Not too long ago, it was considered taboo to draw unnecessary attention to someone’s ethnicity, skin color, or racial identity. Black, white, brown — whatever: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made such a compelling argument about judging each other on the “content of our character” instead of the color of our flesh that he thoroughly discredited his opponents.
This was one of the less-publicized legacies of King: He made racism sound pretty stupid. (Of course, it is.)
Collectively, we judged Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by the content of his character and wished we could be more like him. Being a racist was just about the worst thing you could be!
So if you’re over the age of 40, you've had friends, teammates, acquaintances, dates, classmates, and colleagues of all kinds of different ethnicities. Most of the time, your conversations never pertained to skin color; it was irrelevant. It’s not that you were unaware of racial distinctions; after all, noting that white and black people look different doesn’t make you racist — it makes you minimally observant. But why bring it up?
Let’s face it, if the most interesting thing about someone is their ethnicity, they’re probably a boring person. And who wants to be friends with someone boring?
This MLK approach to race led to impressive results within an astonishingly short period of time: Just a few decades after “colored” restrooms, segregation, and other examples of actual systemic racism, America changed.
We even elected a black president!
America’s future, it seemed, was of racial harmony. Sure, racism (and bigotry, and meanness, and dishonesty, and evil) can never be 100% eliminated, but give society credit for making so much progress: The election of Barack Obama — by a landslide! — conclusively proved that in America, anyone could achieve anything.
All that mattered was how hard you worked, how big you dreamed, and how much you prayed.
But something strange happened during the Obama years: Instead of taking Americans to a post-race future, he deliberately reopened the scars of our forefathers, providing intellectual cover to the race-based bigotry of the radical Left.
And once the floodgates opened, people saw EVERYTHING through a racial prism.
The United States was no longer a land of hope and freedom where anyone of any skin color could rise to the highest office. It was a country built on the backs of slaves, where the systemic racism of white supremacy still reigned supreme.
That is why, even to this day, all white people have “white privilege.”
It’s a logical offshoot of critical race theory (CRT). CRT’s central conceit is that racism is the building block of American life — “it’s a feature, not a bug” — so therefore, the only way to end racism is to radically upend American laws, politics, culture, society, and freedoms.
If you’re white in America, you’re de facto guilty of white privilege. Period, end of story.
Politically, it’s a useful phrase for the radical Left, because it switches the burden of expectations: Before, you needed an actual, tangible example to tar-and-feather someone as racist. You needed to point to something they did or said. But with white privilege, that’s no longer necessary: If they’re white, they’re guilty.
It’s an insidious perversion of the English language because the examples given of white privilege mostly involve things that aren’t a “privilege” at all but how everyone ought to be treated: Not being blamed for things you didn’t do; not being judged for things you can’t control; not being victimized by law enforcement or financial institutions.
“The privilege is invisible to many white people because it seems reasonable that a person should be extended compassion as they move through the world,” we are piously told by the race regulators and CRT proponents. (Which is rather odd because if white privilege was as all-encompassing as they claimed, then certainly we’d be more cognizant of it, wouldn’t we?)
Of course, there’s another potential explanation why this “privilege” is so “invisible”: It doesn’t actually exist!
Hey, Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Abominable Snowman are “invisible,” too.
Not being hassled by the cops isn’t a “privilege” at all. It’s your God-given human right! And it belongs to all Americans — white, black, and anyone in between. That’s because the United States of America is the one country on Earth that recognizes that your rights aren’t derived from government, but from the Almighty.
But that’s the game they’re playing: They want to redefine a “right” as a “privilege.” After all, if the right doesn’t truly exist — if it’s just a “privilege” — then it can be taken away.
And then you can finally redesign society.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member