I was discussion Black Lives Matter in an online forum over this past week or so.
As happens more often than not, one of the BLM supporters in the forum – inevitably white and twenty-something – sniffed down their nose that I should check my white male privilege before asking questions about BLM.
Leave aside the thuggish undercurrent – I can’t ask questions about what people want when they’re blocking traffic all over the damn place? – I realized something.
I’ve had enough of people evoking “Privilege” as a rhetorical trump card.
Not just because it’s cowardly, ad-hominem debate – although it certainly is.
But because invoking “privilege” fundamentally goes against everything this country – and, in theory, Black Lives Matter – stands for.
Let me explain.
But first, let’s step back to the beginning:
Goals: BLM sympathizers – especially the smug, outspoken, white liberal ones – are pretty lousy at defining privilege.
But some of them are pretty clear about what they want; to “deconstruct” or “eliminate” or “smash” “privilege”.
So what is it, exactly, they’re trying to deconstruct, eliminate or smash, anyway?
My Tribe: I’ve asked people to define “privilege” for me. The answers – or, let’s be honest, “answers” in most cases – have varied. “If you have to ask, you can’t understand” has popped up more often than not.
In frustration, I came up with my own, over the summer; “Privilege is this; my ancestors came from a patriarchal warrior cult who had zero words for “Hakuna Matata”, but more words for “Kill Them!” than the Inuit have for “snow”. Between this and their geography, nobody ever enslaved them as a culture, thus bequeathing to me a legacy of freedom that is one of the most precious gifts a culture can give its progeny. Your ancestors, largely from sub-saharan, matriarchal tribes, were easy pickings for the patriarchal, warlike tribes that conquered them. How would you like us to address this?”
But that was a little less productive than I’d hoped.
But someone – a young black guy, as I recall – did define it pretty well a while ago. Privilege is going into a place and not having people visibly trying to figure out if you’re “one of the good ones”, and not “one of the ones who’s going to rob you”, or “one of the deadbeat welfare cheats”.
Let’s run with that.
Baseline: In other words, “privilege” is, apparently, being treated like a regular human being.
Also known as “equality”, and “being seen as a human, not a label”.
Which is supposed to be what this country is about; it’s what the Revolutionaries, and Martin Luther King, and many in between and beyond, fought for.
And here’s the thing: equality, like any other freedom or liberty, is not a zero sum equation. You don’t get more freedom, or justice, or equality by taking them from someone else. I don’t get more freedom of speech by censoring you; I don’t become more secure in my home and possessions by making your home and possessions a freeway for unscrupulous district attorneys; I don’t get more equal by treating you as less of an equal.
You don’t get more of the “privileges” of equality, justice, and freedom – we call them “rights” – by “deconstructing, eliminating and/or smashing” my equality, justice and freedom.
You don’t get more equality, justice and freedom by taking them away from other people.
And I don’t think most of the white urban liberals who are jabbering about “privilege” get that.
The Privileged: And they certainly don’t that that, as we discussed a while ago, “white privilege” is not the only kind of privilege in our society – or even, perhaps, the most pervasive.
Think about it for a moment. Two people walk into Minnesota Public Radio’s executive office; Nekima Pounds-Levy, Ph. D and tenured, termination-proof professor at Saint Thomas University, and Billy Bob Beauregard, small engine mechanic and owner of a thick Alabama accent.
Who gets taken seriously, regardless of the validity of their respective ideas?
Who’s got the privilege?
Class is every bit the privilege that race is.
I especially appreciate the irony of black kids squirting tears about privilege from the leafy campuses of elite Universities.
Next, they’ll be marching around because none of their resumes will get anywhere close to a rational hiring manager once they are identified as whiny assholes.
My “white privilege” is coming from a broken home and being the grandson of four people who grew up on small farms, really pretty poor. Three sets of great-grandparents lost those farms in the Depression, one of which was bought back by my paternal grandfather just in time for World War Two to come around–leading to the federal government appropriating that land as part of the Green River Ordinance Plant. He bought more land so my great-grandparents would have something to do, and ended up dying before he could enjoy it.
So yeah, you can take that privilege and shove it. Don’t even get me started on the people I know who arrived here penniless as refugees–at one place I worked, two out of twelve books of security documents were for employees named “Nguyen”.
Progressives want to redistribute privilege the way they want to redistribute wealth.
Progressives want to redistribute privilege the way they want to redistribute wealth
Incompetently, based entirely on ideology, and with no regard to unintended consequences?
Privilege is the new Prejudice is the new Stereotype . . . it’s all the same complaint. Walter Williams gave a memorable explanation why it happens.
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2006/09/20/whats_prejudice/page/full
If stereotypes weren’t at least partly true, they’d have no utility and nobody would use them (nobody jokes about fat Somalis, but about Skinnies). You change a stereotype by having enough young Black men change their behavior to make a new stereotype, one you like better, perhaps one of valor, or studiousness, or fidelity. No amount of complaining about White Privilege can do that.
A smart conservative recently wrote that the actual issue isn’t important to the far left. They just write up a narrative ahead of time and what for an excuse. Then latch on to whatever they can to ram said narrative down our throats.
-This thug was a women beater and common street criminal
-He was assaulting paramedics and police officers who were assisting his victim
The police in N Mpls are being incredibly restrained. Yet the loony left has their lawyers and cameras out and have put out their pre-written story.
-See Keith Ellison and his son as an example. Threaten police. Police point teargas or some softball gun at the crowd to warn them. Take a photo with a long lens to compress the image, and say the police were aiming assault rifles at peaceful peoples of color.
And us conservatives sit back with our popcorn and watch the show in Americans 10th most liberal city.
I wonder if all the straight hipsters who rallied for the gay marriage thing are going to come up to North Minneapolis and spend some time on the streets.
The greatest privilege of all is to decide who is and who is not privileged.
***** I’ve had enough of people evoking “Privilege” as a rhetorical trump card.****
Why did you ever take any of it at all?
Why did you ever take any of it at all?
Eventually you gotta pick your battles.
After watching the BLM protests at universities the last few months, I am convinced that at some point they will demand that all of the one-time confederates states be ejected from the Union. Possibly with the addition of the slave states of Missouri and Maryland.
Bento, the phrase you’re looking for is “The South will rise again!”
Race is only a social construct.
Racial privilege is also only a social construct.
The idea that race and racial privilege exist is also a social construct.
The idea that racial privilege is a bad thing is also a social construct.
As Bing Crosby, the narrator of Disney’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” told us long ago, “You can’t reason with a headless man.”
I’m sure glad that I didn’t have the privileges of affirmative action or quotas.
I would have felt so guilty now, had I been accepted into college or landed a job because of them.
Not all inequality is imposed — a fair amount is manufactured by those who eventually suffer the consequences.