The ongoing conversations about affirmative action have lamented the victimization of white men while ignoring the profound and powerful ways that racial privilege (what might be best termed white supremacy) grants Euro Americans unfair and unearned advantages. Quite literally, Caucasians enjoy, and all too often, ignore racial preference.
Everyday, white males, heterosexuals and middle-class people are given opportunities as part of an "invisible weightless knapsack of special provision" and receive benefits purely because of the color their skin.
American history is a history of white affirmative action.
From the start, in founding documents like the Constitution, the United States has endowed full personhood and unquestioned humanness on white men at the expense of others who were either excluded or counted as a fraction of their white peers.
The 1790 Naturalization Act granted citizenship to any European (white) immigrant, further codifying white privilege. The new nation set about removing indigenous people, thereby making land cheap and plentiful for white settlement and slavery allowed whites to accumulate wealth and build a nation on the backs of Africans.
More recently, the Jim Crowed-FHA home loan program provided whites the opportunity to purchase homes in newly developed suburbs while confining families of color to poor urban centers.
Did these 15 million families "earn" their homes even though access was limited to those with white skin?
Should we ignore the legacies of those programs in that their children and grandchildren have inherited the wealth and opportunities in having the right houses, school districts, advanced placement programs, which lead to admission in better universities, which then leads to a higher-paying job?
The racist orientation of the New Deal, suburbanization, G.I. Bill and so many other programs continues to provide whites with privilege that has little to do with hard work.
Racism and white privilege are not purely historical artifacts, but persist into the present idea that white people swim in preference, while people of color (women, the poor, homosexuals) swim upstream with weights on their feet.
If you don't believe us, take a look at some statistics that are hard to dispute: In New York, the richest school district, which is primarily white, spent $38,572 per student in 1992, seven times the $5,423 the poorest district spent per student. In Illinois, that ratio was 8-to-1.
Black borrowers paid on average an extra $1,229 in loans throughout the course of a loan.
The life expectancy for whites is 77.3 years, compared to blacks' 71.4 years. White infants die at a rate of 5.7/1,000, as opposed to 14.1/1,000 for blacks.
And a black youth is six times more likely to be locked in jail than a white peer, even when charged with a similar crime, when neither has a prior criminal record.
We could continue, but it should be clear that the legacy and persistence of racism and privilege influences American life.
In a country where white men commit 95 percent of crimes of sexual violence but account for only 25 percent of those in jail, it is absurd to talk about advantages for people of color.
In a time in which 70 percent of crack users are white, but 70 percent of those in prison for crack use are black, it is offensive to deny the realities of white privilege.
At a university in which racial epithets are directed at students of color on a daily basis, and professors preach white supremacist ideas, it is both amazing and disturbing that we continue to talk about how affirmative action harms white male students.