Not everyone accepts that white privilege exists. And not everyone understands what is meant by the phrase. I think there’s a strong overlap between those who deny it and those who don’t understand it.

Here, I hope to first explain what is meant by the term (as I understand it) and then show that it does indeed exist. In fact, I think that the first accomplishes most of the second. A further hope is that my explanation will make sense to the average fellow white person. However, keep in mind that my target audience is always me; I write things to help myself better understand them. If doing so helps someone else, then all the better.

Why I Think Misunderstanding Is Rampant

One surefire way to discover whether someone understands something is to have them argue against it. And because I’ve witnessed many white people argue against the idea of white privilege, it has become obvious that many don’t understand what it means. Just as one example, a white man said to me (in person, earlier this year), that he didn’t have white privilege because “I grew up poor and was abused by my alcoholic father”. Of course, it is abhorrent that he (1) was abused, (2) had an alcoholic father, and (3) grew up poor. But none of these three factors indicate anything about white privilege — because no definition or description of white privilege suggests that a white person won’t be poor, experience alcoholism among family members, or become the victim of abuse.

Other non sequitur arguments sound like: “No, I worked for everything that I have”, “Every white person I know has problems”, and “What about [name of some white person who’s had a tough time]?” Perhaps the dumbest one I’ve heard is that “Using the term ‘white privilege’ is belittling to people of color.”

Other Writings

Here, I use my own words and phrasing, and follow my own (often meandering) thought process, because — as I said above — writing about topics helps me to understand them. If you can tell already that my piece isn’t for you, why not read some of those who came before? The Washington Post published this explanation in 2016, for example. There’s a Wikipedia article on it, with plenty of sources. A well-known piece, often linked to, is called “Explaining White Privilege To A Broke White Person...” And, there is the Peggy McIntosh essay from 1988 that many of the others use as a source, White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack (.pdf, 214kb). Feel free to read any of those if you don’t want to read mine. Or, better yet, read them in addition to mine.

It’s Not A Blame/Fault Thing

Perhaps the biggest evidence of misunderstanding I have seen is that the words “white privilege” cause certain white people to become defensive, as if you’ve blamed them for something, said something was their fault. When this happens, you know you’re talking to someone who doesn’t know what white privilege IS, who has never taken the time to understand it. There is no fault or blame in having white privilege, nor in admitting it exists. The only faults lie in ignoring its reality, arguing against its existence, or knowingly perpetuating it.

White privilege isn’t something you do, it’s something that society confers to you — whether you asked for it or not.

Listen: saying “we white people experience white privilege” is not an accusation of racism/bigotry, nor is it a commentary on someone’s behavior. It is a description of the unequal relationships in our society.

What White Privilege Does NOT Mean

The existence of white privilege doesn’t mean white people will never be poor, never get arrested, or never be violently attacked by police. It doesn’t mean a white person will always be accepted into a college of one’s choosing, always be the boss, or never be suspected of a crime. It doesn’t mean every white person will always be preferred over every person of color or that every white person will always have an easier life than every person of color.

It also isn’t overt laws or policies that protect whites or punish non-whites — that’s “structural and institutional racism”. That can be a part of white privilege, but white privilege exists even after those laws are overturned and even where those policies are never enacted.

What Is It, Then?

Let’s take the words separately. By “white people” or “whites”, I mean very specifically “people perceived as white” — because (1) actual races don’t exist, (2) no human is white in color, (3) in society, the perception is more important than any actual heritage, and (4) the general idea of who qualifies as “white” has been fluid over the years (in at least one startling historical document, even Germans weren’t considered “white”).

“Privilege”, taken alone, can refer to any right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed by a person or group — and almost always exists within an imbalanced power structure. For example, military officers are privileged to certain things that enlisted members aren’t. That’s all it means. Privileges can be earned (hardest working employee gets a bonus) or unearned (son of the mayor gets his speeding ticket erased).

When it comes to society conferring privilege onto certain persons or groups, there tend to be two general kinds, which I will call “inherent privilege” and “supplementary privilege”. The former is the kind of privilege that naturally arises from a circumstance — a wealthy person can buy more things than a person who is not wealthy. It’s almost tautological. A taller person can reach items on higher shelves. A person with darker skin is, on average, better protected from folate deficiency and various skin cancers.

