How The
Theory Of White Privilege Leads To Socialism, by Georgi Boorman,
6/26/18, The Federalist.
The existence of ‘unearned’ opportunities or wealth is seen
as such a severe critique of our system it warrants a disbelief in an idea
foundational to the American dream.
In 1989, sociologist Peggy McIntosh penned a famous essay
that propelled an ideological movement well beyond the ivory tower and into
political discourse, pop culture commentary, and workplace seminars. It is now
part of our modern lexicon.
“White Privilege:
Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” listed 50 examples of struggles
white people don’t usually have, or perks of being the majority race, from
being able to “see people of my race widely represented” in media to never
being asked “to speak for all the people of my racial group.” These examples,
according to McIntosh, are how “privilege” manifests.
Yet white
privilege theory, even as McIntosh conceived of it nearly 30 years ago, is far
from benign. The danger this essay poses is not in acknowledging that the 50
occurrences McIntosh mentions do happen and can frustrate the efforts of black
Americans and lead to feelings of being in the “out-group,” but in the
surrounding commentary. It lays the groundwork for how white privilege theory
is supposed to change our thought processes and economic systems.
Acknowledging the
50 examples in themselves can help us be more charitable and sensitize us to
the disadvantages blacks still often face, but that was only a small part of
McIntosh’s goal. A closer look at the rest of the “knapsack” essay reveals a
system of thought that, at best, runs counter to traditional Western ideas of
individual justice and personal merit:
‘I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package
of unearned
assets that I can count on cashing in each day…’‘My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor,
as an unfairly advantaged person.’
‘The pressure to avoid [white privilege] is great, for in
facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things
are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it;
many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.’ (emphasis
mine)
McIntosh advocates for a “taxonomy of privilege” and sees
many of her examples as indicative of “conferred dominance.” When she says she
sees “unearned advantages” as a type of “oppression,” she’s employing the
language of neo-Marxism.
What Is Neo-Marxism? Briefly, neo-Marxism divides the world
between oppressor and oppressed and identifies a system, or systems, by which
the oppression takes place. In classical Marxism, the oppressed were the
proletariat, the oppressors were the bourgeoisie, and the system of oppression
was capitalism. The Marxist framework has
been adapted to categorize and pit against each other various group identities,
all toward the end of establishing socialism.
In gender, for instance, the oppressors are heterosexuals,
the oppressed LGBTQ+, and the system of oppression is “heteronormativity.” In
race, whites are oppressors, people of color the oppressed, and “white
supremacy” is the system of oppression. In reading social justice literature,
one quickly realizes “white supremacy” is the “conferred dominance” McIntosh
refers to, which is sustained by a generally meritocratic system (capitalism).
As this celebration of Marx’s
philosophy in the pages of The New York Times stated,
“Racial and sexual oppression have been added to the dynamic of class
exploitation. Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe
something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of
the ‘eternal truths’ of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that
the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that
overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.”
Neo-Marxists are asking for a fundamental shift in our
frame of mind, and ultimately, society. McIntosh sees meritocracy as more than
problematic. It’s actually a “myth,” because some “doors are open to certain
people through no virtues of their own.”
The existence of “unearned” opportunities or wealth is seen
as such a severe critique of our system it warrants a disbelief in
an idea foundational to the American dream: that we can rise or fall based on
our own hard work, talent, intelligence, or other individual merits. Put
another way, McIntosh encourages us to reject the idea that outcome is
primarily determined by individual inputs (like work ethic, cooperation, and
intelligence) largely unaffiliated with race.
Capitalism Is Bad Because It’s About Merit
For some neo-Marxist thinkers, overthrowing capitalism is
the only way to end racial oppression, as they see it. According to
sociological theorist Edna Bonacich,
“Capitalism is a system that breeds class oppression and national/racial
conquest. The two forms of exploitation operate in tandem. They are part of the
same system that creates inequality, impoverishment, and all the other host of
social ills that result. I believe that you cannot attack racism without
attacking capitalism, and you cannot attack capitalism without attacking
racism. The two are Siamese twins, joined together from top to bottom.”
