Feministing points to an incredible article up at Alternet about white privilege and the current election.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at 17 like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a “fuckin’ redneck,” like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you’ll “kick their fuckin’ ass,” and talk about how you like to “shoot shit” for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

Over at Edge of the American West, eric looks at US and German laws on race in the 1930s and asks an interesting question:

One may want initially to protest casual moral equivalence between these two regimes; one even wants to say, of course, that the US did not descend that further step into racist depravity represented by the Final Solution. But Ferguson’s parallel poses an interesting challenge: suppose he is right that short of industrialized genocide the two states did not substantially differ. What made the Germans take that step, and what stopped the Americans from taking it? Was it merely that the Germans went first, became our antagonists in a war for survival, and only thus showed the US whither its racial laws were tending?