STRUCTURAL RACISM
February 2011
Editor's Note 8/29/20: This was written by a Tea Partier in 2011. Everything came true, except it only took nine years and it's being carried on by self-declared "trained Marxists".
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Highlights
* The Left is misusing race under the banner of 'structural racism' as a weapon to advance its collectivist, redistributionist agenda.
* Structural racism advocates are making significant inroads in both civil rights circles and popular thought.
* Unless somebody with influence starts standing up to the structural racism crowd, structural racism will become a 20-year overnight policy success. It's already well on its way.
* Anyone hoping to compete with structural racism advocates rhetorically had better come to the battle well-prepared and able to match their sophistication.
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Contents
* Why This Report?
* Anticipating Charges of Racism
* What is Structural Racism?
* Initial Observations
* Playground of the Left
-- Duke Law School Conference
-- Left-wing Publication
-- Van Jones Endorsement
* Inroads Already Made
* Youth Training
* Rhetorical Challenges
* Debating Points
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Why This Report?
Now is the time to pay attention to the Left's new rallying cries, "structural racism". Issue campaigns can take 20 years to gestate. The Supreme Court's recognition of gun rights for individuals came after 20 years of effort on the part of the National Rifle Association that begin with commissioning law professors to write scholarly articles in law journals. Gays can marry in five states today because gay activists have been working the gay marriage issue for the last 15 years or more.
A year before the push for Obamacare, Left-wing activists at a progressive conference discussed how to craft a bill to make insurance companies "whither on the vine" so the country would eventually have no choice but to turn to single-payer, i.e., socialized medicine. The activists' vision came to fruition a year later in Obamacare.
A similar campaign is now underway for structural racism and its redistributionist policy aims. The groundwork is being laid and headway is steadily being made. The idea has thoroughly penetrated civil rights circles and is grabbing mindshare elsewhere. Agitators are indoctrinating minority youth in structural racism concepts, setting up future policy successes at the voting booth. The Left can win again unless attention is paid to structural racism now and the efforts of its advocates resisted.
Anticipating Charges of Racism
Because any writing that does not toe the Liberal-Left line on race is immediately pelted with charges of racism, let's be very clear: The purpose of this report is to expose the Left, its despicable collectivist philosophy, and its redistributionist policy prescriptions. Those prescriptions are antithetical to the classical liberal values upon which this country was founded -- individualism, limited government, and personal freedom. What structuralism racism advocates assert is objectionable, not because of the color of their skin, but because it offends the philosophical core of the American Idea. One's fidelity ought to be to a set of ideas, not a skin tone. Moreover, there are plenty of people of color who subscribe to the nation's founding ideals, reject the Left's world-view of collectivism, and object to the misuse of race to sell the Left's redistributionist agenda. The only color that's important here is gray, as in gray matter, people using their brains to see what the Left is selling for what it is -- snake oil.
What is Structural Racism?
Despite the passage of civil rights laws and wholesale changes in social attitudes in the last 50 years, racism remains as big a problem as ever in the United States today, structural racism theory holds. The white population still controls most of the country's institutions. Racial disparities continue to exist. Minorities still do not fare as well as whites with respect to outcomes in employment, healthcare, incarceration rates, HIV/AIDS, academic achievement, etc. Because these inferior outcomes have proven intractable, it is time to look beyond the facts of individual cases of discrimination and instead indict society as a whole, dispensing with the need for any proof that racism is the cause of these disparities. That there are many more whites of goodwill today who are not racially prejudiced is irrelevant. The disparities exist; that's proof enough. Public policy must be changed to coerce total equality of outcomes with respect to income, education, healthcare, and all social indicators.
Initial Observations
When you take the wrapper off of structural racism, the same old red malarkey is found inside as in all Left-wing causes -- total redistribution of income and wealth -- collectivist prescriptions heavy on state coercion and short on any real understanding of human nature. Structural racism, like social justice, global warming, and Obamacare before it, provides academic cover for the enactment of the Left's over-arching agenda of coerced economic equality. As with these other political stratagems, structural racism is just another excuse for liberal fascists to bend others to their will and grow the government.
The bootstrapping quotient in structural racism advocacy is very high. The fewer overt racist acts there are, the more systemic and subtle racism exists. Denying you are racist means you are racist. When you don't see yourself as manifesting racial problems, you are. You can have racism without racists. Color-blind thinking is racist. Unequal outcomes are intrinsically racist. Disparities are ipso facto proof of racism, even when no proof of motive can be shown. Refusing to acknowledge the existence of structural racism means the problem is worse than ever. The fact that many people of color have succeeded in this country proves nothing and is to be ignored. People of color who disagree with the Liberal-Left line on race, or who are not fixated on racial justice issues like their civil rights masters, suffer from internalized oppression. Structural racism advocates must think that, if they sprinkle enough fairy dust, people will start to believe them.
Structural racism is completely open-ended and unbounded in theory. Its grievances, diagnoses, and policy prescriptions will never end. Why? Because advocates will tell you that racism will never be fully eliminated. Thus, there's no satisfying the structural racism crowd, ever. They have discovered a political perpetual motion machine that enables them to keep moving the goalposts forever. You start going down this road and there will be no end to it, whether there's still any racism anywhere or not.
Never-ending racism. How convenient for the Democrats, always the party of big government and now the party of Karl Marx. The aim of structural racism advocacy is to keep people angry and group-identified so they will remain a reliable voting bloc for the Democratic Party. Victimology and identity politics serve these purposes well. It makes a difference in elections if people have as their first thought 'I'm a victim' instead of 'I'm free'.