“We need to engage in struggle against [the government and
capitalist class],” and push for changes to “deprive the ruling class of their
power and privilege,” she declared.
Privilege theory has always been about destroying the idea
of the meritocracy so socialism can be ushered in. Now, capitalism is not a
perfect meritocracy—far from it. Privileges like growing up in a two-parent
household, being able to attend a good school, or having social connections to
access comfortable employment give some people advantages over others.
Neo-Marxists perceive those advantages not just as inherently unfair, but as
power used to oppress the less advantaged (disproportionately composed of
minorities), and that means capitalism is incompatible with racial justice.
Discrimination and Privilege Are Now Inseparable
A critical step in promoting white privilege theory has
been to change the definitions of discrimination and prejudice to fit
neo-Marxist ideas about how resources are distributed, which promotes
redistribution as a remedy for racial “oppression.” No longer is prejudice about
individual negative behavior toward minorities, but passive participation in
the “in-group” (in this case, the white majority).
In a write-up of an NPR interview with the
creators of the Implicit Association Test, a highly popular although now-discredited attempt
to probe hidden racism, sociologist Nancy DiTomaso told NPR, “Discrimination
today is less about treating people from other groups badly, and more about
giving preferential treatment to people who are part of our ‘in-groups.’” In
essence, white people are “privileging” each other.
Mahzarin Banaji, co-creator of the IAT, said, “The
insidious thing about favoritism is that it doesn’t feel icky in any way,” also
noting that, “that kind of act of helping towards people with whom we have some
shared group identity is really the modern way in which discrimination likely
happens.”
“When we help someone from one of these in-groups, we don’t
stop to ask: Whom are we not helping?” she explained. Banaji accepts
the premise common to leftist strains of thought: the economy is a fixed pie
and everyone gets a slice.
For
instance, this Huffington Post article in defense of affirmative
action reads, “Because wealth and property are finite and produced by labor —
accumulation by some can only happen through disaccumulation of others.”
According to this premise, by giving resources to one person, you are actually depriving someone
else of those resources, instead of working cooperatively to create even more
wealth that eventually positively affects many economic actors of a variety of
races. Banaji says she isn’t recommending people “stop helping their friends,”
but that we should distribute more of our resources to people outside our
“in-group.”
It is good and
moral to give time, energy, and money toward helping the less fortunate. The
danger is in the erroneous belief that every time you help someone who looks
like you, you are working against a person of color.
The belief that
helping your white friends and neighbors constitutes discrimination lays the
groundwork for racial divisiveness and redistributive solutions based on the
“fixed pie” model. Driving a wedge into that crack in logic is the emphasis WPT
places on the “unearned advantages” of whites instead of the relative
disadvantages of blacks.
This is not just potAYto-potAHto semantics. Instead of
targeting policies and processes that put blacks at a disadvantage (i.e.
individual bigotry, being excessively pulled over while driving, longer sentencing
for black males) and gathering support for reforms that bring about more
equality under the law, privilege theory is designed to instill whites with the
idea that they didn’t earn what they have. While advocates for WPT often insist
this isn’t about making whites “feel guilty,” the inevitable conclusion of a white
person who accepts WPT is that they have gained what they have through an
unfair system that “preferences” white people. They have what McIntosh calls
“unearned power.”
As Bonacich put it, “we are caught up in the values of
careerism and survival in the system,” and “in protecting ourselves, we become
a part of the system of oppression, and thus accomplices to the crime.”
A properly convicted or “woke” white person will conclude
he is guilty of participating in the unfair system, of playing on an unlevel
playing field that other whites have distorted, not by deliberately excluding
blacks, but by privileging other whites. Whether he walks around with his head
hung low or vocally “confesses” his privilege is beside the point. Advocates of
WPT have shifted the focus away from denouncing and disempowering racist
behavior (as traditionally understood), to seeking to disempower whites as a
class because as a group they are responsible for “oppressing” blacks.
