The Myth of White Privilege

{snip}

Of course, it isn’t really true that we Caucasians get together in a big conference hall somewhere and, rubbing our hands together with devilish glee, conspire as to how we’re gonna get ourselves some’a that there white privilege. Yet you wouldn’t know it listening to egghead academics, media mouths, and uncivil rights agitators.

Put “white privilege” into a search engine and no small number of results will be for “.edu” URLs, which means that our mental institutions of higher learning are busy teaching “critical race theory” and ideas such as “Whites are taught not to recognize white privilege” and that, as this University of Dayton site informs, white persons have a “special freedom or immunity from some [liabilities or burdens] to which non-white persons are subject[.]” There is also something called “The White Privilege Conference” and a website devoted to it (I actually had to log on to make sure it wasn’t a spoof site, but truth is stranger–and stupider–than fiction). And American Thinker recently wrote about an event called “Erasing White Privilege,” during which whites sat around in a room confessing their collective oppressor sins while “people of color” discharged rage, “yelling at them” and “preaching.” Ain’t Obama’s post-racial America grand?

{snip}

White privilege is a myth.

Let’s look at the facts. Because of the fashionable discrimination known as affirmative action, whites (males especially) are often untouchables in the job market. {snip} Then there is the Dayton, OH police department, which recently discarded its recruit exam and the scores of 748 people who passed it because not doing so would have resulted in too many whites being hired.

And there is social discrimination as well. While black comedians can use derogatory terms for whites such as “cracker,” white comedians who use corresponding anti-black racial epithets risk career destruction. A racial slur isn’t even necessary for a white person to incur the thought police’s wrath. {snip}

There is also a trove of government programs designed to aid minorities–such as those geared toward minority-owned businesses–but no corresponding help for whites. And, as whistleblowers recently revealed, our Department of Justice has long been ignoring voting-rights cases when the victims have been white.

{snip}

And what about blacks’ dominance in mainstream sports? Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to talk about “black athletic privilege”?

Group-specific success isn’t just an American phenomenon, either. {snip}

So while we could prattle on about Chinese privilege in Malaysia or those privileged Japanese boys from Brazil, it would be wiser to accept a simple truth: There is simply no evidence that all groups can succeed equally in every endeavor.

And this brings us to the real prejudice at work here. Whether it’s Jewish Nobel Prize-winners, blacks in the athletic arena, or something else, we generally give credit where it is due.

Except when the relatively successful group is white people.

Then they are guilty–of discrimination, oppression, and victimization–and will never be proven innocent. Their success just must have come at the expense of others, no matter what the facts say.

{snip}