A priestly class of professional civil rights agitators is supposedly needed to intercede on non-whites' behalf and navigate the system for them. These agitators are pushing structural racism and sowing dissension in order to make money for themselves. Entire livelihoods and careers are being made in structural racism advocacy, which renders the advice these advocates dispense suspect because it is completely self-interested. They don't get paid unless they can convince people a problem exists. Follow the money. Self-interest was blatantly on parade in the attempted shakedown of the Peekskill, New York city council by the Cortlandt Peekskill Anti-Racist Collaborative (CPARC) in October 2010. First the wind-up: CPARC representatives began attending meetings to harangue council members about "institutional and structural racism" and "white privilege". In line with structural racism's claim that individual discrimination no longer matters, CPARC stated this was not about specific instances of racism. "Every white person is a racist," a CPARC representative intoned at one meeting. Then the pitch: To have a dialogue with advocates, city leaders needed to attend a three-day workshop ("Undoing Racism") run by the Anti-Racist Alliance at only $350 a pop. Beats working for a living.
Playground of the Left
This report asserts that structural racism agitation is the product of an unholy alliance between civil rights professionals and the Left. A first cut at documenting the Left's ties to structural racism theory and advocacy rests on a 2010 academic conference, agitprop reportáge in a Marxist publication, and documentary filmmaking endorsed by such Left-wing figures as Van Jones, the former Obama White House 'green jobs czar'.
Conference -- Speakers at an April 2010 Duke Law School conference on race on C-SPAN openly advocated the redistribution of income to redress inequality in racial outcomes in America. ("From Slavery to Freedom to the White House" - archived at http://www.law.duke.edu/lrp/conference).
The premise of the conference was that there is a discrepancy in life outcomes (income, education, etc.) between whites on the one hand and blacks and Latinos on the other. As this persists even in the absence of actual illegal acts of discrimination, the panel inferred that these disparities must be due to “persistent structural inequality.” As Prof. Daria Roithmayr of USC (former counsel to Sen. Edward Kennedy and People for the American Way) explained, this is the product of historical discrimination which has illegitimately created a position of power for whites through their use of “cartel conduct", whereby whites monopolize societal, educational, and economic structures to the exclusion of minorities. Roithmayr compares this to Microsoft which, in her view, committed illegal acts to gain market advantage and subsequently thrived by virtue of its illicit position in operating systems. Similarly, whites monopolize jobs, neighborhoods, schools etc., creating a system of exclusion which is perpetuated through self-reinforcing feedback loops. Structural racism and inequality being the diagnosis, race policy therefore needs to go beyond the current set of anti-discrimination laws and enforce equality of outcomes. The goal of race policy, then, is to have the government step in, break structural inequality, and redistribute wealth.
To break structural inequality, Prof. Roithmayr advocated legally prohibiting word-of-mouth referrals for high-paying or high status jobs. As for redistributing wealth, Prof. Glenn Loury of Boston University would do it through Social Security and Prof. Dalton Conley of New York University would accomplish it through healthcare (which we now know, thanks to a quote from a Senator closely involved, was avowedly redistributionist in its aims). The conference panel also espoused the creation of “baby bonds” which would create trust funds for low-income children who could access them upon reaching adulthood. The panel noted that proposals directed to color-blind socio-economic status would be more politically palatable than those directed at race per se. Prof. Conley indicated he didn't really care about the means as long as the goal of income redistribution is achieved.
Left-Wing Publication -- Workers World does not hide the ball. Its logo features a Red Star and the slogan "Workers & Oppressed Peoples of the World Unite!" It's put out by the Workers World Party which, according to its website, "fights against capitalism" and "fights for a socialist society." In a November 2010 story, the publication argued that trade union consciousness must expand to encompass structural racism theory because "Black liberation [is] a central step towards the overthrow of capitalism inside the U.S." Specifically, companies in the South perpetuate racial division between workers as a means "to keep wages low and unions weak." The bottom line: workers of all races should join hands to overthrow the capitalist system.
Van Jones -- "Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible" is a 2006 documentary film by Shakti Butler, Ph.D., executive director of World Trust Educational Services, Inc. in Oakland, California. The film (discussed in more detail below) features ordinary people, mostly white, recounting their personal experiences with racial divides. The film is not explicitly political. However, "Mirrors of Privilege" is not a harmless little puff piece on the need for better race relations or changing social attitudes. As argued below, the film is not to be taken at face value but for what it is - a slick piece of propaganda designed to turn your thinking and soften you up to accept the redistributionist and other socialist policy goals of the hard Left. The film uses race as a weapon to advance the Left's political agenda.
The proof of political purpose is in three parts. First, the film does become overtly political near the end. It speaks favorably of reparations for slavery. Moreover, in a daring bit of sophistry, it argues that affirmative action is merely about equality of opportunity, not guaranteeing equality of outcome which it obviously does by assigning jobs and school slots on the basis of race. As discussed above, structural racism advocates are pushing for equality of outcome in every sphere - education, healthcare, income, you name it. If they can pass off affirmative action as equality of opportunity and thus co-opt the rhetoric of their opponents, they will.
Second, World Trust is currently making another movie that is overtly political and explicit in asserting structural racism. The second film is incontrovertible proof that the filmmakers are pushing a political agenda. According to their website, "By connecting moving personal stories to a broader societal context, Cracking the Codes: Race and Relationships in the 21st Century illuminates the institutional and structural aspects of racial inequity. Help us complete this film in 2011!"
