|
The Strange Career of White Privilege
h/t InstapunditYou hear the phrase "white privilege" nonstop in America these days, as the slogan has transcended the campus and entered popular culture. ...During the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, the nation’s racial tensions were mostly still defined as a binary of a dominant white majority and an often discriminated-against African-American minority. Years of past prejudice had sparked the idea of affirmative action, or federal reparatory programs accorded to a historically discriminated-against black minority. However, by the 1980s, owing to new cycles of massive immigration, other minorities likewise explained their own inequality in terms of white-majority oppressors. They lobbied to be included in government reparation programs in job hiring and college admissions. ...Sometimes even slight changes in self-identification have consequences. For the children of intermarried couples, it can be a career-changing decision to evolve from Robert Smith to Robert Garcia Smith (or even better Roberto Garcia Smith) to reflect one’s maternal Latino roots ‐ an effort especially appreciated by universities and employers. ...In some cases, the more desperate have invented minority pedigrees out of whole cloth, like the false but self-serving and opportunistic claim of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) that she was Native American (on the basis of "high cheekbones" or family mythology), or Professor Ward Churchill’s similar fake Native American get-up that got him hired as a minority at the University of Colorado. ...One of the strangest elements of the American obsession with superficial appearance is the habit of very well connected and affluent whites faulting poor whites for their "white privilege." It has become a sort of rite-of-passage virtue-signaling in which rich, white college students at tony universities damn white privilege and the supposedly racist, nativist, xenophobic, and sexist Trump Neanderthals. With this, they establish their spiritually pure fides or, more practically, earn a sort of insurance policy in case the all-seeing eye of the diversity tower turns its focus on them someday. And he doesn't even mention "war against men" Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2018-07-12 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=518308 |