White Privilege In North America

White privilege is a term for societal privileges that benefit white people in western countries beyond what is commonly experienced by non-white people under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. This is one of the biggest types of unspoken racism that happens all around us. For the most part the white people benefiting from it are fully oblivious to it and don’t know how it has helped their lives. Most African American and other minorities are sometimes blind to this too.
When trying to see where this all began, I realized that it was way too long and complicated to tell the whole story. The first time that people noticed this behavior was way back in the days, according to Allan Johnson. “When the British came to North America, they brought with them both cultural views of race and the expectation of their own position of dominance as a structural feature of any society they might establish. To this was added the explosive growth of industrial capitalism as an economic system in the 18th and 19th centuries, …show more content…
The one-drop rule is a sociological and legal principle of racial classification that was historically prominent in the United States asserting that any person with even one ancestor of sub-Saharan-African ancestry ("one drop" of black blood) is considered to be black (Negro in historical terms). Meaning it doesn’t matter how small that percentage of black you have in you, if it’s there then you are in fact considered black. This started coming about during the nineteenth century and officially became a law during the twentieth century, with Tennessee being the first state to practice the law. During these times many law officials took this as a way to antagonize and manipulate many different individuals. With slavery and racism being a big part of the culture at the time these laws were coming into play, many mixed people were suffering the same way the African Americans