White Privilege

White privilege describes unearned advantages afforded to people who are assumed, based largely on complexion and specific physical features, to be of European, especially western European, ancestry. The concept of white privilege emerged from within critical race theory (CRT), a branch of jurisprudence that argues race-based (and other) preferences are embedded in societal laws and policies rather than merely a function of discrepant interpretation and enforcement of these directives. CRT scholars assert that justice (meted out via societal rules) has never been blind, neutral, or objective, but because it is touted to be all of these things, it favors people who are, or are presumed to be, white By enabling political and economic systems and corresponding power structures to grant only these people unmerited and simultaneously unacknowledged advantages. At the same time, these systems and structures disadvantage people who cannot pass as white while simultaneously denying that such institutional disadvantage is occurring and asserting that challenges these people experience are a function of their individual or group (often characterized as cultural) deficiencies.

In the 1990s, CRT began to be formally extended from law to other fields of study, including human services. As a result, the manners in which white privilege operate in society have been further explicated. From a human services work perspective, white privilege can be understood as the standard against which so-called normal human functioning is measured. Inherent, but often undeclared, in this work is the focus on the individual rather than on groups or communities in the context of a competitive rather than cooperative or collaborative social order. Because white privilege erroneously promotes the ideal that white people function independently (as individuals), at the same time that it affords only white people various forms of assistance (based on group membership), people of color are more likely to be judged as functioning abnormally because they are both visibly identifiable as nonwhites (a group) and also often consciously identify themselves as members of various other groups and because they often prioritize alliance-oriented approaches in pursuing the activities of daily living (ADLs) at the focus of human services interventions.