Shinin’the Lite on White Privilege ask the question of why women vote

overwhelming against their own interests , as well against social justice for
minorities, as if there were a logical choice1, and they should choose to vote in
favor of the Initiative 2092. The 56% of women that defected the purpose of the
Affirmative Action are who really are in question, in the same way that the simple
Germans persecuted minorities. We live in a society that likes to think that right or
‘just’ ideas are better, or more satisfactory to represent ideals or goals that people
should follow. I think that this idea comes from the concept that all men and women
are thought to be equal just because they were created equals, and therefore there
is no reason to think otherwise; that in precise sense man and women are born
unequal3 in an unequal or equalitarian societies, and if they get together in an
organize or disorganized groups is not for a chance to live as an equals but to
exercise power over others individuals or groups. If we add, what Brian Barry call
the “process of cumulative advantage and disadvantages” we will see that the gap
between some those groups related to the others would necessarily increase in
power and benefits, If there were no resistance from the subjected groups, and from
the individuals that become intertwined in the process of fight this power, as Freire
could say, of their oppressors.

We can categorize the antagonism as Freire does in his Pedagogy of the

Oppressed as a fight against manipulation4, but I think that it is more complex
because the relation between groups and what they produce in its relational

1 Perhaps white women voted YES because to extend privileges to minorities will diminish
the purpose of the privilege, and they rather chose difference over some rights gain. Besides
there was the illusion of the language, because in a society where the Constitution
guarantee equal rights there is no need for minorities’ privileges.
2 “A key reason why Connerly has been successful with his ballot initiatives is because the
language he uses is deceptive to the electorate. Following is the language from Connerly’s
successful campaigns in California and Washington State:
• Language of Proposition 209 and I-200: “The state shall not discriminate against, or
grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex,
color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public
education, or public contracting” Cited from: Consequences of Ward Connerly’s Anti-
Affirmative Action Initiatives. Civilrights.org.
3 To be unequal is, at the most, physiological and not a moral distinction. Kropotkin thinks
that people get together for some propensity to solidarity, and to defend themselves. This
drive for solidarity overcomes the so call survival of the fittest sponsor by Spencer. I think
this drive as a resistance, a resistance to power.
4 Freire says that this manipulation is a historical instrument of domination, and is part of
the anti dialogical response to induce people to inauthentic type of organization. Freire
(20100 p. 148.

1
dynamic. I think that there is a common oppressor for all those people who voted
the initiative regardless is ethnicity or membership to a cultural group, but they
white group of women could be caught in the model, of what Freire call the model
of the oppressor, the model of their own ascent. The language of the initiative
rarified people differences and subsume them into a new relationship where the
invisible privilege will allow the returning to not to old injustices, where a group get
more opportunities or privileges5 ( to use the language of the oppressor).

I will freely use the concept that Brian Barry borrow from Donnison but I do
not think that the conclusion logically applies to the premise. Barry says that “what

5 Impact of Proposition 209 and I-200 in California and Washington State

Higher Education
After enactment of Proposition 209 and I-200, state and local higher education programs
were prohibited from conducting recruitment and retention activities targeted at women and
minorities.
• Initiatives designed to encourage the number of women to pursue fields where they
have traditionally been underrepresented, such as math and science studies, were no
longer permitted.
• Further, pre-college programs that encourage underrepresented minority groups or
girls to apply to college or pursue nontraditional academic courses were likely
prohibited if targeted exclusively to women or minorities.
• For example, following passage of Proposition 209, then California Governor Pete
Wilson interpreted Proposition 209 as prohibiting programs including the following:
� The California Summer Science and Technology Academy, which targets
female and minority high-school students.
� The American Indian Early Childhood Education Program, which is
directed at school districts where more than 10 percent of the students
are American Indian.
� The Student Opportunity and Access Program, a minority outreach and
information network under the Student Aid Commission.

Further, immediately following enactment of Proposition 209, minority admissions at