If you sufficiently degrade the idea that our pseudo-capitalist
generally rewards by merit (usually productivity), you degrade the idea that
what we have is truly “earned.” The idea of unearned privilege therefore
undermines support for the meritocracy.
This Undermines the Idea of Private Property. Ultimately,
the idea of unearned privilege unwinds belief in private property, opening the
door for Marxists to fashion policies that undermine property rights so
resources can be redistributed. A belief in “unearned advantages,” leads to a
disturbing question: if we cannot truly earn what we have because we’ve been
given advantages, then does it really belong to us? Have we, in effect, taken
out a mortgage for our success?
Eula Biss penned an essay for The New York Times arguing
that white Americans have in fact taken out a “mortgage.” White guilt is white debt, she
argues. We feel guilty because we haven’t paid it off.
We feel guilty not because we personally have behaved in a
racist manner, but because we’ve indirectly benefited from this country’s
history of very real oppression, though we have participated in none of it:
slavery, Jim Crow laws, and racist housing policies chief among them. “I’m more
compelled by a freedom that would allow me to deserve what I have. Call it
liberation, maybe. If debt can be repaid incrementally, resulting eventually in
ownership, perhaps so can guilt.”
President Obama reflected a similar sentiment during the 2012 campaign,
though in the broader context of opposing tax cuts:
If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your
own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just
so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I
worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a
whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody
along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your
life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have
that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve
got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
His words reflect the Marxist ideology that you can’t take
credit for what you own (Obama’s affiliations with Marxists throughout his
career are well documented),
because “somebody else made that happen.” White privilege theory is undergirded
by the very same idea. WPT leads to white guilt, which leads to a belief that
you don’t truly own what you have.
This is a dangerous road to take. We are already traveling
down it via broader societal consensus on entitlements, which by definition
entitle one American to another American’s money. Taxation is theft, but hardly
anyone acknowledges this. Instead, there’s broad support for
affluent citizens to “pay their fair share,” which indicates a belief that
these citizens aren’t chiefly entitled to the fruits of their own labor, but
someone else, someone poorer, has a greater claim to their wealth.
The more we redistribute, the more we come to think of
someone else’s assets as being on loan from a larger pot of money meant to
serve the collective. Undermining property rights through white privilege
theory greases the hinges on the door to enforcing outcome equality via
redistribution. This is not just a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. Privilege
theory is already leading
to more redistribution—not just of wealth, but of speech and opportunities like
college admissions or job applications. Here are some examples of this.
Progressive Stacking - It
should come as no surprise that white privilege and censorship, both gaining
traction on college campuses, go hand in hand. Many advocates for WPT seek to
redistribute speech through “progressive stacking.”
Speaking slots are not assigned by who signs up to speak first. Rather, the
“stack” is rearranged by “facilitators” so that “marginalized groups” are given
better slots or more speaking time.
According to an Occupy Wall Street
activist, “A progressive stack encourages women and traditionally
marginalized groups to speak before men, especially white men…’Step up, step
back’ was a common phrase of the first week, encouraging white men to
acknowledge the privilege they have lived in their entire lives and to step
back from continually speaking.” Last year, a University of Pennsylvania TA
admitted she uses progressive
stacking in her classroom.
The emphasis on white privilege in college campuses,
together with animus toward pro-individual rights, pro-free market thinking,
has even led student senators at the
University of California at Berkeley to seriously suggest
“reallocating all College Republicans funding to the Black Student Union,” on
the basis that the College Republicans had violated “lead center rules during
Free Speech week” last September (even though the event had been cancelled).
According to Campus Reform’s report, they did not cite any
details about which rules they had violated. Such a blatant redistribution of
funds based on race would not have occurred as a valid idea to these senators
apart from the influence of privilege theory.
