I suspect that all of this talk about white privilege is racist. I don’t mean racist against white people, but as so much of racism seems to be, a twisty attitude against people of color, a descendant of the old British idea of “white man’s burden,” the idea that white people need to care for these lesser people as a matter of noblesse oblige. This is actually a class struggle, not that I want to get all Marxist on you, but class is the great open secret of America.
I refer to the wonderfully snarky book “Radical Chick and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers,” by Tom Wolfe, in which the first essay reports a high society New York event given for members of the Black Panthers by Leonard Bernstein and his friends. The Panthers looked at all these silly white people, but they were not the focus of the story. The interesting part was the hidden attitude of Bernstein and company, that they essentially groveled before these African American insurgents in order to appear liberal and noble before their peers. It’s like High School where everybody looks around to see the reactions of the people standing by before they speak. This is oddly enough a form of racism because it doesn’t allow for the sense of equality that should be there between the classes, but rather in a twisty way, made Bernstein and Co. out to be nobly superior.
Now, all the talk about white privilege is just an episode in the same tawdry story. I cannot help but note how many white people are ready to throw themselves under the bus as people who somehow owe something to existing people of color because of the nasty things their ancestors did, on the basis of their whiteness alone. I know that my family wasn’t even in the country until after the Civil War, and yet somehow I owe people of color something because of the color of my skin.
All of this in the name of white man’s burden. I owe people of color reparations for the evil things that white people of a hundred and fifty years ago did to them, and for some vague “privilege” that doesn’t seem so great to me, all because I am expected to do as Bernstein did and help balance the books and shoulder my part of the white man’t burden by extending a hand to those lesser people, either through affirmative action or through a pervasive guilt that afflicts people of a superior sensibility.
The United States is a nation of “Self Reliance” as Emerson called it, not a nation where power and influence arise from the accident of your birth or the accident of your skin color. To try to reach down and assist people of color avoid the brawling ascendency that Self Reliance demands is little more than taking on their burdens for them because they can’t do it themselves.