colleges and universities experienced a significant drop.
• For example, at the University of California at Berkeley, 8000 students were offered
admission for the fall 1998 term. Only 191 students were black (compared with 562
students in 1997) and 434 students were Hispanic (compared with 1,045 students in
1997).
• While the University of California system has made some gains in increasing the
number of underrepresented minorities admitted to the colleges and universities, the
numbers still fare poorly.
• In fact, the overall percentage of enrolled underrepresented minorities declined at both
University of California-Berkeley and UCLA, the two largest schools in the UC System.
For example, at UCLA, the number of black students from California admitted
dropped from 3.3 percent to just 2.8 percent in the fall of 2003.
• In addition, minority enrollment numbers in the UC medical schools and law schools still
have not rebounded to pre-Proposition 209 levels, which were consistently higher than 20
percent. The enrollment percentage for underrepresented students in the first-year class for
UC medical schools in 2002 was 16.5 percent. The proportion of underrepresented students
in the law schools was 16.2 percent of the first-year class.
Donnison intended to convey was the ‘working parts of the injustice machine’ are
‘different patterns or dimensions of injustice, each of which has many causes’, “and
due to this nature the only way to reverse this is if they are not tackle in isolation6.
We can structure or create a machine that shows us the interrelation, arrangement
or patterns of injustices in complex groups, but this construct is a conceptual one
that illustrates something that is far from the real struggle. If I assumed that white
privilege is a kind of assembled machine that resulted from the “strategy of the
slave owner´ I must see this as an elaborated and intentional result that is set apart
from the content of the struggle that started in Jamestown, where the new
distribution of labor or activities will include a new set of relations between the
oppressed group. The separation of black and white slave women and the new
distribution of labor, would impact the relation of power between them, even if
women have no rights. I could say that the nature of injustice for both group of
women change in a different level. A black woman is considered part of field and
the white woman is included in the house of the land owner. This inclusion in the
physical land owner space is the origin of what we call now privilege, and it is borne
in the relation with the master and is proximity. We can interpret the vote by white
women, for the initiative 209, as “fear of freedom’, fear to lose their proximity to
the power and the false identity with the oppressor resulting from the model of the
manipulation (Freire).

The article states that white and black people fought together because they
suffered the same opprobrious treatment, but I have to say again with Freire that
there is something more that is learned by the oppressed that is not reflected in this
history and this missing knowledge is the substratum of the subsequent rebellions.
What I see so far is that as Dr House says “everybody lies” in Freire’s dialectical
twist everybody learns. I mentioned groups above. Black slaves were a prescript7
group; white slaves were a prescript group too. They shared a similar fate, but fate
does not make them equals. Whites are culturally related to whites, not only
because they are whites, but also because they have Culture in common. In this line
of thinking I can see that there are not only slaves and slave’s owners in conflict as
two opposing forces. There are at least three groups involved in the struggle: black

6 Barry, Brian. (2005) p. 14

7 Prescription is basically a consciousness imposition of the oppressor that takes over the
consciousness of the oppressed. Freire (2010) p. 47

3
slaves, white slaves (later called servants), and slave owners.

In my opinion slave owners did not just create a law to divide the oppressed.
The slogan ‘united we will win’ or ‘united we are strong’, had no practical use here
since no all groups involved in the economic relationship had the same status, they
are embedded in a machine over which they had no control at all, and, as Marx
states, those economic conditions will ´determine” their ulterior whole life and all
their individual8 relations. This is to say that the preferential treatment that the
oppressed white group got resulted from its particular condition and proximity to
the master and as white women did towards Initiative 2009, this fought was only to
preserve the naked privilege (difference or individuality) that they had by being
whites9. This privilege of whiteness had no the same inversed value that a branded
white person for siding with black people. The acceptation of the privilege by the
new group of servants it is not an improvement in their relation with the master, but
the voluntary (or forced) agreement of their oppression. This privilege is the prior
acceptation and submission from the white slave group to the slave owner, even if
not voluntarily accepted. At this point I can say that here were two kinds of slavery,
one the result of direct coercion and another for acceptation. To accept the
oppressive power10 is what results inprivilege and this position make any kind of
solidarity (in Freire’s term) impossible.

8 I have the presumption that when we talk about rights we refer exclusively to individual
rights. In general , the individual can group together to oppose or to exercise power over
another individuals or groups, and, in this way, guarantee, or even create rights, but per se
the group cannot hold rights. I followed S. Kierkegaard when he said that “under the pretext
of objectivity the aim has been to sacrifice individuality entirely” and add that “each and
every one is an individual…” S. Kierkegaard. The diary of..1960. p.111

9 It is not that black people became slaves because they were black. They were slaved, as
some other minorities, because they were vulnerable in a relation of force and violence. I
can say that as they became targets of other groups, even black groups that physically
hunted down, the brutality of the their conditions made impossible to regain any
consciousness of group. Sadly, “It must be said that the vast majority of the Black slaves
purchased by White slave traders were sold into slavery by fellow Blacks: very few White
slave traders had to actually go and find their own victims, there being more than enough
local Black chiefs up and down the length of Africa willing to sell off their own and
neighboring tribesmen.” March of the Titans (http://www.white-history.com/hwr52.htm)
10 “However, the oppressed who have adapted to the structure of domination in which they
are immersed, and have become resigned to it, are inhibited from waging the struggle for
freedom so long as they feel incapable of running the risks it requires” Freire. 2000 p. 47
 Morton Deutsch categorizes five types of injustices in order to identify
oppressed groups and the form that each of their identified oppression reveals
itself. I can apply any of his categories to describe the ‘strategy of the slave owner’
to see if any them is relevant to his homework. The first subcategory in the
Distributive Injustice camp is consumption capital. Deustch said it usually refers
to the standard of living in industrial societies and it is much related to income.
(2005 p.1) Since the groups involved did not have income, and even if they had a
high standard of living, this standard is not in accordance with an individual’s
consumption coming from an income. At this point I believe this concept is not
relevant.