Third, members of World Trust's Advisory Board agitate for Left-wing causes. Carl Anthony, Ph.D. "is the founder and former executive director of the Urban Habitat Program, one of the oldest environmental justice organizations in the country." Connie Cagampang Heller "works with individual donors and national donor membership organizations to deepen commitment to building an inclusive, political infrastructure that has social justice at its core."
And, here's the clincher: The lead endorsement of "Mirrors of Privilege" on World Trust's website is from another Advisory Board member, Van Jones. Van Jones, you will recall, is the admitted communist and 'green jobs czar' who was forced to leave the Obama White House after being exposed as a radical. Van Jones is currently a senior fellow at the George Soros-funded Center For American Progress. Not only does the Van Jones connection prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that "Mirrors of Privilege" is political propaganda, it undergirds the assertion that structural racism advocacy and policy demands are creatures of the hard Left.
It's hard to take seriously anything that structural racism advocates say when you know that the Left is behind it all. Maybe some of the people involved in the structural racism movement are well-intentioned and naïve, but this would make them 'useful idiots', as Lenin would say, pawns in someone else's game.
If the Left can ride this pony, it will, just as it has ridden environmentalism, healthcare, and the other 'progressive' issues that have gained traction in recent years.
Inroads Already Made
Structural racism generates 80 new hits a day in Google. Here's a run-down of where structural racism is making inroads -
* youth training (detailed herein)
* academic conferences (detailed herein)
* presidential speeches (Obama's speech to the NAACP's 100th anniversary convention where, in a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, he used the less incendiary term 'structural inequalities')
* statements by members of Congress (e.g., Rep. Barbara Lee [D-CA]: "white privilege, institutional racism, and structural inequalities still exist")
* explanations by outsiders of the Tea Party (structural racism is why the Tea Party, a putative extension of the white working class majority, is supposedly working against the universalization of social rights for all ethnic groups)
* attempts to fuse the campaign against structural racism with trade unionism (Workers Word communist newspaper, discussed herein)
* strategizing by the civil rights and anti-poverty grievance industry (e.g., the Poverty & Race Research Action Council)
* the formation of an umbrella group for advocacy organizations working on structural racism (the Structural Racism Caucus)
* books ("Poverty and Power: The Problem of Structural Inequality" by Edward Royce; "Color-Blind" by Tim Wise; "Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America" by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva)
* documentary films (“Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible" and the forthcoming "Cracking the Codes: Race and Relationships in the 21st Century" by Shakti Butler) (discussed herein).
* serious grant money ("Kellogg Foundation Awards Maynard Institute $1.2 Million to Improve Media Coverage of Structural Racism and its Impact")
* university administration (the University of California at San Diego agreed to take steps to boost minority enrollment after the Black Student Union complained of structural racism)
* complaints to the United Nations (300 activist groups, including Amnesty International USA and the ACLU, blasted the U.S. report to the UN Human Rights Council, asserting structural racism's claim that "discrimination permeates all aspects of life in the U.S.")
* the Lutheran church (in October 2010, the mostly white European American Lutheran Association gathered in a national conference to discuss how to "overcome institutional and structural racism, throughout congregations, the denomination, and the world")
* careers ("celebrated anti-racism essayist, author, educator and speaker Tim Wise; self-described "community therapist" Harlan Johnson)
The idea is even turning up - no joke - in the kitchen: ' eco-chef, food justice activist, and author uses cooking to illuminate the intersection between structural racism and food insecurity.'
Structural racism ideas and frameworks are spreading. Public policy demands are already being voiced (income redistribution, baby bonds, etc.). There will be increasing demands to change public policy in the name of structural racism in coming years, you can count on it.
Youth Training
The Left is also busy indoctrinating kids after school. So-called "youth development organizations" (community organizers) "are engaging youth in recognizing, questioning, and challenging the ideas, dynamics, and institutions" of structural racism. The Philanthropic Initiative on Racial Equity and another group called 'mosaic' issued a report describing the activities of groups like Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership (AYPAL) in Oakland, California, Students 4 Justice in Denver, and Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals For Community Empowerment (FIERCE) in New York. The report, entitled “Changing the Rules of the Game: Youth Development and Structural Racism” (November 2004) is at http://www.racialequity.org/docs/500393_0_YRE_Report-Jan.pdf.
The trainers in these programs teach ethnic youth that racism permeates the entire system and is the key factor that determines their chances in life. Training sessions explore "the impact that systems have on the ways people behave" and examine "youth experience and emotion in context of racialized structures of power." These programs teach that addressing the objectionable behavior of individual bigots is a loser's game. Racism is systemic and must be addressed on the institutional level.
In other words, the youth in these programs are taught 'I'm a victim, the system is stacked against me, and there's nothing I can do about it.' If you want to know how the politics of resentment is created, it is through this kind of psychological manipulation. The trainers take a small personal example - a dirty bathroom, say - and wrongly generalizes it into systemic conclusions and prescriptions - 'your school is 'dissing all students of color and you must rise up as a group to fight it.' Brainwashing ethnic youth into a "structural racism orientation" serves the Left's purpose to re-cast small grievances into grand systemic conclusions. It teaches youth that the individual doesn't matter; only the collective matters. Individualism is deliberately attacked in these programs and replaced with "politicized racial identities" and collective action. Participants are trained for leadership roles where they will go out and infect others with this poisonous world view.
