re seen as ôwhiteö professions and so people of color have a hard time breaking into them.
Sacks points out in ôHow Jews Became Whiteö that it was only after World war II, when the American government systematically shut African Americans out of most benefits available to white GIs that Jews were able to become accepted as white in this society (Sacks, 66). ôWhite men of northwestern and southeastern European ancestry were treated equally in theory and practice with regard to the benefits they received,ö says Sacks, and this was part of the postwar whitening of the Jews and other eastern and southern Europeans who had until then not been considered quite white. Their children have the benefit of having parents who own homes or who have decent retirement benefits, which makes a difference to the younger generation, allowing them to take on college loans or put a down payment on a house themselves. This simple inheritance helps them perpetuate the gap between blacks and whites, the privileged and the non-privileged.
Solomon talks about the privilege of the white classes when he talks of the razing of the I-Hotel and the displacement of its long-time Filipino residents to make way for urban development - the white manÆs urban development (Solomon, 616-623). The development of the San Francisco financial center completely wiped out ten blocks of low-cost housing, restaurants, shops, markets, clubs and other businesses that benefited the Filipino community of around 10,000 people. This is an example of white power rather than just white privilege. They did it because they could.
But privilege doesnÆt just act against race: it acts against people of different religious faiths, against people of different sexual preferences, against people of different
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