@Social Distance Warrior I thought you might appreciate this. I'm copying and pasting from a Facebook post.
The term white privilege was coined by labor organizers and communists, such as Noel Ignatiev and Theodore Allen, especially folks around the Sojourner Truth Organization, which was the part of the New Left in the US that most heavily focused on workplace struggle and centering that struggle on the demands of black and brown workers. They built a lot of their analysis both off of experience and from the writings of scholars like WEB DeBois and his "psychological wage" for white workers. A big part of this analysis was how the white race is a political invention, a tool of ruling class dominance that gets white workers to side with the capitalist class.
What's fascinating is that the original theory of white privilege, as they wrote it, is about how the real and material benefits of whiteness pull white workers away from solidarity with black and brown workers and enlist us in being the enforcers of the system that exploits us. What writers like Allen and Ignatiev were adamant about was that this is a "poisoned bait"- a term they used or wrote variations of over and over throughout their work. They called it this because they saw white racism as being the main thing holding back white workers from joining with the demands of colonized workers and overthrowing society. So, in the final accounting, Allen and Ignatiev tended to see white privilege as having real, material benefits for white workers, but also being fundamentally bad for working class whites. They appealed to white workers to be actively anti-racist on a basis of class solidarity.
This is a stark contrast with the way that white privilege theory is typically understood in the public conversation today. A lot of people today are introduced to the concept of white privilege through works like "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack", by Peggy McIntosh. This paper takes the theory off of the factory floor and steel mills and into a university setting. McIntosh lists a number of privileges she enjoys, but most poor whites would easily point out (and repeatedly have) that a ton of the things she lists are benefits of her professional-class position, not solely her race. The paper, much like the whole diversity-consultant industry, makes a general call for white privilege to be "unpacked", and even vaguely hints at "systemic change" that is never concretely defined. It does not call for actual seizure of the land, capital, and wealth that colonialism and exploitation of labor has concentrated into the mostly white ruling class. It does not touch the observations of writers in former colonized nations who threw off colonialism only to find the institutions of capitalism still firmly rooted where the colonizers planted them.
By refusing to call for revolutionary social and economic transformation, this discourse is able to happily skip over the question of what sort of organizing would be necessary to allow the exploited and oppressed to carry out such a revolution. The door to fundamental social change is closed. The action it calls for, from a white middle class audience, is for recognition and naming, personal transformations into more moral people, and occasional voluntary surrenders of various amounts of disposable wealth- in short, antiracism as a form of moral charity. What Ignatiev and Allen called for, building off of DuBois and in line with their contemporaries among black communists like Fred Hampton, was for white workers to fight against racism as an act of solidarity, recognizing that they could not be free as workers as long as colonized workers were exploited and white workers duped into being a line of defense for the ruling class.
Here's a comment by the author:
A friend asked us to include a comment from the thread.
“We can easily demonstrate this by imagining three people involved in building 4-on-1 condo blocks. One, a white union worker, is working under a timber frame contract that keeps getting bargained down in a concessionary way because the union has low market density, a cautious ruling set of administrators, and a disconnected rank and file who don't invest a lot of energy into energizing an institution that, like every other institution in their life, does a sort of disappointing but adequate enough job. This white worker could maybe afford to live in the condo he is building, but the news feeds him a steady diet of stories about urban crime which he believes, and he doesn't want to raise a family in a neighborhood with underfunded schools. He buys a house in an exurb with very little community life, and his kids grow up pretty alienated. The news tells him to blame immigrants for keeping wages in the industry down.
The next, a Honduran roofer, isn't quite being "trafficked" by a single entity, but by his working conditions he might as well be, because the entire geopolitical set-up is trafficking him. He came to this country to send money back home and help his family escape the violence of a US-backed political purge. His home country is poor in large part because of generations of ongoing exploitation by both domestic elites and foreign capitalists. He makes more money in America than he would at home but when his boss is late cutting him the check, or when he is told to do something wildly unsafe, or when the lodging he was promised turns out to be a hotel room shared with a couple other guys, he doesn't complain because he has seen people taken away by ICE when they start organizing on the job.
The third is a developer, let's say a white man (but we could change that, and the analysis really wouldn't change much). He is making higher profits every year building gentrifying condos in former Latine neighborhoods that are easy to market as vibrant arts quarters. He looks the other way when the general contractor looks the other way at the trafficked workers the subcontractor hires, and if he's ever called on it he'll make a big show of never working with that sub again while the sub reincorporates under a new name. Using cheap labor gets him mad cash. He's glad the union doesn't mouth off much any more since mechanization and de-skilling, undercutting by subcontractors exploiting immigrant workers, and non-union training programs have weakened their market density.
One of these men is unambiguously benefiting greatly from white supremacy. One is being comprehensively and systemically exploited. Another is being exploited and having his conditions eroded, but holds on to certain benefits and is being told by authority figures in his life that his interests lie with his nation, imagined as a white country- not with his class. He might be convinced to stick his neck out for his fellow worker based on an appeal to his morality; the morality here is obvious. But, what if he were also asked to consider how the wood frame contract will continue to deteriorate if the immigrant workers are never proactively organized and protected from ICE?”
@Possum Jenkins