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Whiteness Wednesdays: Addressing White Privilege, Fragility, & the David Hogg Drama, Part 3 [1]

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Date: 2025-06-11

Welcome back to Whiteness Wednesdays. So, this interview with David Hogg on Bill Maher ended up being a rather rich source of material. I shouldn’t be surprised: it was, after all, two wealthy white men talking about the problems white men face these days. It was bound to be more tone deaf that me doing karaoke. The insidious thing about these sorts of conversations though was the bits of truth laced throughout it. It’s the exact sort of half- and distorted truths that form the bedrock of ignorant beliefs, the foundation upon which extremists and bigots build their entire philosophy.

I don’t think David Hogg (or Bill Maher, for that matter) are misogynistic bigots who want the whiteness caste system to endure for their own benefit. I even believe both want the country to be better, and genuinely think they’re doing their part, in their own way and respective fields, to make that happen.

None of that erases the problems with this interview and the framing the two have of the problems and issues facing white people (particularly white men). So, let’s dive into that last aspect of the interview this week, shall we?

Before we go any further, I’m going to ask you to support me at my Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/…

I am struggling to pay my mortgage, and looking for a second job. Just $2,000 per month would be enough to cover that (after setting aside money for income tax to pay on it), so every little bit helps. If you like my writing, or anything else creatively I do and want to see more, that’s the easiest way to make it happen. I’d appreciate it immensely. I’m working on adding a monthly subscriber option to Ko-Fi, but I’m still finalizing what the subscriber perks would be, if any, and the pricing tiers. I won’t ask people for regular donations unless I like what I can offer in exchange.

If you would rather support Black America directly instead of a White Dude, maybe make a donation to the United Negro College Fund: uncf.org/…

Okay, back to the writing.

Many of you are familiar with the expression “a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing”. It’s one of the more useful and evergreen ones, I’ve noticed: you can apply it to so many different people and situations and find it is perfectly apt and gets the point across nicely. Well, here it fits because the little bit of knowledge is used to propagate the belief that white people have it harder than anyone.

The issue isn’t, as we’ve covered, that white people always have it easy because of their skin color (that is not what “white privilege” is), but the reaction many white people have when discussing their privilege is to protest by pointing out the existence of hardships real, inflated, and fabricated.

We covered the latter two in the Hogg/Maher interview last week (to summarize: yes, in some ways white people are held to a different standard or have to deal with hardships they did not, because they’re no longer being given a pass for bigoted jokes/behavior or no longer benefiting from the same overt abuses of power being wielded in their favor, so their lives are only harder because the playing field is being leveled), but I did not touch on the first. There ARE real hardships out there, unique to white people (usually, though not always, specifically white men).

This is the dangerous “little bit of knowledge”: the few solid points, cherry-picked and devoid of context, that support the overarching worldview’s flawed framing. These align nicely with personal experiences: lofty academic arguments about the meanings of words aside, it’s rare to find a person of any kind in this world who hasn’t experienced bigotry directed against them firsthand: I’ve been told, to my face, some pretty overtly bigoted things (Examples: “I don’t hire white people for this job”; “We don’t trust straight people to be in charge here, you’re not going to get promoted”; “Men don’t deserve freedom”, all real things I’ve had said to my face and were told unironically). So, when you combine the fact that bigotry exists and shit happens, you have some frustrated and angry people ripe for being told they ARE the victim here (as, indeed, anyone who is subjected to dehumanizing behavior and bigoted cruelty is a victim), and then led down a rabbit hole of hate and deception.

We’ll touch more on “intersectionality” in the future, but it’s interesting that here we have an excellent example of why it matters: intersectionality is about understanding the various ways The System hurts people, and how it can hurt people across multiple dimensions of their existence. The easiest way to demonstrate it is with the concept of “misogynoir”: we know Black people deal with racism, we know women deal with sexism, it’s therefore fairly simple to grasp Black women get a double dose of bigotry via sexist-racism (or racist-sexism). That’s intersectionality in a nutshell.

The point of it is not to prove who is winning the Oppression Olympics, but rather to understand the vast power of systemic bigotry and the complexity of the problem: once you understand that, you can start seeing how those mechanisms of oppression work and how they hit multiple people, across society (often in surprising and unexpected ways). Well, it works the same way with white people and men, because whites and males are both humans in society. There are ways they are hit, sometimes in ways nobody else is, by the machinery of oppression designed even as it is to help them at the expense of others.

Bigotry, and its aftermath, hurts both oppressor and oppressed . That single sentence is something that I cannot repeat enough, and is definitely going to be at LEAST one, if not multiple, entire entry unto itself. It’s easiest to focus on how the oppressed is hurt by it, because of the magnitude and obviousness of it, but the harm done to the other is still there, and crucially grows and spreads the longer it is ignored (same as any other growing and ongoing harm).

The broken system that created White Privilege ALSO hurts White people, and thus dismantling it BENEFITS White people.

Now, covering the various examples and arguments put forward is best suited to a point-by-point refutation. I’d love to dedicate future updates to Whiteness Wednesday to breaking down and refuting different ones (so feel free to post suggestions in the comments or message them to me on Bluesky).

However, the core lesson here is that many of the legitimate complaints that Whites and males have would be addressed via the very same remedies that will help Black America directly. We know this because the status quo hurts both Black AND White America, so fixing it would self-evidently correct the harm to BOTH, because they are intrinsically linked.

If that sounds an awful lot like a selfish pitch to White America, well, it kind of is. Self-interest works, for starters, but also the blunt reality is some people don’t care about a problem until it happens to them. When it does, a lot of Whites find their complaints either falling on deaf ears or being told their problem isn’t serious (especially when it isn’t serious and they don’t want to admit it).

I’ve made the comparison to triage before, and it stands, but taking that analogy one step further: just because your injury wasn’t as severe as someone else in the ER doesn’t mean you BOTH wouldn’t benefit from a similar preventative measure. If you were both injured by a defective product, recalling or fixing the product would prevent it from happening in the future: that won’t move you, personally, ahead in the waiting room list but it WILL help make sure you (and everyone else) never goes back for the same injury at all.

While David Hogg is telling Bill Maher about all the Whites he speaks to with broken fingers bemoaning how they have to wait behind people with missing limbs for treatment, Black America is busy trying to dismantle the Person Chopper/Smasher that keeps hacking off Black limbs and occasionally breaking a few White fingers in the process.

Get off your ass and grab a sledgehammer, White folks: trust me, it’ll pay off hefty dividends.

I’m on Bluesky now! bsky.app/…

Give me a follow!

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