Rhetoric like this is deeply problematic, especially for mixed-race people: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/anti-racist-education-is-anything.... About 1 in 6 children today are mixed race, and most of them have some white ancestry. What does it mean to a mixed-race person to tell them to "be less white?" I don't want my half-white daughter being told "be less white." (More like me, less like my wife?)
The thing is--if some random guy on the street said it, like when someone yelled "go back home" to my wife and daughter, I could shrug that off. You can't eliminate bigotry from society completely. But educated people normalizing this sort of rhetoric in Fortune 500 companies is intolerable. That's bigotry backed by a theoretical and ideological framework. That's something I can't just shrug off. I have been reading Thomas Chatterton Williams (an American writer of mixed heritage who now lives in France) lately. In my view, he has the better take on this: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/part-of-a-larger-battle-....
We also can't overlook what this rhetoric does to ordinary white people. "Be less white" is easy to say for educated and privileged white people like Robin DiAngelo. They aren't bothered by the implications of this because of their own status and security. They see it as harmless "punching up." Let me tell you, that's not how my grandmother in-law perceives it. To her, "white privilege" is an academic abstraction. She grew up in real poverty and never went to college. By contrast, "be less white" is quite easy to understand as a statement of overt racism. And, perplexingly to her, its overt racism that's evidently being given sanction at the highest levels of our society.
[1] An excellent assessment of DiAngelo's book: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizi....
This is absolutely true and needs to more vocally and explicitly acknowledged. As explanatory variables go, financial means is by far the most significant determinant of a wide variety of important life outcomes.
However, it is also beyond question that there is at least some marginal disenfranchisement experienced by certain people purely on the basis of their appearance. Do I think it's as potent a handicap as being poor? Hell no. Do I think it's as potent a factor as many people who live in San Francisco would have you believe? Definitely not. But we absolutely do need to acknowledge that it's a nonzero consideration in socioeconomic stature.
Appearance, apart from race, is certainly a significant source of privilege for some and discrimination for others.
But I imagine you meant race, and I don't think that is beyond question. I find it hard to believe that race remains a significant obstacle in a country where university admissions offices give extra points based on race, most major companies preferentially recruit non-whites, and the current President publicly declared that being black was the first criterion for a Vice-Presidential candidate.
However, black people remain far more likely to be born in families and communities with limited financial resources, and that naturally perpetuates racial disparities. They are, on average, more likely to attend poor schools, more likely to encounter violence in their communities, and less likely to receive help from their families. These are fundamentally economic issues that affect people of all races.
Correcting the economic disparities for everyone would also solve many of the racial issues, while not dividing the country into poor people who receive help and other poor people who do not, in the way recent race based policies clearly have.