According to Merriam-Webster, white privilege is “the set of social and economic advantages that white people have by their race in a culture characterized by racial inequality.”

MYTH: White privilege exists. White people benefit economically and socially because of their skin color.

REALITY: This is false and a lot of data contradicts this.

There isn’t any law that specifically gives a white person an advantage. What the left does is they’ll show studies of disparities as evidence of white privilege. A disparity isn’t evidence of unequal opportunity.

One of the biggest examples that debunks the narrative that white people have an advantage in this country is the fact that they don’t do the best. Indian Americans often do better than white Americans in almost every area, despite having a similar melanin content to African Americans. So, it doesn’t appear that skin color plays a factor in success. It’s not just Indian Americans who do better than white Americans; Nigerian Americans, Pakistani Americans, Iranian Americans, Syrian Americans, Turkish Americans, Egyptian Americans, Ecuadorian Americans, Colombian Americans, and Peruvian Americans all outperform white Americans in almost every area. (Check Income below for more information)

The left claims disparities in being turned down for home loans, police shootings, and being more likely to be arrested is evidence of white privilege. Let me go through each claim—

According to the evidence, black people are more likely to be denied a loan because they’re more likely to have a bad credit score, which is not explained by poverty or racism. 48% of all credit scores belonging to African-Americans were poor, compared to only 27% for Caucasians. Also, black people are more likely to be denied a loan at black-owned banks than at white-owned banks.

As for police shootings, large-scale studies have found no evidence of racial bias being the cause of disparities in police shootings. In addition, Asians are more than 50% less likely to be killed by police than whites.

There also isn’t any evidence to support that black people are being unjustly arrested. Blacks being arrested more often than whites is not explained by racism. This was evident when you compare the similarity between arrest records and victimization surveys. This is also evident when you see that incarceration rate amongst Asians are significantly lower than the rest of the population.

The disparities are not explained by racism, but it is explained by factors like family structure, culture, and other lifestyle choices.

The left also leaves out any disparity that negatively affects white people, like higher rates of suicide, black-on-white violence, and affirmative action.

When it comes to police shootings, being arrested, median household income, loan requirements, and rights, there’s no racial bias. If there’s no racial bias against blacks or other minorities, then there are no advantages for whites.

(Check below for all the evidence)

POLICE SHOOTINGS

According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, Asians are more than 50% less likely to be killed by police than white people.

A 2015 analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department, by the Justice Department, found that white police officers were less likely than black officers to shoot unarmed black suspects.

According to a large study conducted by African-American Harvard Economist Roland Fryer, there’s no racial bias in police shootings. The study examined more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida, and California.

INCOME

White people on average have a higher median household income, but it doesn’t have to do with skin color. Other ethnic and racial groups far exceed white Americans.

According to 2018 median household income data from American Community Survey, Asian Americans had by far the highest median household income ($87,243) in the United States. This far surpasses the median household income of white Americans ($65,902).

Nigerian Americans also had a higher median household income ($68,658) than white Americans.

Indian Americans had the highest median household income in the country ($126,705).

Whites are also lagging behind some other ethnic groups. Whites had a median household income lower than Pakistani Americans ($98,212), Iranian Americans ($87,288), Syrian Americans ($74,047), Turkish Americans ($83,375), Egyptian Americans ($67,187), Ecuadorian Americans ($66,971), Colombian Americans ($66,875), and Peruvian Americans ($66,845).

Furthermore, if you break down black people by different cultures or ethnicity, you’ll see major income differences. For instance, in 2012, the poverty rate for Nigerians were 12.8%, Jamaicans were 14.8%, and Ethiopians were 19.7%. All the rates were significantly lower than the rate of 28% for blacks as a whole. Both Jamaicans and Nigerians had poverty rates that were below the national average of 14.9%.

As a result, comparing results for people of the same color but different culture is a valuable tool to indicate other factors besides discrimination at work.

As Africa American economist Thomas Sowell wrote, “Blacks may ‘all look alike’ to racists, but there are profound internal cultural differences among blacks.”