Affirmative Action - The
idea of redistributing opportunities to remedy “systemic racism” reached the
policy level decades ago in 1961, when President Kennedy started the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission. This was long before “white privilege” cascaded
into the public consciousness, but it is justified as a remedy for it.
Although it is never billed as such, affirmative action is
essentially a method of redistributing jobs or academic slots based on racial
or gender quotas (in countries where it’s legal) or “targets” (meaning it is a
goal to hire X many minorities, but not a “mandated outcome.”) While the
Supreme Court has ruled against strict quotas in America, it has allowed
universities to factor race into their admissions decisions.
To demonstrate how affirmative action artificially boosts
minorities, thereby “redistributing” according to race, see this Princeton study,
which attempted to quantify the weight given to race in college admissions.
Being African American instead of white is worth an average
of 230 additional SAT points on a 1600-point scale, but recruited athletes reap
an advantage equivalent to 200 SAT points. Other things equal, Hispanic
applicants gain the equivalent of 185 points, which is only slightly more than
the legacy advantage, which is worth 160 points. Coming from an Asian
background, however, is comparable to the loss of 50 SAT points.
So while the authors noted that weights given to legacy
students or athletes sometimes have a greater effect than weights for
ethnicity, it is clear that with affirmative action, the individual scores of
the applicant are secondary in importance to artificially equalized outcomes.
In cases where white candidates are more qualified on individual
merits than minority candidates, yet minorities (apart from Asians) are given a
“bump” because of race so they receive the position or admission instead of
more qualified white candidates, this is a redistribution of opportunity.
Opportunities are redistributed from white candidates to non-white candidates
via a biased selection system.
Forty years ago, affirmative action was meant to “level the
playing field” that had been tilted because of the racial injustices we had
built into law. Today, it is about correcting for “white
privilege” as much as “promoting diversity,” and it will only
gain more traction as the theory gains more adherents.
Disparate Impact - The
concept of “disparate impact” in government policy also serves to promote
redistribution. I described the policy in an article in
2015:
Disparate impact is the idea that policies can have a
disproportionate and adverse effect on minorities. For example, let’s say that
a certain housing policy was not intended to cause racial disparities in types
of housing and allows all people with equal qualifications an opportunity to
live in a single family house. Despite its universal standards for applicants,
if it nevertheless leads to white people aggregating in suburban neighborhoods
made up of single family homes, and Hispanics and blacks aggregating in low
income apartment housing, the theory goes that this ‘disparate impact’ can
constitute racial discrimination.”
The Supreme Court ruled in
a 5-4 decision that disparate impact claims, which have been allowed under the
Civil Rights Act, can now be brought under the Fair Housing Act. This means
local governments are now liable for disparate impact claims, regardless of
whether their policies were meant to discriminate against protected classes
like race or age. The court affirmed HUD’s long-held interpretation of
the Civil Rights Act, and effectively permits HUD to intervene in cases of “a
facially neutral practice that has a discriminatory effect.
Essentially, plaintiffs can demand that housing be
redistributed because non-equitable outcomes, although unintentional, can be
legally viewed as “discriminatory.”
This is exactly what white privilege theory advocates asked
for. The authors of a 2001 report titled
“Persistence of White Privilege and Institutional Racism,” compiled by the
Transnational Racial Justice Initiative, argues that the focus “on intention
versus injury is clearly designed to protect white privilege and make
challenges to this system prohibitive.” The report points to federal housing
policy as a specific example of how white privilege creates “injustice.” It
calls for exactly what the Supreme Court has recently ruled: that disparate
effects should be treated as discrimination.
This idea is closely associated with Banaji’s sentiments
that “discrimination” is about preferencing your in-group rather than showing
bigotry toward blacks because of their race. It’s not about motive, it’s about effect. The
tendency of people to aggregate themselves and their resources around people
similar to them must be corrected by “redistributing” housing (and even people
holding affordable housing
vouchers) among communities of varying densities of whiteness or
blackness.