The latter, the bonus or extra privileges, are those that do not logically or naturally arise from the circumstance. For example, the wealthy not only have more money and experience the natural consequences of that, but also have an entirely different relationship with law enforcement than the non-wealthy, have access to personal connections with other powerful people (even access that isn’t purchased), and invitations to exclusive events, etc.

It is that second kind, the supplementary privilege, that we combine with the word “white” to derive the phrase “white privilege”. Following, I provide a few more examples from human categories other than skin color, in order to illustrate the point.

Take the privilege of being able-bodied. Not only is there the inherent privilege — abilities that others might not have — but on top of that society is structured in a way that confers supplementary privilege to the able-bodied. We install informational signs at a height most easily seen by a standing adult, so a person confined to a wheelchair must struggle — beyond their natural hindrances — to get the same information I do. Also, most of those signs are meant to be seen, by sighted people, conferring yet another privilege to the able-bodied person. So when someone tries to argue that “the privilege is inherent in the ability”, we can point out the cases where that’s not true. While the natural world puts up natural barriers to some, we in society went further and added manufactured barriers. Sidewalks and curbs, for example, aren’t features of nature; they were intentionally constructed by the able-bodied in a way that only the able-bodied can easily and consistently access. Staircases aren’t part of the natural world; humans made them in a way that confers extra benefits to the able-bodied.

The same situation of supplementary privilege holds true for heterosexual people, cisgendered persons, males, Christians, and other privileged categories.

When it comes to skin-color privilege, there is very little inherent in skin color that should confer any natural advantages to one color or the other (aside from the known scientific pros/cons like Vitamin D synthesis for lighter skin colors or preventing folate deficiency for darker skin colors). Instead, society was built in such a way that extra, unearned privileges are granted to people perceived as white.

(Perhaps obviously, the existence of each category’s privilege depends on context and location. A gay man inside a gay club in San Fransisco might not experience the same lack of privilege as a gay man in a Baptist church in Mississippi, for example. But in this entry overall, I’m speaking in generalities, of the nation at large.)

The supplementary (unearned, bonus) privileges of being perceived as “white” are many, though they can overlap with privileges (or oppression) from some other category, which is where the term “intersectionality” comes in. (I have a section on intersectionality below.) Also, few — if any — of these categories are “either/or”: there are varying degrees of wealth, an entire continuum of ability, a whole spectrum of skin color and personal appearance, etc.

I Keep Hearing About These ‘Benefits’ — What Are They?

McIntosh, in her 1988 essay, made a list of “some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life”. She admitted that some could sometimes be due to other factors like class, religion, etc., but believed “skin-color privilege” was mostly responsible for all of them. She doesn’t say explicitly, but implies the obvious truth that not all of them will apply to all white people — for various reasons. They are things like: being able to be in the company of people of “my race” most of the time, go shopping without worrying about harrassment or being followed, turn on the TV or open a newspaper to see people that look like me “widely represented”, not worry about my appearance affecting someone’s assumptions about my financial ability, not worry that minor personal failings will reflect on my entire race, do well in challenging situations without being called “a credit to [my race]”, never be asked to speak for all the people in my racial group, and several others.

Those that struck home to me the most were numbers 17, 18, 19, and 26. Seventeen notes that I can criticize my government without being seen as a cultural outsider. 18: If I ask to see the “person in charge”, there’s a very good chance that person will be white like me. 19: When pulled over by police, I can be certain it isn’t due to my color. 26: When products say “flesh” or “skin” is the color of the product, it will likely very closely match my skin tone.

Most of the list has been true for me, most of my life. Someone might argue “but most of those aren’t very bad”. They might choose the last one to argue against, saying it really doesn’t hurt anyone that a “flesh-colored” bandage matches white people’s skin while contrasting vividly with darker skin. But here’s the thing. It does actually hurt to be labeled the abnormal one, the different one, the “other”. And to have this happen constantly, in conjunction with several of the other points on the list, can be psychologically debilitating.

McIntosh wasn’t specific about representation or the person in charge, so we can expand on that. It’s well-known that not only was our country founded by white men and initially run by white men; it still is today. White people are still disproportionately represented in leadership, not only in Congress, the presidency (97.8% white, 90.0% white during my lifetime), and the Supreme Court (around 96% white throughout history) — but in each state and in private industry. Almost every person of color in our country has almost always lived in a state with a white governor and mostly white legislature. A supermajority of all businesses (more than 80%) are owned by whites. (Anecdote: every person who’s ever hired me was white — and I’ve had more than a dozen jobs.)

