For many years now the American academy has been besieged with the theme of “white privilege,” which holds to the notion that being born white carries its own guilt based on a sense of superiority which even the most innocent white person may not realize. In recent years, especially at more privileged progressive schools such as the Ivy League, white students have had to undergo ritualistic cleansings, to purge themselves of the impurities of whiteness…sort of like sorority and fraternity hazing. Entire university departments have been dedicated to this process, which costs the parents who want their kids to get that special sheepskin from Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Wellesley etc, an extra ten grand a year just to keep those few professors in their Volvos.
Now they want to take “white privilege” national, and weave it into the body politic, so, like the men in pink kilts at a St Patrick’s Day parade, we can have our noses rubbed in it every day. And, now that they’ve shown an amenability to this sort of blackmail, we can look for the NBA and NFL to begin running PSA’s and sensitivity training in a coming season.
It’s time this is stamped out.
Here’s why…it’s all a damned lie.
To begin with, by taking “white privilege” to the street, it no longer has anything to do with the victimization of the black-community; i.e, institutional racism such as jobs, affirmative action, voter ID or Pepsi’s and Moon Pies. Hell, it has has nothing to do with black people, not so’s you’d know them. This has been a sinecure of academic privilege, a secure departmental slot on the university payroll for years. It would be easier to dump the Chemistry Department than this lot. But with this move to the general population, black academicians, like Rosa Parks from another time, are being kicked to the back of the bus by being pushed to the front of the protest line, much like the ’68 riots, where girls were pushed to the front of the protest line, because the white superiorists knew guardsmen would never put a rifle butt in one of their faces. Today a black college professor with a Trotsky goatee serves the same purpose as those braless babes with no makeup and bushy eyebrows.
The real target here is the “privilege of being American,” not white privilege, for America has disproved everything…everything…Marxism and racial politics has tried to teach us about race. And the Left has to turn this around now.
The fingerprints of white Marxist liberalism is all over this “white privilege” theme today, so just as every civil rights believer has forgotten what Dr King said in order to keep his place at the table set by white liberals, black academicians may as well forget what W E B Du Bois wrote about white privilege as well, for that is no longer the issue here. Black folk don’t invent their histories but white leftists/Marxists always do just that. So black academicians must now choose, are they black first or Marxists first?
You see….
Fact: Between 1862 and 1865 nearly half a million white men died in a war that their white president, Abraham Lincoln, caused, just by being elected, namely to free from slavery a race of people almost none of those young white men had ever seen.
Yes, I know scholars have given us all sorts of others reasons for the Civil War; economic, sociological, etc, but I’m talking about what it was that compelled millions of young men on farms and in small towns in the North to enlist. For the most part, in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, the only thing those young men knew about Negroes was from two generations of preachers railing against slavery from the pulpit and the inhumanity and utter un-Americanism of one man owning another. So they left those farm cots by the millions to enlist. And half a million never came home.
In all of mankind’s history this had never happened before, anywhere, that millions of men would risk, and half a million would lay down, “their lives for their brothers”(John 15:13), for total strangers that had never ever seen.
And yes, almost all those men were white, and all the slaves they freed were not. How do these half million deaths fit into modern demands for “reparations” or demand that white Americans wear the scarlet brand of “white privilege”? (Did you know that most privileged white liberals never came to this country until a generation after this great sacrifice?)
Being “white” had nothing to do with what propelled those young men off their farms.
But another term did.
As Paul Harvey would say, “Now for the rest of the story,” for you see, between 1865 and 2009 nearly three-quarters of a million more Americans repeated this selfless act, also laying down their lives for people they didn’t know. Most notable among them were the over 400,000 Americans who died on foreign shores and seas in World War II, to rescue people as diverse as Filipinos and the French. Yes, even the French. Only this time among the Americans who died there were thousands of children of those original freed slaves.
The same for Korea, and then Vietnam, where the number of black soldiers increased drastically, in all ranks, from draftees to officers, witness Colin Powell. While some argue Vietnam was made up of draftees, explain then why, by 2003 an all-volunteer military rescued 6 million Arabs in Iraq from a murderous dictator, providing them the means to forge their own democratically-elected government…the first one in the Arab Middle East. (It probably won’t be allowed to last since this act of rescue was designed by a Republican, unlike the Vietnam failure, which was once called “the last liberal war,” i.e, Democrat.)
Since Vietnam, only no one is counting, white American, black Americans, and Latino-Americans have followed in the footsteps of those white (privileged?) farm boys from Pennsylvania in the 1860s, and risked their lives to rescue and free people as alien to themselves as Bill Clinton’s ethics are to me.
I’m trying to connect a thread here, only you know already, the right term isn’t “white.” It is “to be American.” Ser Americano. And I am quite certain to derail this is why the privileged white elitists of the Left have stolen this issue from their house blacks in the academy.
The issue isn’t whiteness, but privilege, the privilege “to be American”…for at no other place or time in man’s history have Americans black, white and Hispanic men, volunteered, not once, but several times, and risked their lives for total strangers. Dr King’s Civil Rights movement, which W E B Du Bois dreamed of, was all about the fact that blacks had been denied the ability “to be American.” Only here they are, now. Only now that they are here, suddenly they are told to look around and see that “to be an American’ is a bad thing.
Show me the Nigerian who ever went to die for a Ghanian. Show me a Peruvian who ever marched off to risk all for a Bolivian. Or the Chinaman for the Japanese, or the Russian for anyone. Considering the tens of thousands of American white crosses on French soil, show me a French cross in any foreign land, unless left there by a French invader.
Then show me any privileged white or black, man or woman, politician, college professor or professional race huckster, who would raise one finger to defend his neighbor, or put a crowbar in his (own) wallet to rescue a neighbor… or even send two lousy hundred bucks to a half-brother who needed a medical procedure.
On the other hand, show me one white or black person who can stand in the midst of a triumphant surgical team ….
…and I will show you one who is privileged to be an American.
We have to stamp this “white privilege” nonsense out. And I aim to do it.