How is a young person who is brought up this way (as Obama was) and trained for victimhood going to regard white people? Just as Obama does - as a privileged elite that must be made as miserable as every person of color it oppresses. Another consequence of this training is that young impressionable minds come away believing they will be permanently dependent on the intervention of a priestly class of professional civil rights agitators for any and all economic benefits which ethnic youth will forever be unable to attain on their own. This type of training could not have been more perfectly designed to create a population that will support group identity politics and redistribution when it reaches adulthood.
So while the Left is developing a cadre of young redistributionists-in-training, what is our side doing? The Jaycees and the Kauffman Foundation teach entrepreneurship, but is it enough to counter the Left's slick and manipulative "racial justice capacity building"?
Rhetorical Challenges
"Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible" (cited above) is a documentary film about 'white privilege' that, while not overtly political, contains building blocks that are being used to turn people's thinking to align with structural racism's factual assertions and policy conclusions. It presents significant rhetorical challenges to people who oppose collectivist philosophy and redistributionist policies. (Don't buy the film. Don't fund the Left. You can get the DVD for a nominal charge through interlibrary loan.)
The film purports to remain on the level of personal witness. Ostensibly, it is not a political movie. The term 'structural racism' is not used. The film does make some good points about consciousness-raising as regards race prejudice. Better race relations is a laudable goal. Race relations can still be poisonous in America. Black churches still get torched in Alabama. There is still plenty of need to change social attitudes because not everybody has gotten the message yet.
But what we have in this film is white liberal guilt on parade, the same liberal guilt that got Barack Obama elected. This writer had an exchange with a liberal Democrat in 2010 who said, "I voted for Obama because he's black. We needed an African-American president." There you have it. The speakers in the film all elaborate in one way or another on the guilt they feel about events they have seen or the history of race relations overall in this country.
"Mirrors of Privilege" starts out with personal stories interspersed with scenes of police cars and other artifacts from the old civil rights-era South. Dated examples of white prejudice are trotted out, such as the candidacy of David Duke and God-fearing southerners having no qualms about lynching black people. A black speaker in the film describes how he still slows down when driving through Skokie, Illinois, site of Klan rallies years ago.
Thus, the first building block is dropped into place. Because the civil rights era was inarguably a time of blatant injustice, everything that follows in the film must be inarguably unjust as well, starting with the bridging stories, accounts of blatant race prejudice in more recent times. One speaker recalls how his father spewed racial venom in front of the kids for years after his wife divorced the speaker's father and married a black man. And thus another building block drops into place - there are still prejudiced people in America.
About mid-way through the film, the term 'privilege' begins to appear. By this time, viewers outraged by civil rights-era and more recent injustices have been softened up to accept the bait-and-switch from 'prejudice' to 'privilege'. The choice of words is not accidental. 'Privilege' implies a legal structure that must be taken down. Getting people to recast their thinking in terms of 'privilege' instead of 'prejudice' is key because 'privilege' is the pivot point from which the discussion can move from the realm of personal and social attitude into the domain of political process and governmental remedy. We need laws to dismantle 'white privilege' just as much today as we needed laws to desegregate lunch counters and guarantee the right to vote 50 years ago, get it?
What does the film mean by 'white privilege'? White people need to realize, the argument goes, that they're part of a system that favors them over people of color in every aspect of their lives. White people aren't reminded of their color every day, but black people are. Whites never have to think about race, but blacks do. A white lady in the film describes how she counted up 46 examples of personal favors she received at work over a three-month period simply because she is white. 'We benefit every day from our whiteness,' she says in the film. And thus another building block is cemented into place: The racism that exists today is subtle but puts whites in privileged positions, nonetheless.
The next building block: Racism is not only subtle, it's systemic. White people of good will have to look beyond their own tolerant racial attitudes and realize that there's still something wrong with the system. Whites must no longer deny or remain silent about their own privilege but must oppose the status quo and fight for racial justice. And thus, the structural racism edifice is nearly complete. All that remains is to put the roof on - to take structural racism into the political realm and for Congress to enact redistributionist policies, a task left to the next film, "Cracking the Code" cited above.
But the film should really have been entitled 'Mirrors of Deception'. The personal stories in the film meant to illustrate 'white privilege' completely fail to do so. The story about the angry husband related above only demonstrates personal prejudice, not systemic 'privilege'. In another story, a parent feels compelled to explain to a 12 year-old daughter that a black man will take care of a neighbor's cat while the neighbor is away, something the parent would not bother mentioning if the caretaker were white. Again, this is in the realm of personal outlook on race and the choices individual people make. To mislabel it 'white privilege' implies a legal structure that must be dismantled. But there is no legal structure in this story and you can't change the choices individuals make on a personal level without changing personal attitudes or jettisoning free society altogether.
Another example, not from the film, came in 2010 with the public statements of kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart, who was 14 years old when she was abducted in 2002. Observers complained that lots of black girls get kidnapped, too, but white girls get all the publicity. Again, all this shows is that social attitudes towards race aren't what they should be in this country, not even in the newsroom. 'There oughta be a law'? No, not on the strength of this example.