In other words, a white person can look around and see that the power structures favor him. (A few exceptions regularly pointed to by bigots include a couple of professional sports, though not at the management level, and a couple of music genres.)

Intersectionality

Note the non-skin-color categories I mentioned above as examples. The existence of these categories means not every white person will experience the same level of privilege, and it is often this that people point to in order to deny the existence of all white privilege.

The various forms of social stratification do not exist separately from each other but overlap in complex ways. Being perceived as white is only one of many ways to access supplementary privileges built into society; each of us has our own “score”, so to speak, based on numerous factors including skin color, income/wealth, ability, citizenship status, sex, gender, sexual preferences, religious affiliation, age, and so on. I don’t know how rare it is to be on the privileged end (or the oppressed end) of every single category (see table below), though we can assume it is fairly rare.

Perceived as white	Person of color
Male	Female
Cisgender	Transgender
Heterosexual	Homosexual or bi
Natural-born citizen	Immigrant
Able-bodied	Disabled
Wealthy	Poor
Christian	Non-Christian
Young adult	Senior citizen

(I came close, once upon a time. As a young adult, I fit every privileged category on the left except “wealthy”.)

The great majority of people in our country will find themselves on both sides of this table, and/or in the middle of several categories — remember that most of them include a range or continuum. Most of us fit at least one of the marginalized categories — very few of us are wealthy, for example. Some of the categories see movement throughout our lives: a surprising number of us get older, sometimes we lose certain abilities we once enjoyed, and we might change religious affiliation throughout life. Some of the categories are easier to hide than others, when it might be helpful, or generally less-obvious to the casual observer. For example, my neighbors can’t tell from looking at me that I’m an atheist or that my gender doesn’t fit the binary standard.

I mention intersectionality of multiple forms of oppression and/or marginalization in order to give context, but not to take away from the primary topic, to which I will now return: white privilege.

How White Privilege Can Show Up Even When Other Privilege Doesn’t

Perhaps the most tired example is that of the “poor white”.

Yes, a white person might be poor and thus cannot access the privilege that comes with wealth or the middle class, just as the wealth privileges are unavailable to a Black person who is poor. For these two hypothetical people, everything is the same except skin color. If you lend nice new clothes to both of them, and set both of them up with job interviews, it’s possible neither will get the job, or that both will get jobs. But we also know that the white person is more likely to be hired, despite laws that prohibit racial discrimination in hiring. We also know that, while walking to these interviews, the Black man will be perceived as more threatening, and therefore more likely to be stopped and questioned by police.

And so on. A person perceived as white is conferred the societal benefits of being white, even if they are denied some other privileges due to some other categorization.

Try any hypothetical combination of the categories above with two hypothetical people: one who is white and one who is a person of color. If everything else is equal except skin color (the perception of race), the white person is (statistically, generally) more likely to receive the supplementary benefits from society — for no other reason than the skin color. The white person is perceived as “one of us” by society at large, while the person of color is perceived as an “other”, exotic, different, strange. Even when a white person lacks some kind of privilege, whether it is the lack of wealth or disability, they can still cash in — even unintentionally — on being white. They might be LGTBQ, a woman, or part of a religious minority — all groups typically lacking privilege in our country — but unlike a person of color in the same category will never be perceived as a person of color.

Anecdotes Can Both Help And Hurt Understanding

Here, I will share a few anecdotes from my own life that illustrate white privilege in action.

Note that I typically dislike anecdotes because they can be used dishonestly. Someone arguing against the existence of white privilege can easily find an instance of a Black man who’s wealthy and a white man who’s poor. Just as easily, we can dig up a time when a Black person suspected of a crime was arrested without violence and a white suspect was gunned down by police. Obviously, these examples don’t disprove the existence of white privilege; in fact the rarity of examples like this (when compared to the bulk of statistical reality) helps show that white privilege truly exists.

Remember, anecdotes — even true ones — aren’t evidence. Their only valid use is for illustration, to paint a picture that punches through a mess of generality. Many of us have a hard time understanding statistics, as well as difficulty peering into a reality different from our own.

