The perceived societal privilege that benefits people whom society identifies as white. Typically employed by the corporate politician elite to make us fight each other rather than the true enemy – the establishment. (Urban Dictionary) Given that a generation of high-school and college students are being taught that a great number of “unearned privileges” accrue to white Americans, the charge of white privilege demands rational inquiry. The assertion turns out to be largely meaningless. And, more significantly, it does great harm to blacks. First, no reasonable person can argue that white privilege applies to the great majority of whites, let alone to all whites. There are simply too many variables other than race that determine individual success in America.
Amani Douglas, writing freelance for the Daily Caller, points out the following:
Just as with the other well-known reprehensible titans in the world of derogatory terms that we can all agree are soaking in racist intention, the label of “white privilege” is used to strip away all the intricacies that make up an individual’s character and delegitimize their accomplishments. In a broader sense, terms like these are used to even question an individual’s right to exist in a given space because of the color of their skin. I cannot understand why there is not more push back when the label “white privilege” is used. The focus needs to be on the individual, not a person’s race. As a Nation, we have fought a war amongst ourselves and struggled for decades to establish racial equality yet here we are today. We can never move forward until we flush tendencies like segregation and racial bias down the historical toilet once and for all. It is hard to move forward, together, as Americans under the shadow of a racial grudge that appears to be reinvigorated and ever expanding with each passing day.
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So-called progressives who think spouting out the overtly offensive label of “white privilege” is an effective way to prove their point should look to history. They will find that violence, blame, and racist labels are the classic rebuttal tools used by fascists to shut down what should be a reasonable debate stemming from a rational difference of opinion. Someone who goes to this type of play list probably has no justifiable position or simply doesn’t know how to express it if it exists. When they are done studying history, they might want to consider looking in the mirror.
Whatever reason one gives for the white suicide rate, it is indisputable that, at the very least, considerably more whites than blacks consider life not worth living. To argue that all these whites were oblivious to all the unique privileges they had is to stretch the definition of “privilege” beyond credulity.
Second, there are a host of privileges that dwarf “white privilege.”
A huge one is Two-Parent Privilege. If you are raised by a father and mother, you enter adulthood with more privileges than anyone else in American society, irrespective of race, ethnicity, or sex. That’s why the poverty rate among two-parent black families is only 7 percent.
Compare that with a 22 percent poverty rate among whites in single-parent homes. Obviously the two-parent home is the decisive “privilege.”
Another “privilege,” if one wants to use that term, that dwarfs “white privilege” is Asian privilege. Asian Americans do better than white Americans in school, on IQ tests, on credit scores, and on other positive measures. In fact, according to recent data from the Federal Reserve, Asians are about to surpass whites as the wealthiest group of Americans. Will the Left soon complain about Asian privilege?
And how about “gentile privilege?” For most of American history it was a lot easier being a Christian than being a Jew in America. Yet, I do not know a Jew — myself included — who doesn’t believe that to be a Jew in America has always been an unbelievable stroke of good fortune. It is not surprising that an American Jew, Irving Berlin, wrote “God Bless America.”
There are even times when there is “minority privilege” in America today.
Every high-school student knows that given similar scholastic and extra-curricular records, one’s chances of being accepted into a prestigious college are considerably greater if one is a member of a minority, most especially the black minority.
And the biggest privilege of all is American privilege. Unless you or your family make some big mistakes, the greatest privilege of all is to be an American. That’s why much of the world wants to live in America.
So then why all this left-wing talk about white privilege?
The major reason is in order to portray blacks as victims. This achieves two huge goals for the Left — one political, the other philosophical.
The political goal is to ensure that blacks continue to view America as racist. The Left knows that the only way to retain political power in America is to perpetuate the belief among black Americans that their primary problem is white racism. Only then will blacks continue to regard the Left and the Democrats as indispensable.
The philosophical reason is that the Left denies — as it has since Marx — the primacy of moral and cultural values in determining the fate of the individual and of society. In the Left’s view, it is not poor values or a lack of moral self-control that causes crime, but poverty and, in the case of black criminals, racism. Therefore, the disproportionate amount of violent crime committed by black males is not attributable to the moral failure of the black criminal or to the likelihood of his not having been raised by a father, but to an external factor over which he has little or no power — white racism.
White privilege is another left-wing attempt, and a successful one, to keep America from focusing on what will truly help black America — a resurrection of the black family, for example — and instead to focus on an external problem: white privilege.
(1ReasonRoad) Data easily refutes the claim that “white privilege” accounts for social disparities.
The poverty rate among 2-parent black families is only 7 percent while in single parent white homes it stands at 22 percent. Obviously the two-parent home is the decisive “privilege”. This privilege leads to the other privileges; the father role model, discipline, adoption of traditional values, better peers, and commitment to education. Analysis from the left leaning Brookings Institute supports such a conclusion. They claim three significant factors keep a person from being poor: 1. Finishing high school. 2. Getting a job. 3. Not getting pregnant before marriage. All three factors are encouraged by the traditional family unit.
The success of other non white immigrant groups also helps destroy the myth of “white privilege”. Asians for example comprise the one group that excels whites in many areas. They do not claim “white privilege”. They have succeeded because they pursue the two parent family privilege. Soon they will surpass whites as the wealthiest group of Americans.
Why do political and social leaders invoke “white privilege?
Blacks need to be portrayed as victims in order (1) to conceal the failure of the welfare state policies of the Left and (2) create the “need” to be rescued from their victim status by community organizers and activists.
Here are some key facts:
- The welfare state began in the 60’s. Prior to this, the black family was relatively stable.
- The proportion of all black children being raised by a single mother in 1960 was 22%.
