The Culture Of The Smug White Liberal

[Igel]

12. "it’s unfair to judge an entire by the actions of a small minority"

That's one problem. It overgeneralizes.

The second problem is rather more backgrounded. Most white liberals spend virtually no time thinking about the issues others obsess about and assume white liberals also think about. They're busy with school, work, social lives, entertainment, sleeping, personal grooming, eating, etc., etc. To the extent they think, much of it is merely nodding in accord with people who they view as authorities. Because that's quick and easy and psychologically satisfying, and allows them to get back to school, work, social lives, entertainment, sleeping ... Many got their opinions out of a box, all prepared and ready for installation.

Statements like "... I find it telling that they assume that we are not qualified" in response to, "When questioned, they'll defensively state that they promote strictly on merit" are overstating the point. Nobody's making the assumption that (all) black applicants aren't qualified; presumably they've looked and haven't found the top candidate among their applicant pool. What they may do is just choose "white" if given a simple black/white choice of equally qualified candidates. I'd have had a problem with that 20 years ago, but since then have seen so many justifications for not only why some (non-dominant) groups tend to pick in-group members but why this is such a great thing to not generalize the justifications to whites, as well. The argument against it then becomes, "It's wrong because it doesn't help us." Then again, many employers and decisions just go with the most successful applicant without doing outreach. A number of schools' admissions programs had this "problem"--one school I know of had admissions folk saying that to meet their informal quotas they'd have to admit nearly every black applicant but be highly selective for Asian admits. In other words, they didn't want to have the student body self-select, they wanted to engineer diversity but balked when it meant reducing cohort competence. Tough call--and, yes, in that case it was saying that many of the Af-Am candidates were less qualified. (The dichotomy in this article, "qualified" vs "unqualified" as the only two choices, is fallacious.)

As with many such articles, I'm left wondering if the real problem isn't a lack of power and control over others. "White Liberals have hijacked the conversation about diversity, political correctness and what topics we should be outraged about." It's them there white liberals versus us and we resent that they're telling us what we should think. No, really, for the most part white liberals aren't telling other liberals/progressives what they should think, at least not any more than simple peer pressure and push for group conformity would lead them to. Mostly they're talking to each other, which is fine. "We" (I'm quite obviously not in the rather exclusive "we" I think the OP is in) can think whatever the OP's "we" wants, but that's going to be a separate conversation. And "we" has the same power to dictate to "them" that that "them" has to dictate to the OP's "we".

The problem is that if the OP's "we" has that conversation, since it's not the majority or a large minority of the population, it's likely to be a sidebar. And that's a serious issue because it means that "we" lacks power and control. Such is life. (I mean, if my particular minority group had the power to control the conversation we'd be happy, too. But we don't. That was true when I was an American in Brno, it's true for me in America.)