The first time I became aware of how my skin color helped was when I was pulled over by police in an (almost) all-Black neighborhood in North Little Rock. I was driving a darkly-tinted 1974 Monte Carlo in the late 1990s. The police officer was African-American. He approached my door with a hand on his gun, but visibly relaxed and became friendly when he saw my face — well before seeing my ID or learning anything else about me. I got the distinct impression he was expecting the driver to be Black. And he showed surprise when he learned I lived in the area.

Another time, not long after, I was giving a co-worker a ride home from work and was pulled over — this white officer never gave a reason for the stop but he did harass my Black passenger for several minutes, calling him “boy” repeatedly, patting him down, checking his ID for active warrants. Most of my coworkers, upon hearing the story, weren’t surprised at how my passenger had been treated; they were only surprised that I had seen it for the first time.

I worked on the night crew at a supermarket at the time; about half the crew was Black. One of them, Adrian, had been at the store a year or so longer than me and was as good at his work as I was at mine. As reward for our level of skill and work ethic, we were assigned the two most difficult aisles to stock. Both of us excelled. One night he told me: “I guess you’ll be the next assistant manager.” I assumed he was in line for it. He laughed when I suggested it. “Just wait”, he said. A month or two later, I was called in to the office and promoted to assistant manager, along with a raise I had been (literally) hungry for. Eventually I was comfortable enough asking the higher-ups why they’d skipped over Adrian. The best answer I got was “he isn’t management material”. (Yet they said my promotion was due to my work ethic, not to my management potential.) Later, when I moved up again and needed an assistant of my own, I wasn’t given a choice, though I did suggest Adrian. The higher-ups instead promoted a white guy who had previously quit in a rage, rehiring him to be my assistant.

Twenty years later, I found myself questioning an armed law enforcement officer about some minor point. It ended peaceably, as I had expected it would, and I went on my way. As soon as we were out of earshot, my spouse (who is not white) shuddered and exclaimed: “Now that was some white privilege.” What I had seen as a completely acceptable and in-no-way-dangerous act, was terrifying for her.

News Stories Passing In The Night

I recognize that not everyone reads the news frequently, and most people don’t keep up with the latest studies or statistics regarding societal disparities between white people, Black people, and other demographic groups. But over time these start to pile up and expose the privilege that we white people experience — quite often without realizing it. (Some of these also expose systemic racism, which is interrelated.)

For example, a new study by economists shows that Black households pay higher property taxes. It sounds counterintuitive, since we think of the richest U.S. residents as being mostly white (true) and those living in poverty to be disproportionately not white (also true), but the study looked at assessed tax value relative to their actual sale price. The study analyzed more than a decade of tax assessment data and sales data for more than 100 million homes. Drilling down neighborhood by neighborhood, the places with higher property taxes (relative to sale price) are places with greater percentages of Black and Hispanic households. The economists also found that not only are Black homeowners less likely to appeal their property tax appraisals, when they do appeal they are less likely to win. Further, if they do win a reduction, they earned smaller assessment reductions than did white people.

Did you know a person can get kicked off a jury for supporting Black Lives Matter (even if the case has nothing to do with Black Lives Matter)? I didn’t. But it happens. The only Black woman in the jury pool was questioned about her agreement with the well known social justice movement and immediately stricken from trial. (A California appeals court is going to take a look at it.) As a white person, not only would I likely not be asked such a question, but even if I volunteered the information no one would see it the same way for me as they did for her. (Full disclosure: I’ve been called for jury duty twice and was excused both times, once for being out-of-state at college and once for being the journalist currently covering the trial in question).

Though we’ve been told “redlining” is a thing of the past, a 2021 investigation in Dallas, Texas found that it’s still going on. Banks continue to avoid lending in poorer neighborhoods — even when people qualify — where the residents are primarinly not white. Instead, they finance and own low-income housing, from which they can profit while the residents have no path to home ownership.

These are examples of things most of us rarely think about, which is one way they’re allowed to continue existing. A white person will rarely bump into the bad end of these situations and thus will be likely to disbelieve them if told.

How Privilege Hides

If white privilege is so real, so prevalent, so ever-present in our society, then why did so many of us go so long without noticing it? Why did I, raised as a (1) white (2) middle-class (3) male, never assume that much of what went right in my life was due to precisely those three factors?