One story in the film does touch on legal structure. One speaker recalled an instance of the police showing up within ten minutes of black fraternity pledges lining up on a sidewalk for a group activity. However, this story at best only justifies a pin-point remedy in the particular police department involved. The fix here would be to change racial profiling policies or improve training in that one department. The fact that there may be a legitimate grievance against that one department does not get structural racism proponents to where they want to go - indictment of the entire society and total redistribution of wealth. Particular injustices cannot carry the weight of imposing the grand redistributionist schemes of the Left. None of the stories in "Mirrors of Privilege" take us to affirmative action, reparations for slavery, redistribution, or anywhere else in the Leftist's version of Nirvana.
Now let's take a moment to examine the true meaning of the word 'privilege' and establish a frame of reference by which assertions of 'white privilege' may be judged. A privilege is a special advantage, right, or benefit granted to an individual or group of people. As noted above, it implies a legal structure. To apply the term 'privilege' to all instances of personal prejudice is to debase the word and strip it of all meaning. The supposed existence of 'white privilege' in 2011 America pales in comparison to the legal systems of REAL privilege that existed in by-gone eras and that still exist in some places outside the U.S. today.
Aristocracy and royalty set the frame. Consider the medieval ideas of divinely ordained classes with complete social immobility, hereditary nobility, and primogeniture. Inheriting property because you are the first-born son while little sister loses out every time - now that's REAL privilege. Or look at the Bourbon kings who ruled France for 200 years and the aristocrats underneath them who came by their position by birth and maintained their exalted status by law. The nobles were undeniably abusive in pre-Revolutionary France ('let them eat cake'). Unshakeable position conferred by birth, that's REAL privilege. In the present day, the entire kingdom of Saudi Arabia is run for the benefit of one family, which controls all oil revenue and doles out all favors. The playboy lifestyle of the Saudi princes, that's REAL privilege. Moreover, Saudi Arabia is not the only country left that still has royals. Or how about corruption in third world countries where friends and mistresses of government ministers fly on state airlines for free? Again, REAL privilege.
Royalty and aristocracy set the frame in bright, vivid colors. 'White privilege' in today's America, assuming arguendo it exists, is trivial by comparison. America's open society cannot reasonably be compared to the true legally ensconced privilege of aristocratic times or the privilege of rulers in certain other countries today. If 'white privilege' is not entirely hogwash, it is but a pale pastel when compared side-by-side with REAL privilege. We're supposed to get whipped up into the same frenzy about 'white privilege' that sent Marie Antoinette to the guillotine in 1793? Hardly. Moreover, the facts of 2011 America fall far short of justifying even the level of animus or the politics of resentment that the structural racism industry is spewing forth today.
Those bemoaning 'white privilege' will have to get in line. There are other people in front of you. America is a horrible, rotten place, not just for racial minorities. There are other privileges that could be asserted with equal plausibility. There's nothing special about 'white privilege'. The grievance industry has no shortage of potential customers. Before we get to 'white privilege', we have to tear down -
* Male Privilege
* Straight Privilege
* Gentile Privilege
* Judeo-Christian Privilege, and
* Non-Native Privilege
And that's just for starters. We can't stop there. We have to tear down the big daddy of them all - American Privilege - because everybody knows that Americans (blacks included) don't deserve to live better than anyone else in the world.
The point of all this reductio ad absurdum: 'White privilege' is no more a problem than any of these other non-problems. Only by repeating their claims loud enough and long enough can structural racism advocates obscure the fact that they don't have a case, any more than the people affected by these other supposed 'privileges' do.
Where others see a big conspiracy, this writer sees only individual choices and individual responsibility. It's a personal choice to make race the central fact of one's existence. Not every person of color does. Not everyone in a minority group buys into the artificial identity and warped identity politics that the liberals and the Democratic Party peddle to the unsuspecting. Individuals can choose to be pumped full of the politics of resentment by the Left and professional civil rights agitators who are only in it for the money, or simply go about their lives without waiting for anyone else's permission, approval, or meagerly hand-outs. Individuals can refuse to drink the Kool-Aid and can make the free choice to stop 'waiting for whitey' and get on with whatever they want their own lives to be.
America is an open society, not a frozen society like traditional Britain with its rigid class structure. There is no REAL privilege bestowed by birth in America. Anyone can work more than 40 hours a week to improve their own circumstances.
We're supposed to believe that America is a horrible, rotten, racist place when Oprah has more money than God, a black man is President, and half the NBA makes more than a lot of corporate CEOs? Try peddling structural racism theory to Michael Jordan, LeBron James, or BET founder Robert Johnson. They would be too busy building their financial empires to listen. Try selling it to Franklin Raines (former CEO of Fannie Mae), Stanley O'Neal (former CEO of Merrill Lynch), or the five black, seven Hispanic, and seven Asian CEOs in the 2008 Fortune 500. Try convincing all the middle-class black homeowners in Prince George's County, Maryland, a majority-black jurisdiction, that they have been denied the American dream. Or the descendants of Chinese and Japanese immigrants in California who as a group have higher-than-average education and incomes. If race is axiomatically holding people back, then none of these examples could exist. There are just too many data points proving we have an open society for the claim of structural racism to hold up. Moreover, in our open society, even a family like the Kennedy's can fall to the bottom. The Kennedy clan gathered a few years ago in their compound to receive the bad news, 'we're down to our last 30 million bucks, folks, we have to clean up our act.' Yes, fools and their money are soon parted, regardless of their skin tone. That's life.