NO RACIAL BIAS IN ARRESTING

The amount and rate of black people being incarcerated strongly reflect the number of crime victims who identify the perpetrator as black. This is confirmed when you compare Uniform Crime Report with the National Crime Victimization Survey, which is strikingly similar. This confirms that black people are only being arrested for the crimes they commit.

According to a January 2021 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there’s no statistically significant difference between criminal activity and arrest for African Americans. The report confirmed that black people are not being wrongfully arrested.

According to an article written for the Manhattan Institute, “A recent study by an economist at Maryland’s Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation found that race does not affect a civilian’s risk of injury or death following an arrest or a police stop; blacks and whites face an equal chance of getting injured or killed by a police officer.”

Black people commit crimes at a significantly higher rate than any other group, which explains why they’re more likely to be incarcerated. According to the Wall Street Journal‘s Jason Riley, “Blacks commit violent crimes at 7 to 10 times the rate that whites do.”

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, African Americans committed a majority (52%) of all murders between 1980 and 2008, despite only making up 13% of the population.

Some say higher crime rates amongst the black community are also explained by systemic racism and white privilege. This doesn’t make any sense. According to Jason Riley, “Black crime rates were lower in the 1940s and 1950s when black poverty was higher” and “racial discrimination was rampant and legal.”

Government data also shows that Black kids are significantly more likely to get in trouble for breaking the rules in school, this can be thought of as an indicator of future criminal activity.

Further debunking the narrative, Asian Americans are significantly less likely to be incarcerated. According to the Urban Institute, “From available data, we know that Asians are largely underrepresented in the federal criminal justice system, as they make up 5.6 percent of the US population but only 1.5 percent of the federal prison population.”

BEING DENIED A LOAN

According to a 1.3 million dollar study conducted by Freddie Mac, the federally backed home mortgage company that buys mortgages on the secondary market, African-Americans are significantly more likely to have bad credit scores than Caucasians.

According to BadCredit.org, “The study compared the credit scores of members of each ethnic group, leading to data that shows Caucasians earning less than $25,000 per year were likely to have better credit scores than African-Americans earning between $65,000 and $75,000 per year. Overall, the study found that 27 percent of all credit reports belonging to Caucasians were poor, compared to 48 percent of those belonging to African-Americans. Only 28 percent of Hispanics were found to have bad credit.”

Black people being more likely to have a bad credit score is why they’re more likely to be turned down for a home loan. Poverty or racism can not explain why black people are more likely to have bad credit scores, considering black people with a higher income had a worse credit score than whites with a lower income.

According to a University of Tennessee study, black people were twice as likely to be rejected for their loan applications at black-owned banks, compared to white-owned banks. White-owned banks rejected 16.7% of black loan applicants while black-owned banks rejected 38.4% of black loan applicants.

RACIAL DISPARITIES AGAINST CAUCASIANS

Suicide: Suicide is more common among white Americans. According to the New York Times, in reference to the rate of suicide, “In data released in 2017, the rate for white Americans was around 19 per 100,000, and it was about 7.1 for both Hispanics and Asian-Americans/Pacific Islanders, and 6.6 for Black Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

Businesses: Black women start more businesses than white men or women. According to an article written for Harvard Business Review, “In the United States, an astounding 17% of Black women are in the process of starting or running new businesses. That’s compared to just 10% of white women, and 15% of white men.”

Education: According to a study by the National Center For Education Statistics, black women have a higher college attendance rate than white men and women.

Affirmative Action: colleges admit African-American students who would not be accepted if they had been white or Asian.

INTERRACIAL VIOLENCE

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 2012 and 2015, excluding homicides, there were 631,830 violent interracial victimizations between white and black people. Black people were the perpetrators in a majority of the cases.

According to the Manhattan Institute, “Blacks, who make up 13 percent of the US population, committed 85.5 percent of those victimizations, or 540,360 felonious assaults on whites, while whites, 61 percent of the population, committed 14.4 percent, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks.”

Asian Americans were also more likely to be violently targeted by blacks, compared to whites. According to 2019 Bureau of Justice Statistics data, showing that 27.5% of perpetrators targeting Asians were black and only 24.1% were white.

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