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Showing Original Post only (View all)Why I don't like the term "white privilege" [View all]
Some background, as I mainly post in the I/P forum.
I am not white. I am Arab, specifically of Lebanese background. I "look" Arab.
My family fled the Lebanese Civil War, firstly to West Africa, where there is a substantial, tight-knit Lebanese community. My family began working alongside other Lebanese in various import/export businesses. They were already reasonably well-to-do, and became considerably richer during this time. African governments are by and large corrupt and incompetent, so rather than trying to organise their own supplies of whatever they needed they would buy them directly from us. Then of course you have the Western NGOs, who are always looking to buy stuff but don't really care what they pay as they are spending their donors' money. Almost always whatever they bought was at a 10% markup.
My family eventually "graduated" to exporting rough gemstones, which meant we spent some time in and out of central Africa. This was partly because Chinese traders had started to displace the Lebanese shop owners in West Africa, basically because they could source product more cheaply. Through the gem trade, we became, and remain, what people even in Western countries would consider wealthy. This financed our emigration to the UK and eventually Australia. For myself, in a fit of adolescent pique, I refused to work in the old man's business for the old man's money, and so became a lawyer, even though my siblings still work in the family business.
I was educated firstly at a boarding school which was attended mainly by rich Saudi playboys, and later at exclusive schools in the UK and Australia, where there were still plenty of rich Saudi playboys, as well as plenty of Chinese and Indian playboys as well.
Our ethnicity, I think, was a distinct advantage to us in Africa. We weren't Westerners, so we didnt have any colonial baggage. At about this time Lebanon was getting the shit bombed out of it by Israel, and given the sympathy Africans had for Palestinian nationalism this made them inclined to regard us favourably as well (ironically, a lot of our gemstones would be cut and polished in Israel). Coming from a fragile political environment in Lebanon, we also knew how to not run foul of the Africans.
My time in central Africa made me into something of a Marxist. I saw small snippets of the Third World War in and around the Congo, in which 8 million Black people were murdered by other Black people. I remember how shocked I was when my father first pointed out slaves to me. You can always spot them in parts of central Africa by the distinctive bangles they wear on their ankles and wrists. "What can you do?" my father said. "It is their culture". Myself, I saw it as the natural consequence of a global proletariat that had been denied resources and had begun to slaughter and enslave itself in its will to survive.
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I dislike the term white privilege for a couple of reasons. The first is that it implies that being non-white is some sort of permanent disability. It encourages fatalistic attitudes on the part of non-white people that they cannot possibly succeed in what they regard as a white man's world. The fact is that the white man is just about busted-arse broke, and the next century is likely to belong to Chinese and Indians who are likely to dwarf the West in terms of growth for the next few decades.
It also gives me a free pass, which I probably don't deserve. I could bask in the comfort of being a persecuted non-white person, but the fact is that besides being screened at airport security just about every god damn time I am very seldom inconvenienced by my ethnicity. Being Arab has definitely been a net gain for me.
But the biggest problem that I have with the term "white privilege" is that it is used as an instrument to destroy class consciousness. The wealthiest group in the United States are not whites. It is in fact Indian-Americans who have a median household income of about 100k per family. The poorest county in the US is Martin County, Kentucky, which is 90%+ white.
Poor African Americans and poor whites in the US are kept poor for the same reasons. They are denied adequate health care, education and employment opportunities. When a well-meaning New Lefter insists that a poor White is "privileged", he or she gets upset for legitimate reasons. A privilege that does not amount to a material benefit is not much of a privilege at all. The most that could be said of being white is that it results in a greater tendency to be privileged, and not that it inherently constitutes a privilege. To the extent that Whites have privilege, it is because they have more money. If Blacks held as much money as Whites there would be no White privilege. It is therefore, essentially a function of class, rather than one which attaches to race irrespective of context.
The 20th century trade union movement, which encouraged working class people to organise and to overlook their racial and religious differences, resulted in the only real gains for those people in living history. It was a successful example of coalition politics. Yes, the union leadership was mostly male and mostly white. But the wage increases they obtained for workers black and white were worth more than the pious exclamations of "white privilege" by the New Left for the past several decades. By any metric, the circumstances of Black people (who remain predominantly working class) have not improved under the New Left. They have gone backwards together with the interests of working class whites.
That they have gone backwards is no accident. The national obsession with race in the media persists because it works to the advantage of the ruling class in America. It is a deliberate divide and conquer policy. It is carried out with the acquiescence of the overwhelmingly middle-class New Left, which regards poor whites with blatant stereotyping and overt hostility (consider, for example, that just about every cartoon character with an Appalachian accent is a simple-minded moron, and the frequent references to trailer-trash living, flyover-state dwelling inbred rednecks in contemporary Left circles).
The term "white privilege" also gives the Black middle class a pass, which frankly they probably don't deserve either. Barack Obama, for example, did not come from the same social class as "traditional" African Americans. He was the son of a senior Kenyan econocrat. In fact many high-achieving Black Africans in US academia are predominantly not traditional African Americans but are instead migrants from the professional classes of Namibia, Kenya and other countries. They are no more inclined to naturally care for working class Blacks than ruling class Whites are to care for the lot of poor Whites. The fact that Barack Obama is no more liberal and in fact quite centrist in comparison to other Democratic presidents is testament to this.