Here's the question for anyone arguing that economic opportunity is foreclosed by race: Why aren't you actively providing goods or services to the black market? The 2010 Census racial data was not available at this writing but, in the 2000 census, blacks were 12.3 percent of the population, thus comprising an addressable market of 36.6 million people of the same race, a market in which race prejudice cannot possibly be a factor. That's bigger than a lot of countries. There are no legal impediments in your way, no exclusive franchises conferred by birth, no one with a privileged position shutting you out of the market. What are you doing with the second 40 hours of your work week to find your pot of gold, if that's what's important to you? And to anyone who suggests that blacks are weak and not capable of succeeding, this writer says YOU are the racist. Until the structural racism crowd responds to these questions, their commentary will continue to exude an air of unreality.
Structural racism advocates would dismiss much of this analysis. It's not true, they argue, that anyone can make it in America if they try hard enough. There are race and class barriers that prevent it, they assert. The point is: they're ready. They've heard a lot of first reactions to their claims and have fashioned their responses. Anyone hoping to compete with them rhetorically had better come to the battle well-prepared and able to match their sophistication.
Debating Points
This is an early attempt to craft rhetoric for people who must publicly confront the topic of structural racism or its advocates.
* Structural racism is the same old Leftist drivel about redistribution.
* You're skipping right over the bad stuff, starting with deficit spending and state coercion. Washington has mapped out trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see and states are going bankrupt from social spending. There is no more to get. Moreover, using state coercion to guarantee equality of outcome will cost everyone their freedom. Let's call it what it is: liberal fascism. Your freedom may not mean anything to you but mine means everything to me.
* Assigning ancestral guilt breaches the principle of individual responsibility and no end of mischief will result. If group guilt is a good principle, why stop with structural racism? If you think reparations for slavery would be a big bill, just wait until you see the counterclaim against blacks as a group for making the inner cities unlivable - all the crime, the loss of life, the blight. It's all on them. How do you like your principle of group guilt now?
* To the law professors, if you think redistribution is such a good idea, let's start with you. You make above-average salaries. Fork it over. If you're not willing to settle for the same pay as the janitor who cleans your office, you're just another garden-variety liberal hypocrite - think Left, live Right.
* And professors, if you think affirmative action and prohibiting word-of-mouth employment for high-status jobs are such good ideas, let's start with you. You can no longer pick your own assistants from students you know. We will pick your assistants for you. And, while we're at it, Elena Kagan will no longer select her own law clerk. Oprah Winfrey and Robert Johnson will no longer be allowed to hire the people they want. We will make those selections for them. So, professors, how do you like your liberal fascism now when it's thrown right back in your face? If you can employ state coercion for your purposes, so can we.
* Let's suppose you get everything you want - total affirmative action and redistribution of wealth. What about the fact that wide disparities of outcome never go away in socialist countries? The rulers all get dachas while the peasants get mush. It's already starting to happen. The committee staffers who wrote Obamacare exempted themselves and get something better than the rest of us. You can't deal with the fact that total equality has never existed in supposedly equal societies, or anywhere else for that matter, and never will. You're either chasing a pipedream or deliberately luring people in with false promises about a future you know will never arrive.
* Let's have a conversation about the structural racism industry and the politics of resentment. About how the whole structural racism edifice falls when you consider that every single one of its proponents is either a Left-wing crazy or financially self-interested.
* Debaters need to be ready to address the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina. It's a staple of structural racism advocacy ('The government didn't care about the poor black people in New Orleans and that's why everything got so bad.').
# # #
February 2011
Editor's Note 8/29/20: This was written by a Tea Partier in 2011. Everything came true, except it only took nine years and it's being carried on by self-declared "trained Marxists".
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Highlights
* The Left is misusing race under the banner of 'structural racism' as a weapon to advance its collectivist, redistributionist agenda.
* Structural racism advocates are making significant inroads in both civil rights circles and popular thought.
* Unless somebody with influence starts standing up to the structural racism crowd, structural racism will become a 20-year overnight policy success. It's already well on its way.
* Anyone hoping to compete with structural racism advocates rhetorically had better come to the battle well-prepared and able to match their sophistication.
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Contents
* Why This Report?
* Anticipating Charges of Racism
* What is Structural Racism?
* Initial Observations
* Playground of the Left
-- Duke Law School Conference
-- Left-wing Publication
-- Van Jones Endorsement
* Inroads Already Made
* Youth Training
* Rhetorical Challenges
* Debating Points
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Why This Report?
Now is the time to pay attention to the Left's new rallying cries, "structural racism". Issue campaigns can take 20 years to gestate. The Supreme Court's recognition of gun rights for individuals came after 20 years of effort on the part of the National Rifle Association that begin with commissioning law professors to write scholarly articles in law journals. Gays can marry in five states today because gay activists have been working the gay marriage issue for the last 15 years or more.
A year before the push for Obamacare, Left-wing activists at a progressive conference discussed how to craft a bill to make insurance companies "whither on the vine" so the country would eventually have no choice but to turn to single-payer, i.e., socialized medicine. The activists' vision came to fruition a year later in Obamacare.
A similar campaign is now underway for structural racism and its redistributionist policy aims. The groundwork is being laid and headway is steadily being made. The idea has thoroughly penetrated civil rights circles and is grabbing mindshare elsewhere. Agitators are indoctrinating minority youth in structural racism concepts, setting up future policy successes at the voting booth. The Left can win again unless attention is paid to structural racism now and the efforts of its advocates resisted.
