the patriarchal society that we live in. However as a white woman, I don't also suffer from the ingrained racism that black people in this country face and therefore start naturally ahead on the start line from my black sister. Who has the best start in life in other ways (education, parenting, money etc) isn't relevant to this, you can be a step back on something back a step forward elsewhere. Yes, of course somebody can make rude remarks or treat you differently if you are white, have ginger hair, are short, fat or whatever but that isn't the same as racism and doesn't have that ingrained history. Not saying it's acceptable but it's a totally different thing. Wanting an organisation to reflect the society that it operates in is not racist or sexist as they already have a large majority of employees causing that bias and making it much harder for them to support the community accordingly, it's simply a balancing exercise and hopefully will improve things in the long term. I read a quote the other day along the lines of "having white privilege doesn't make your life easy, but understanding it can make you realise why some people's lives are harder than they should be" which really resonated with me. In the UK I am at an advantage by being white, that doesn't mean that everybody will favour me, of course not and it doesn't mean that I can't have challenges in other areas but I don't see how this is remotely a difficult thing to understand. I fully appreciate that there are people on this thread who are closed to any other views, despite many many studies that show this to be true so not sure what the point is in this thread other than for certain individuals to spout their usual nonsense.
It's not that "we are going round and round in circles", it's that you don't understand why some people don't agree with an ideology that views everything through the lens of victim and oppressor.
I can try to explain. "We" don't "live in a patriarchy" in the same way that we live in a house; the house actually exists, but the patriarchy is just a made-up idea that you choose to believe in, and others don't. It's the same with "white privilege" - it's just a concept, one way out of many hundreds of interpreting the world and explaining the way things are, That doesn't make it right, or real, or more importantly provable as an explanation of why some groups of people are more successful than others. I wonder how much time the usually white, usually middle-class, usually educated people who talk about "white privilege" have spent living in
tit-poor communities in Cornwall, or the ex-mining villages, or some areas of the northeast. If it's such a great and important idea, go and talk to those people about white privilege and see how far you get. It's a luxury, snobbish idea that has come out of elite universities, and IMO damages pretty much everyone except the people who preach it who actually gain social capital out of it. (See video below.)
Personally I see these ideas as incredibly damaging and deeply patronising. I can think of nothing more demotivating, nothing more guaranteed to keep people stuck, than this kind of "oh poor you, you're so disadvantaged, the world is against you, you need MY help and understanding" attitude because it teaches helplessness and perpetuates a sense of social hierarchy and blaming others. I go out of my way to stand up again Critical Race Theory whenever I can and nobody will EVER convince me that I am racist because I am not, despite the despicable mind-fuckery CRT tries to instil. It is a hideous philosophy that does nothing but demoralise everyone involved. I think it will eventually die, because everything is cyclical. As the saying goes, bad times produce strong men, strong men produce good times, good times produce weak men, and weak men produce bad times. At the moment times are good and CRT is intent on producing weak men who doubt themselves, so bad times and strong men will follow and these bad ideas will eventually get cleared out but unfortunately by that time it will have done significant damage.
There is NOTHING simple about “balancing exercises” as you call them, especially when decisions on what and how to "balance" things are made on immutable characteristics like skin colour or sex. It doesn't matter what you call it: equity, affirmative action, redistribution of wealth, taking from the rich to give to the poor, "decolonising the curriculum", discriminating against Asians so that black kids get get more places in elite universities )... we've run enough of these experiments over the last 100 years now to know that they ALWAYS have unforeseen negative and sometimes devastating consequences. How many more times do we have to go through this to come back to exactly the same conclusion? It always starts out with "just a simple little balancing exercise" and NEVER leads where you think it's going to.
We are all always discriminating, against everyone, all the time. If you see an attractive smiling woman at the doctor's reception desk, you're probably more likely to speak to her rather than the grumpy old git sitting next to her. It is as natural as breathing and it happens to everyone. If you benefit from privilege as a white person in the UK, it's the privilege of being the MAJORITY culture in a population, and that is the same in every single country in the world. That doesn't mean that other people and races cannot succeed, because they can and do, far surpassing in some cases the success of white Britons. Having stable family structures, both parents in the home, and a strong emphasis on succeeding at school is one of the factors that correlates with this success, whether CRT proponents like it or not.
As I'm sure you're an open-minded and inclusive person, and not "closed to any other views" in the way you accuse others of being, maybe you'll enjoy this video of a young mixed race man growing up in the absolute depths of poverty in LA who has reached very different conclusions to yours. Or look at the work of Thomas Sowell, a black economist whose experience of growing up poor in Harlem in the 1950s led him to some very different conclusions about race, culture, what perpetuates racism and the best ways to help everyone succeed. Or read the work of Kenny Xu, an Asian American who has written about anti-Asian discrimination (in favour of blacks). There are lots of different ways to view the world and I'm sure we'll all agree it's important to explore as many as possible.
How Elites Hurt the Poor With Terrible Ideas - Rob Henderson - YouTube