"White Privilege"—a thing of the past?

Bill O'Reilly Says White Privilege No Longer Exists


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-schmookler/bill-oreilly-white-privilege_b_6009646.html

Fox News’ popular and notoriously cheeky political commenter, Bill O’Reilly, recently made a statement regarding the absence of white privilege in America today.  But, as a white man growing up in a middle-class family during the post-war suburban sprawl in Levittown, New York, O’Reilly’s admirable position as a top-grossing talk show host is hardly attributable to his motto of being a, “self-made man”. As Jon Stewart implies in his rebuttal against Bill O’Reilly, the concept of white privilege is not an illusion, it’s ingrained in the fiber of our psychological, economic, and social environment.

In an article evaluating Jon Stewart’s rebuke against O’Reilly’s statement, the author points out right winged Republicans scrutinizing blacks for their inability to secure jobs and maintain stability within the home, while ignoring the etymological facts that the society in which African Americans are brought up in do not provide, “the opportunities to reap the rewards to which those virtues (job and home stability) are supposed to lead”.  We cannot simply erase the mark that slavery and the legacy  of its collective ideologies left upon our nation. Nor can we pretend as if society has, with the passage of time, completely cleared its pallet of nasty labor and race conundrums, now solving major world issues with its positive outlook and good intent. While it would be endearing and certainly desirable to live in a world where the 20^th century’s exclusion of black people from Levittown is no longer relevant to today’s reality, or in O’Reilly’s terms, “ancient history,” the existence of white privilege and the longstanding values of a country founded by white supremacists still remain an inherent part of our culture today.

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/21/upward-mobility-race_n_6016154.html

The graphs in the link above display the presence of white privilege in percentages that forecasts a poor white child’s prospective income versus that of an impoverished black child’s.  How can two children of the same poor economic standing acquire, come adulthood, such a large disparity in total income earned? If all it takes to achieve your dreams is learning how to become the man you want to be, as Bill O’Reilly preaches, why does the white man place in nearly two class differences higher than the black man? Is white privilege truly a term reserved for post-slavery Jim Crow days, or a concept so deeply ingrained in our culture we’ve long morphed and re-morphed what it means in today’s day?