- This rose to 52% by 1995 while in poverty level households only it was 85%.
- By 1992, more people were in poverty after the war on poverty and collapse of the black family, than in 1964.
So the welfare state struck 3 blows; it increased dependency, increased poverty, and weakened the black family.
Rather than ending its destructive policies, the intelligentsia doubles down and claims racism. Where no hard evidence of racism exists, they resort to claiming the more subtle form of “institutional racism” or “white privilege”. This enables an entire group to blame others for their problems, purely on the basis of the color of their skin. They create a ready-made excuse for any failure. Advocates look at “disproportionate outcomes” and without further evidence conclude a racist or white privilege cause.
One major example in recent years was the alleged discrimination in lending policies by banks. But capitalism is color blind and favors merit. Any business discriminating on any basis other than merit will hurt itself. This includes banks lending policies as much as NBA hiring policies. There are laws that protects against real discrimination, but hard evidence must exist and penalties are severe.
Ben Shapiro examines several other areas of supposed “white privilege” in a speech at the University of Missouri. He presents evidence concluding statistical discrepancies in these areas is due for reasons other than “white privilege”… that such privilege is a myth.
(“Ben Shapiro destroys the concept of white privilege”)
Meanwhile, author Victor Davis Hanson evaluates the “racial spoils industry” that promotes the idea of “white privilege”
Those who participate in “racialism” receive benefits. Benefits include approval, political support, and even plain cash, lots of it. The industry divides Americans into two groups: those identifiable as being non-white, or white. Not everyone “non white” is entitled to the spoils of “racialism”. Skin color alone is not the determinant. “Non-white” claimants must think and speak in a particular progressive manner, in dutiful obeisance to those who set up and perpetuate the racial spoils system. Those who are “of color” but oppose the progressive cause are “not authentic” and therefore not entitled. They become primary targets.
Here are some excerpts from Hanson’s article entitled “America’s Balkan Values … White liberals and black careerists vigorously reject the MLK ideal of a color-blind society”
“In this unhinged way of thinking, a quite dark conservative Clarence Thomas, who grew up destitute in the old Jim Crow South, is not as “authentic” an African-American as Barack Obama, who is of half-Kenyan ancestry and was raised by his upper-middle-class white grandparents and schooled at Honolulu’s most exclusive prep school. Make Obama right-wing and Thomas left-wing, and journalists would question Obama about everything from his prep school to his name change at age ten.”
“Eager for government-promoted racial advantages, a number of white careerists have reinvented themselves as minorities to gain job traction. Senator Elizabeth Warren was Harvard Law School’s first “Native American” faculty member on the basis of her grandfather’s high cheekbones and unsubstantiated family lore.
Ward Churchill, with beads and headband but without an earned Ph.D., became a “Native-American” tenured campus activist at the University of Colorado Boulder.”“Someone raised in poverty but who rejects the liberal creed is stamped inauthentic while someone far better off but solidly leftwing is approved of as legitimate. The noted philosopher, scholar, and economist Thomas Sowell was raised in utter poverty in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s. He is not deemed a proper spokesman of the pre–Civil Rights black experience …. Sowell offers data to urge self-help and inner reflection. This is not useful for claims on government assistance. Thus Sowell is considered not really black.” My comment: Sowell’s books, such as “Vision of the Anointed” (1995) and “Wealth, Poverty, and Politics” 2015) document the decline of black culture commensurate with the rise of the welfare state and black activism. His body of evidence is not really challenged, but simply ignored)
“College-dropout and racial provocateur Ta-Nehisi Coates writes autobiographies damning white America for problems in the black community. Despite growing up in relative middle-class security during the age of affirmative action, Coates very much is black and the proper spokesman for the black experience.”
“The architects of affirmative action also envision racial rubrics as a form of personal medieval-style penance. By bestowing some of their own privileges on selected minority categories, liberal grandees helped assuage their own guilt over their de facto apartheid and material privilege. Sexist attacks on Bristol Palin are hip, but not so questions about how Chelsea Clinton somehow became worth $15 million.”(My comment: Billionaires who advocate “raising taxes on the rich” because “their secretaries pay more taxes than they do” get a giant pass for such penance.)
“Wealthy white liberal America, the engine that drives the race industry usually does not live, go to school, or engage in leisure activities among those minorities it selects for racial advantages. Hollywood may agonize over the racial and ethnic makeup of its Oscar nominees, but Malibu is for the most part a lily-white fortress, where affirmative action does not translate into subsidized public housing for the poor on the Pacific Coast beaches.” (My comment: Their penance for being white and rich does not go THAT far)
Racialism is strictly a one-way bias:
- Blacks lament the lack of Oscars but not the racially disproportionate NFL, NBA, and their MVP award. Wondering why the merit based NFL is vastly favors African-Americans is taboo.
- Wondering why merit based UC Berkeley is disproportionately Asian-American is politically correct.
Hanson concludes “the termite-ridden foundations of the racial-spoils temple are crumbling … soon the entire rotten edifice will collapse under the weight of its own inherent contradictions and illiberal prejudices”
My comment: I am not so sure Hanson is correct in saying the racial edifice will crumble; “disease” may be a better metaphor than “temple”. America has allowed a cancer to advance unimpeded into its blood. America seems unaware or does not care. In other words, no force exists to stop it. Cancers do not cease “under their own weight”. New generations of students are being indoctrinated into believing the concepts socialism and social justice. So the cancer spreads.
Chronological History of Events Related to White Privilege
Leaked Internal Docs Reveal Disney is Pushing White Employees to Not to Question Black Peers, Donate to BLM
Boulder, Colorado Grocery Shooting – An Anti-White Hate Crime