This is a very serious ruling, considering how strongly we
are biologically and culturally pulled toward communities of our own ethnicity. Babies show a facial
recognition bias toward their own race (or the race they
interact with the most), and this bias continues into adulthood, especially if
their own race makes up the majority of the people they interact with.
It isn’t likely this tendency will diminish outside
radically rearranging family structures (discouraging monoracial parents, for
instance), the ethnic compositions of classrooms, and the larger local
community. If removing the wiring for in-group preference is politically
untenable, progressives are left with simple outcome redistribution to remedy
the problem, which they now have the power to do via claims brought under the Fair
Housing Act.
In short, it is a remedy by diktat, using the force of the
federal bureaucracy to reshape local policy toward more equitable racial
outcomes. In fact, one of the goals of the AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair
Housing) rule is to make every grant-recipient community reflect the racial
proportions of the larger region in which they are found. HUD has therefore
treated candidates for affordable housing as “ethnic units”
to be redistributed toward this goal of racial proportion, and the SCOTUS
ruling validates this goal.
It Is Unfair to Blame Groups for Individual Choices - There is a kernel of truth to the idea of white privilege
as it is often understood by less ideological, casual observers: that white
people generally have an easier time getting on in the world than black people
do. But white privilege theory as originally conceived was never confined to
simply acknowledging that the average white person doesn’t face the same
disadvantages as the average black person (if we can speak of “average” at all,
given that every individual is unique) and encouraging cultural sensitivity and
justice for victims of racism.
It was always
couched in neo-Marxism, identifying whites as oppressors and blacks as the
oppressed, placing blame on the entire white “class,” regardless of its
members’ individual behavior or circumstance, for perpetuating a system that
produces disparate outcomes on the aggregate between whites and blacks. To
acknowledge white privilege in the way McIntosh did, the way “social justice
warriors” and left-leaning college professors do today, is to tacitly accept the
oppressor/oppressed framework. To promote true white privilege theory is to
advocate for the dismantling of the system of oppression: capitalism.
While hardly
anyone outside self-professed socialists would acknowledge this is what is
happening, we see the dismantling of meritocracy and individual rights all
around us. White privilege theory seeks equality of outcome, not merely the
equal dispensation of individual justice. That goal can only be reached by
redistributionist policies that violate the principle of local governance,
treat people as ethnic “units,” limit individuals’ opportunities based on race,
suppress freedom of speech, and restrict the freedom to keep and control one’s
own money.
Although forfeit
of property is generally confined to money (via taxation) and we deem our other
property “safe” from confiscation, the logical conclusion of white privilege
theory is that we can never truly earn what we have, as long as we’ve been the
beneficiaries of in-group preference, so our possessions do not really “belong”
to us. Given other precedents by which government tells us what we can and
cannot do with our property, this fundamental rejection of
property rights, in the minds of enough bureaucrats and judges, would further
imperil their justification under law.
We would do well to acknowledge the disadvantages African
Americans and other minorities face, and to work to mitigate those
disadvantages. We should be less prone to leaning on stereotypes, for example,
and more generous with our individual resources in helping the marginalized,
particularly people who have been tangibly victimized. But to accept white
privilege theory as the Left promotes it is to accelerate our journey down the
road to socialism. As Walter E. Williams wrote, “Which
way are we headed tiny steps at a time – toward greater liberty or toward more
government control over our lives?”
Those who wave off the warnings of Jordan Peterson, Jonathan
Haidt, and others who warn about the infiltration of Marxist thought in higher
education may not fully grasp how dangerous this ideology is. Communism, its
ideological spawn, has led to the deaths of
nearly 100 million people in the last century. Collectivist
ideologies nearly conquered the globe.
Instead of tacitly accepting the theories that trickle out
of the universities, we should critically examine and compare them to the ideas
that gave rise to the human flourishing of the West— individual liberty and
natural rights—to see if they are compatible. In the case of white privilege
theory, it clearly is not.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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