First, it was never pointed out. Whether this is intentional or unintentional is a matter of debate — but that debate is mostly irrelevant. What matters more is that when you belong to a privileged group, there’s no orientation class; you simply exist inside that bubble of privilege. It can take a while to see it.

Secondly, in addition to not being told (as we grew up), we were told instead that we live in a meritocracy. We (most of us) were simply told — if something went well for us — that it was due to our hard work. I got good grades because I deserved good grades, the story goes. If I grew up in a nicer neighborhood, it’s because my parents worked hard and managed their finances well (as opposed to people in other neighborhoods, who must necessarily either be lazy or don’t manage finances well). And so on. This lie — the lie that we get what we deserve — is easy to believe because we badly want, as kids, to believe the world is fair. It’s even easier to believe because the lie is told so often, by so many authority figures. If we reach the age of majority before dislodging this notion, it becomes that much more difficult to uproot it.

Third, misinformation abounds any time a white person is on the verge of recognizing his or her privilege. Just when we start to think: in this particular instance it actually does look like someone was mistreated for their skin color — at that very moment — someone will pipe up with an “explanation”. They didn’t present their ID as soon as the police ordered them to; they “acted suspicisouly”; they didn’t immediately comply — whatever phrase that fits the particular situation to keep the white person skeptical of the whole privilege claim. When it comes to more general claims, including statistics, major reports, etc. — again we see “explanations” quickly trotted out. Most of us don’t know, the first time we hear each explanation, that they’re the same ones always employed or that they’ve already been debunked. The arguments have been refined over the years to seem plausible to fresh minds.

Fourth, it isn’t pleasant, so we automatically resist believing or understanding it. I’d rather think that the tough times in my life were due to my own mistakes, instead of realizing they could have been much worse if I wasn’t white. I’d rather think the good things in my life were due to my good choices, perseverance, solid character, and so on, instead of realizing that I had a head start due to my skin color. It also isn’t pleasant because often it only comes up in stressful situations or arguments, and so it sounds awfully like a fault or blame, even if it isn’t (see above).

Some Valid (And Not So Valid) Arguments Otherwise

Perhaps the strongest argument against the existence, persistence, and ubiquity of white privilege is that it’s gotten better — sometimes phrased as “it’s all in the past”. It certainly is one of the most effective arguments — in the minds of white people. There’s no denying that society has improved over time. Some of us see daily evidence of that improvement. (My city is one of the most integrated in the country, with one of the highest rates of Black home ownership, for example.) We can point to affirmative action programs, both in hiring and in college admissions. The country’s most-admired people now include plenty of people of color (the lists are topped by Barack and Michelle Obama). Heck, we even had a Black president.

All of that is good news. None of it means white privilege is gone for good.

One of the least-valid arguments, but still frustratingly tenacious, is: but we already give them so much. It can take various forms, but all of them harmfully assume that “we” is “white Americans” and “they” are Black people. Sometimes it’s the odd myth that Black people don’t have to pay for college. Often it’s the widely spread lie that people on “welfare” are “minorities”. (The media rarely helps this impression, often showing footage of Black people when discussing any form of welfare.) The fact is, the people most-helped by the government’s safety net programs (food stamps, housing subsidies, tax credits, home energy assistance, school lunch programs, etc.) are white. Sometimes it’s the aforementioned affirmative action programs, designed to chip away at white privilege but consistently misconstrued as “reverse racism”.

Whichever form this argument takes, it’s often entirely false, and even when partly true (like the existence of scholarships reserved for people of color) it is merely a drop in the bucket, a small attempt to turn the tide.

Another very weak one that I have actually heard/read is but I haven’t seen it. If you’re tempted to use this one, I beg you to say it out loud a few times in private, and then apply the same phrase to any number of things you know/assume to be true, like the curvature of the Earth (which you haven’t personally seen unless you’re an astronaut), the existence of organized crime, or that all matter is built of atoms. In all other instances, we know to trust the experts, the people who’ve experienced it for themselves, the investigators who investigate it, the scientists who study it, the mathematicians who calculate it. But for some reason, with white privilege, many white people think “I haven’t seen it for myself” is somehow a valid argument.