The next subcategory is capital investment. Marx said that, ‘the first
condition of accumulation is that the capitalist must have contrived to sell his
commodities and to reconvert into capital the greater part of the money is
received’11 . Deutsch said that this kind of capital “is what people use to create
more capital.” If I applied this framework to the differences among ethnic groups,
blacks and whites, or classes of groups, black slaves, white slaves and whites
owners, it shows the abysmal gap between the possibilities that the slave groups
could have to accumulate something earned compared with the capacity of the
slave owners to reproduce their wealth. They own everything, including the
opposing groups, which were considered some kind of assets attached to the
private property. It is only later (1790) that white immigrants can become citizens,
which leads the way for them to become owners of land, and eventually accumulate
wealth.

Skill capital is the next subcategory described. Perrucci and Wysong, cited
by Deutsch, said “The most important source of skill capital in today’s societies is
located.“ in the institutions that provide credentials for the ´privilege class,’ but the
skill capital as ‘specialized knowledge, social work and skill “that are ´developed as
a result of education and training and experiences in one’s family.” I assumed that
skill capital is not a concept only to be applied to industrial societies as the two
precedent concepts seem to be. The abnormal forms of the division of labor12 could

11 Das Kapital. Part 7. Chapter 23. Simple Reproduction.

12 Capeheart and Milovanovich commenting Emile Durkheim. (2007) p. 32. Here there were
not contractual consensus between the parts involved because legally there were not parts
with the same status. The slave owner is the only juridical subject, all others are objects.

5
characterize the society13 illustrated by Sharon Martinas in her article. Here we
could be talking about reproducing and accumulating skills not necessarily certified
by institutions, but required in the process o delimitation of groups implemented by
the slave owners. Martinas said that after the Jamestown revolt the strategy of the
slave owner needed to divide the slave group of black people and whites. The slave
owners created two basic groups based on some division of labor. Black people will
be designated as slaves and white slaves as servants. This division would signify
specialization in both series of work, and activities including those against the slave
owners. Now, after the Initiative 209 was implemented minorities were truly
affected not only for their exclusion in educational institutions, the disadvantage in
obtaining contacts from the government, but also for effects that a long term would
have these communities in their process of social accumulation of skills and
credentials to compete in more equalitarian conditions.

I will leave out the last subcategory because I think it will not add up much to
my opinion just expressed.

Procedural Injustice is a category that could be applied to the Servants,

group that has no sense to call white people because they had not ethnic difference
with the slave owners. Why this concept only should apply for them? If we admit the
concept of white privilege it should not be related to the slaves because when
“the codes equated ‘slave’ and ‘Negro’’ or when we recognize an ethnic separation
or religious distinction the privileges apply only to the groups involve in the relation
of domination or struggle. Then in the case of the slaves there will not much sense
to talk about fairness between them because slaves just cannot have this kind of
privileges (white privileges), first because they did not have social membership,
and second for ethnic reason. But we can talk about justice of procedures at the
interior of the servant group if one of them is treated differently in relation to what
was given to them: “Virginia ‘servant codes’ allowed the servants to testify in
courts, “get freedom dues”, had a piece of land, and marry someone from Europe,
etc. In relation to the Initiative 209 as legacy of the ‘strategy of the slave owner,’
the author concludes that oppressed whites refuse not only to ‘challenge racial
oppression’ but also the privileges attached to it, therefore ‘when they organize
themselves they become oppressors of people of color.’ This assertion reminds me
13
the words of Freire that ‘dialogical encounter cannot take place between
antagonists,’ and in the action of intercommunication there must be communion,
‘apart from this communion, we do see dichotomy…”14

Another form of injustice mentioned by Deutsch is moral exclusion.

One sociological definition of social exclusion is as follows: Social exclusion is

a multidimensional process of progressive social rupture, detaching groups and
individuals from social relations and institutions and preventing them from full
participation in the normal, normatively prescribed ...

14 Freire. 2010 p. 129