Anticipating Charges of Racism
Because any writing that does not toe the Liberal-Left line on race is immediately pelted with charges of racism, let's be very clear: The purpose of this report is to expose the Left, its despicable collectivist philosophy, and its redistributionist policy prescriptions. Those prescriptions are antithetical to the classical liberal values upon which this country was founded -- individualism, limited government, and personal freedom. What structuralism racism advocates assert is objectionable, not because of the color of their skin, but because it offends the philosophical core of the American Idea. One's fidelity ought to be to a set of ideas, not a skin tone. Moreover, there are plenty of people of color who subscribe to the nation's founding ideals, reject the Left's world-view of collectivism, and object to the misuse of race to sell the Left's redistributionist agenda. The only color that's important here is gray, as in gray matter, people using their brains to see what the Left is selling for what it is -- snake oil.
What is Structural Racism?
Despite the passage of civil rights laws and wholesale changes in social attitudes in the last 50 years, racism remains as big a problem as ever in the United States today, structural racism theory holds. The white population still controls most of the country's institutions. Racial disparities continue to exist. Minorities still do not fare as well as whites with respect to outcomes in employment, healthcare, incarceration rates, HIV/AIDS, academic achievement, etc. Because these inferior outcomes have proven intractable, it is time to look beyond the facts of individual cases of discrimination and instead indict society as a whole, dispensing with the need for any proof that racism is the cause of these disparities. That there are many more whites of goodwill today who are not racially prejudiced is irrelevant. The disparities exist; that's proof enough. Public policy must be changed to coerce total equality of outcomes with respect to income, education, healthcare, and all social indicators.
Initial Observations
When you take the wrapper off of structural racism, the same old red malarkey is found inside as in all Left-wing causes -- total redistribution of income and wealth -- collectivist prescriptions heavy on state coercion and short on any real understanding of human nature. Structural racism, like social justice, global warming, and Obamacare before it, provides academic cover for the enactment of the Left's over-arching agenda of coerced economic equality. As with these other political stratagems, structural racism is just another excuse for liberal fascists to bend others to their will and grow the government.
The bootstrapping quotient in structural racism advocacy is very high. The fewer overt racist acts there are, the more systemic and subtle racism exists. Denying you are racist means you are racist. When you don't see yourself as manifesting racial problems, you are. You can have racism without racists. Color-blind thinking is racist. Unequal outcomes are intrinsically racist. Disparities are ipso facto proof of racism, even when no proof of motive can be shown. Refusing to acknowledge the existence of structural racism means the problem is worse than ever. The fact that many people of color have succeeded in this country proves nothing and is to be ignored. People of color who disagree with the Liberal-Left line on race, or who are not fixated on racial justice issues like their civil rights masters, suffer from internalized oppression. Structural racism advocates must think that, if they sprinkle enough fairy dust, people will start to believe them.
Structural racism is completely open-ended and unbounded in theory. Its grievances, diagnoses, and policy prescriptions will never end. Why? Because advocates will tell you that racism will never be fully eliminated. Thus, there's no satisfying the structural racism crowd, ever. They have discovered a political perpetual motion machine that enables them to keep moving the goalposts forever. You start going down this road and there will be no end to it, whether there's still any racism anywhere or not.
Never-ending racism. How convenient for the Democrats, always the party of big government and now the party of Karl Marx. The aim of structural racism advocacy is to keep people angry and group-identified so they will remain a reliable voting bloc for the Democratic Party. Victimology and identity politics serve these purposes well. It makes a difference in elections if people have as their first thought 'I'm a victim' instead of 'I'm free'.
A priestly class of professional civil rights agitators is supposedly needed to intercede on non-whites' behalf and navigate the system for them. These agitators are pushing structural racism and sowing dissension in order to make money for themselves. Entire livelihoods and careers are being made in structural racism advocacy, which renders the advice these advocates dispense suspect because it is completely self-interested. They don't get paid unless they can convince people a problem exists. Follow the money. Self-interest was blatantly on parade in the attempted shakedown of the Peekskill, New York city council by the Cortlandt Peekskill Anti-Racist Collaborative (CPARC) in October 2010. First the wind-up: CPARC representatives began attending meetings to harangue council members about "institutional and structural racism" and "white privilege". In line with structural racism's claim that individual discrimination no longer matters, CPARC stated this was not about specific instances of racism. "Every white person is a racist," a CPARC representative intoned at one meeting. Then the pitch: To have a dialogue with advocates, city leaders needed to attend a three-day workshop ("Undoing Racism") run by the Anti-Racist Alliance at only $350 a pop. Beats working for a living.
Playground of the Left
This report asserts that structural racism agitation is the product of an unholy alliance between civil rights professionals and the Left. A first cut at documenting the Left's ties to structural racism theory and advocacy rests on a 2010 academic conference, agitprop reportáge in a Marxist publication, and documentary filmmaking endorsed by such Left-wing figures as Van Jones, the former Obama White House 'green jobs czar'.
Conference -- Speakers at an April 2010 Duke Law School conference on race on C-SPAN openly advocated the redistribution of income to redress inequality in racial outcomes in America. ("From Slavery to Freedom to the White House" - archived at http://www.law.duke.edu/lrp/conference).