Several years ago, in the middle of a discussion about racism and its longterm affects on African-Americans specifically, a white man said to me but what about the Asians? He went on to cite the longstanding model minority argument, which basically goes like this: “If marginalized demographic ‘A’ has managed to succeed despite experiencing racism, then maybe it isn’t racism that’s holding back demographic ‘B’.” In other words, Asian Americans (typically) experience high incomes, excellent education outcomes, low crime statistics, and high levels of family/marital stability — so something must be inherently wrong with African Americans if they can’t do it too. Sometimes people of Jewish background are used as the “model minority” in this argument, often relying on age-old stereotypes about persons of Jewish descent controlling the nation’s finances.

At the time, I didn’t know how to respond, and I admitted as much. I eventually thought of a few things. (1) The generational enslavement we visited upon Black Americans was something we didn’t inflict on any of the other groups, on such a scale. (2) Selective recruitment of highly-educated Asian immigrants likely played a role. (3) The anti-Asian racism in America was rarely of the same type as anti-Black racism in America. (4) One historian, Ellen Wu, has posited that in fact: “The image of the hard-working Asian became an extremely convenient way to deny the demands of African Americans... both liberal and conservative politicians pumped up the image of Asian Americans as a way to shift the blame for Black poverty.” If the latter is true, then the “model minority” idea only reinforces the idea that white privilege is real and thus makes a very poor argument against it.

Wrapup: What Are We Supposed To Do About It?

Once in an online conversation, when some privilege-denying white person finally stipulated that such a thing might be real, he responded with: “Well, then, what am I supposed to do about it?”

I think it’s a good question, even if it was asked in bad faith. We didn’t ask for this, right? I certainly didn’t. Every time in my life that I learned some factoid about how people of color have been treated in our history, I’ve been horrified, nauseated, disgusted, and incredibly sad. I wish it wasn’t true; I wish it had never happened — the broken treaties with and brutal assaults on Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, redlining, racist hiring policies, discriminatory business practices... All of it. I remember learning that my own grandfather, who ran a small business in rural Oklahoma, didn’t allow “coloreds” on the premises. He died when I was three, so I never had a chance to tell him to his face how ugly I thought he must be inside to do such a thing. So what am I supposed to do?

The existence of white privilege requires — morally — action on my part. I believe that to be silent in the face of oppression is to side with the oppressors. To “play along” and pretend everything is okay might not be as morally wrong as personally designing the systems of oppression or actively participating in or supporting the power imbalance, but it is still wrong.

I wish this part of this blog entry was stronger — and maybe it will be someday, after feedback.

1. Recognize and Acknowledge. The first thing I had to do was get past the point of denying the existence of white privilege. This means the internal act of recognizing it exists, and the external act of acknowledging it exists. This has to be the first step, right? The unnamed, unacknowledged problem can never be solved.
2. Become and Stay Informed. This goes hand in hand with the first, but can continue well afterward. Read about it. Watch for it. Make sure one of the things you learn is that the existence of white privilege is not an accusation of racism or bigotry on your part (just as the existence of able-bodied privilege doesn’t mean you, specifically, discriminate against people with disabilities).
3. Listen to People of Color. Just as a wealthy person can’t be expected to understand the struggle of poverty — and definitely shouldn’t try to explain poverty to someone experiencing it — it can only help if more white people listened more to more people of color on this topic. I am incredibly grateful for the patient explanations various people have provided to me over the years.
4. Pay Attention. At some point, if you didn’t see it before, you’ll start to notice it happening.
5. Vote Accordingly. Sometimes it’s fairly obvious that certain candidates are worse for people of color than others — whether it’s a “joke” or a racist meme, nasty epithets, demanding that American people of color “return” to some country they’re not from, referring to brown people as an “invasion” or “infestation”. Don’t vote for those people. Even if a candidate doesn’t personally do those things, but provides heavy support and cover for the one who does... Don’t vote for those people either.

Most of us probably aren’t in a position to do much more than that. Most of us aren’t hiring, so we can’t ensure that people of color are given a fair shake. Most of us aren’t in charge of sentencing guidelines, so we can’t do anything about the disproportionately long prison terms handed down to Black defendants. We don’t have much power.

Fortunately, many of us have bits of tiny power in our little niches of life. Each of us can find tiny ways to turn the tide, to make things better, if only incrementally.