Letter: ‘White privilege”? (2025)

Letter to the Editors from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘White privilege”?

This letter is in response to the Pathfinders article in the May Socialist Standard, titled ‘Without Distinction of Race or Sex‘.

Firstly, I’m against the author’s argument that the capitalist system will always promote whites over more talented minority-ethnic candidates; it’s in the best interest of enterprises to hire the most talented worker for the job. Poor white people don’t see talk of ‘white privilege’ as an attack on their ‘rights’, they see it as being an attack on them due to their skin colour.

We shouldn’t fall into the bourgeois trap of fighting for equality among the proletariat (based on skin colour, etc), not that that’s achievable anyway. While certain groups of people (on average) and individuals undoubtedly have harder lives under capitalism than others, the entire capitalist class oppresses the entire working class. Our enemy is the capitalist class (they screw us all over, though some more than others).

None of us are free until we are all free.

Matthew Shearn

Reply:

The article was not advocating but explaining the critical race theory argument that ‘disadvantaged groups will never get a fair shake unless a little positive discrimination is introduced’ and that ‘as things stand, the system will always promote whites over more talented ethnic candidates’. It then goes on to make your exact point, that discrimination is not logical for employers, before adding that ‘prejudice is not logical’, a view with which you will hardly disagree.

The article refers in passing to ‘talk of “white privilege”’, but we ourselves don’t use the term as it could imply that all ‘white’ workers discriminate against all ‘non-white’ workers whereas such discrimination is an historical left-over from colonialist times which many workers today emphatically do not endorse. Much violence is perpetrated by workers scapegoating other workers, and there’s nothing ‘bourgeois’ about saying so. If, as we argue, the route to class emancipation is class solidarity, then the question is how best to achieve that solidarity. So we call out worker-against-worker discrimination and violence for what it is, in effect class betrayal. 

Editors