Something must be wrong. My finances are in shambles; mainstream newspapers won’t publish my pieces; and, no matter how much I try to convince Fox News that they need male eye candy as well, they just won’t give me a show. Then I gaze into the mirror at my alabaster complexion and say “What’s wrong with this picture? I’ll have to address this at the next White People’s Meeting.”
Of course, it isn’t really true that all we Caucasians get together in a big conference hall somewhere and, rubbing our hands together with devilish glee, conspire as to how we’re gonna get ourselves some ‘a that there white privilege. Yet you wouldn’t know it listening to egghead academics, media mouths and uncivil-rights agitators.
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Put “white privilege” into a search engine
and no small number of results will be for “.edu” URLs, which means that our
mental institutions of higher learning are busy teaching “critical race theory”
and ideas such as “Whites are taught not to recognize white privilege” and that,
as this
University of Dayton site informs, white persons have a “special freedom or
immunity from some [liabilities or burdens] to which non–white persons
are subject….” There is also something called “The White Privilege Conference”
and a website devoted to it
(I actually had to log on to make sure it wasn’t a spoof site, but truth is
stranger – and stupider – than fiction). And American Thinker recently wrote about
an event called “Erasing White Privilege,” during which whites sat around in a
room confessing their collective oppressor sins while “people of color”
discharged rage, “yelling at them” and “preaching.” Ain’t Obama’s post-racial
America grand?
Of course, I don’t imagine there are many
plumbers, supermarket workers or forklift operators at such meetings – and not
just because they actually have to work. It’s also because they know something:
White privilege is a myth.
Let’s look at the facts. Because of the fashionable
discrimination known as affirmative action, whites (males especially) are often
untouchables in the job market. And examples are legion. Talk-show host Michael
Savage has often mentioned that after he earned his Ph.D., he had trouble
finding a job in his chosen field and was told in so many words that “white men
need not apply.” I could also mention a junior-high-school friend of mine whose
test score was too low to qualify for the specialty high school I attended and
the black student who gained admission with the exact same score. Or read
this
essay by Professor Louis Pojman, who cites the case of a brilliant Ph.D.
philosopher who was denied a tenure-track position because the university in
question had to hire a “woman or a Black.” Then there is the Dayton, OH, police
department, which recently discarded
its recruit exam and the scores of 748 people who passed it because not
doing so would have resulted in too many whites being hired.
And there is social discrimination as well.
While black comedians can use derogatory terms for whites such as “cracker,”
white comedians who use corresponding anti-black racial epithets risk career
destruction. And a racial slur isn’t even necessary for a white person to incur
the thought police’s wrath. Sportscaster Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder lost his job
in the 1980s for, while tipsy at a restaurant, offering an unsophisticatedly
stated opinion as to why blacks are great athletes. Even more ridiculous,
Washington, DC, mayoral staffer David Howard was pilloried and had to resign
his position (he was later rehired) for using
the word “niggardly,” which is of Scandinavian origin and means “cheap,”
during a staff meeting. Golf commentator Kelly Tilghman was suspended for two
weeks for innocently using
the term “lynch” when describing what young players might have to do to
beat Tiger Woods. And university student Keith John Sampson was charged with
“racial harassment” for reading
a book about the Ku Klux Klan in the presence of black colleagues. It
didn’t matter that it was an anti-KKK book.
There is also a trove of government
programs designed to aid minorities – such as those geared toward
minority-owned businesses – but no corresponding help for whites. And, as
whistleblowers recently revealed,
our Department of Justice has long been ignoring voting-rights cases when the
victims have been white.
This is where the white-privilege
propagandists may say, “But, wait, whites are wealthier than other racial
groups and occupy most positions of power and prestige. Why do you think that
is?!” This is the same reasoning leftists use when claiming that the large
number of blacks in prison proves discrimination in the criminal/justice system.
But let’s see how valid this circumstantial argument really is.
The median income of Jewish Americans is
approximately twice that of their
non-Jewish countrymen. Additionally, while only about 40 percent of high-school
graduates attend college, the rate among Jews is 85 percent. Jews also occupy
positions of power at a rate greatly in excess of their two percent of the
population. Yet should we speak of “Jewish privilege”? It would be more instructive
to note a secret of Jewish people’s success: They place great emphasis on
education and workplace achievement.
And what about blacks’ dominance in
mainstream sports? Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to talk about “black athletic
privilege”?
Group-specific success isn’t just an
American phenomenon, either. As Professor Walter Williams wrote:
[D]uring the
1960s, the Chinese minority in Malaysia received more university degrees than
the Malay majority — including 400 engineering degrees compared with four for
the Malays, even though Malays dominate the country politically. In Brazil's
state of Sao Paulo, more than two-thirds of the potatoes and 90 percent of the
tomatoes produced were produced by people of Japanese ancestry.
So while we could prattle on about Chinese
privilege in Malaysia or those privileged Japanese boys from Brazil, it would
be wiser to accept a simple truth: There is simply no evidence that all groups can
succeed equally in every endeavor.
And this brings us to the real prejudice at
work here. Whether it’s Jewish Nobel Laureate winners, blacks in the athletic
arena or something else, we generally give credit where it is due.
Except when the relatively successful group
is white people.
Then they are guilty – of discrimination,
oppression and victimization – and will never be proven innocent. Their success
just must have come at the expense of others, no matter what the facts say.
As for oppression, what is the end game
here? Many foreign nations have enacted hate-speech laws predicated on the idea
that expressing negative sentiments, true or not, about a group can ultimately
lead to its persecution. Well, another privilege whites don’t have is a
dispensation from the laws of man’s nature. And when they are constantly and unfairly
maligned as deserving not their successes but only contempt for being the
source of the world’s woes, it’s not hard to figure out what the consequence
will be.
