Privilege

For John, BLUF:  One problem facing us with regard to racism is that any solution will likely have winners and losers.  Someone will have to admit to be wrong, or admit that their ancestors were wrong or that they failed to step up when the chance was given.  We need a way for everyone to be a winner.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Atonement as Activism

Here is the sub-headline:

Today’s consciousness-raising on race is less about helping black people than it is about white people seeking grace.

From The American Interest, by Professor John McWhorter, 24 May 2018.

Here is the start:

By the age of 50, you have lived long enough to remember being a mature adult in what is now a distant era.  I recently recalled a conversation I had as a graduate student in 1991 that demonstrates a key change in America’s “conversation” on race over the past 30 years.

A white humanities graduate student was a member of a campus organization that had brought black activist and filmmaker Marlon Riggs to campus to give a talk.  The student recounted that in his critique of racism, Riggs had leveled some potshots at the students themselves.  This surprised and hurt her, as she had supposed that Riggs would consider her and her friends on his side in having invited him to speak.

Today, that same graduate student would be much less likely to take remarks like Riggs’s that way.  Rather, today’s “woke,” educated white people would quite often lap up being apprised of the racism inside of them by a black speaker they paid, lodged, and fed.  That speaker as often as not today is Ta-Nehisi Coates, who charismatically limns America as a cesspool of bigotry in his writing and in talks nationwide, and is joyously celebrated for it by the very people he is insulting.

I was thinking, nearly a decade ago, that maybe we were heading into an age of better race relations, what with the election of President Obama and the appointment of Attorney General Eric Holder.  A decade of lost opportunities.

I think that the Marxist critique has gotten in the way.  People succeed in the United States due to Anglo-Saxon Privilege.  They adopt it.  It isn't about "White" people.  You can see it in Cameroon, where the Anglo-phone Citizens, collectively, do better than the Franco-phone.♠  And when they emigrate to the United States they fit right in.

Later on Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  On the other hand, it looks like the English are giving up their Anglo-Saxon Privilege.