No doubt that your average Indian experiences a greater degree of poverty than your average Oaklandian, but that isn't the only factor in privilege. Can you imagine what it does to a child when they see someone get shot in the street outside their house, or get their home raided, or lose family member(s) to incarceration / murder / drug addiction? It's a different kind of struggle, and I wouldn't be so quick to say that one group is more or less privileged than the other.
Personally I feel that "privilege" is an ill-defined concept and should be ignored by intelligent people. I've never seen a concrete definition that a proponent of privilege was actually willing to stand by.
(E.g., people show me this essay http://amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html to explain "white privilege", then rapidly shift the goalposts once I point out that every point applies to me when I live in India.)
I suppose you are right that the relatives of drug addicts, murder victims and criminals might have more problems than others. But then why is happyscrappy talking about black people in Oakland rather than the children of junkies?
Note that India has junkies, criminals and bad parents too. In addition to having bad parents, the children of Indian junkies are also legally barred from working in the US (unlike, e.g., an Oakland child of junkies). It's true that Indians are less murder-happy than Oaklanders, but they have all sorts of other traumatizing events (e.g. rampant eve teasing, a high rate of traffic fatalities, multi-day water cuts).
there's basically two kinds of people in the world.
those that will sit around and mope and moan about how unfair the world is, and invent terms like 'victim blaming'.
and those who take concrete, actionable steps to overcome or work around the problem.
don't fucking fool yourself, nothing will erase the prejudice against certain names in the next 50 years. just ask any american who isn't white. they've had to deal with this shit from the very beginning, it's not an abstract textbook concept to them.
>nothing will erase the prejudice against certain names in the next 50 years.
Why the pessimism? Race relations have come on a decently long way in the last 50 years.
I don't think anyone's saying that it's wrong for someone to change their name to avoid prejudice. The point is that no-one should be expected to change their name for this reason.
that's very noble. but you sound like you're a white guy who has good intentions but very loose grasp of how things work in reality. maybe i'm wrong, but that's just my feeling.
I think you are missing my point. I'm not criticizing individuals for choosing to change their names. I'm just pointing out that it's pretty shitty that they feel the need to do this. If you're fine with the status quo as (I'm guessing) a non-white person, then, well, good for you. But you shouldn't blame people who don't choose to change their names.
And even more places where if you're broke, you simply starve to death.
I'm in the "do what I love even though I'm broke" category, and my background is definitely privileged. My girlfriend on the other hand grew up very poor and had to grind for 10 years before she could even start to consider doing what she loves.
One solution would be to display the text of the question slightly beforehand to the audience, but not the contestants.