The premise of the conference was that there is a discrepancy in life outcomes (income, education, etc.) between whites on the one hand and blacks and Latinos on the other. As this persists even in the absence of actual illegal acts of discrimination, the panel inferred that these disparities must be due to “persistent structural inequality.” As Prof. Daria Roithmayr of USC (former counsel to Sen. Edward Kennedy and People for the American Way) explained, this is the product of historical discrimination which has illegitimately created a position of power for whites through their use of “cartel conduct", whereby whites monopolize societal, educational, and economic structures to the exclusion of minorities. Roithmayr compares this to Microsoft which, in her view, committed illegal acts to gain market advantage and subsequently thrived by virtue of its illicit position in operating systems. Similarly, whites monopolize jobs, neighborhoods, schools etc., creating a system of exclusion which is perpetuated through self-reinforcing feedback loops. Structural racism and inequality being the diagnosis, race policy therefore needs to go beyond the current set of anti-discrimination laws and enforce equality of outcomes. The goal of race policy, then, is to have the government step in, break structural inequality, and redistribute wealth.
To break structural inequality, Prof. Roithmayr advocated legally prohibiting word-of-mouth referrals for high-paying or high status jobs. As for redistributing wealth, Prof. Glenn Loury of Boston University would do it through Social Security and Prof. Dalton Conley of New York University would accomplish it through healthcare (which we now know, thanks to a quote from a Senator closely involved, was avowedly redistributionist in its aims). The conference panel also espoused the creation of “baby bonds” which would create trust funds for low-income children who could access them upon reaching adulthood. The panel noted that proposals directed to color-blind socio-economic status would be more politically palatable than those directed at race per se. Prof. Conley indicated he didn't really care about the means as long as the goal of income redistribution is achieved.
Left-Wing Publication -- Workers World does not hide the ball. Its logo features a Red Star and the slogan "Workers & Oppressed Peoples of the World Unite!" It's put out by the Workers World Party which, according to its website, "fights against capitalism" and "fights for a socialist society." In a November 2010 story, the publication argued that trade union consciousness must expand to encompass structural racism theory because "Black liberation [is] a central step towards the overthrow of capitalism inside the U.S." Specifically, companies in the South perpetuate racial division between workers as a means "to keep wages low and unions weak." The bottom line: workers of all races should join hands to overthrow the capitalist system.
Van Jones -- "Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible" is a 2006 documentary film by Shakti Butler, Ph.D., executive director of World Trust Educational Services, Inc. in Oakland, California. The film (discussed in more detail below) features ordinary people, mostly white, recounting their personal experiences with racial divides. The film is not explicitly political. However, "Mirrors of Privilege" is not a harmless little puff piece on the need for better race relations or changing social attitudes. As argued below, the film is not to be taken at face value but for what it is - a slick piece of propaganda designed to turn your thinking and soften you up to accept the redistributionist and other socialist policy goals of the hard Left. The film uses race as a weapon to advance the Left's political agenda.
The proof of political purpose is in three parts. First, the film does become overtly political near the end. It speaks favorably of reparations for slavery. Moreover, in a daring bit of sophistry, it argues that affirmative action is merely about equality of opportunity, not guaranteeing equality of outcome which it obviously does by assigning jobs and school slots on the basis of race. As discussed above, structural racism advocates are pushing for equality of outcome in every sphere - education, healthcare, income, you name it. If they can pass off affirmative action as equality of opportunity and thus co-opt the rhetoric of their opponents, they will.
Second, World Trust is currently making another movie that is overtly political and explicit in asserting structural racism. The second film is incontrovertible proof that the filmmakers are pushing a political agenda. According to their website, "By connecting moving personal stories to a broader societal context, Cracking the Codes: Race and Relationships in the 21st Century illuminates the institutional and structural aspects of racial inequity. Help us complete this film in 2011!"
Third, members of World Trust's Advisory Board agitate for Left-wing causes. Carl Anthony, Ph.D. "is the founder and former executive director of the Urban Habitat Program, one of the oldest environmental justice organizations in the country." Connie Cagampang Heller "works with individual donors and national donor membership organizations to deepen commitment to building an inclusive, political infrastructure that has social justice at its core."
And, here's the clincher: The lead endorsement of "Mirrors of Privilege" on World Trust's website is from another Advisory Board member, Van Jones. Van Jones, you will recall, is the admitted communist and 'green jobs czar' who was forced to leave the Obama White House after being exposed as a radical. Van Jones is currently a senior fellow at the George Soros-funded Center For American Progress. Not only does the Van Jones connection prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that "Mirrors of Privilege" is political propaganda, it undergirds the assertion that structural racism advocacy and policy demands are creatures of the hard Left.
It's hard to take seriously anything that structural racism advocates say when you know that the Left is behind it all. Maybe some of the people involved in the structural racism movement are well-intentioned and naïve, but this would make them 'useful idiots', as Lenin would say, pawns in someone else's game.
If the Left can ride this pony, it will, just as it has ridden environmentalism, healthcare, and the other 'progressive' issues that have gained traction in recent years.
Inroads Already Made
Structural racism generates 80 new hits a day in Google. Here's a run-down of where structural racism is making inroads -
* youth training (detailed herein)
* academic conferences (detailed herein)
* presidential speeches (Obama's speech to the NAACP's 100th anniversary convention where, in a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, he used the less incendiary term 'structural inequalities')
* statements by members of Congress (e.g., Rep. Barbara Lee [D-CA]: "white privilege, institutional racism, and structural inequalities still exist")
* explanations by outsiders of the Tea Party (structural racism is why the Tea Party, a putative extension of the white working class majority, is supposedly working against the universalization of social rights for all ethnic groups)
* attempts to fuse the campaign against structural racism with trade unionism (Workers Word communist newspaper, discussed herein)
* strategizing by the civil rights and anti-poverty grievance industry (e.g., the Poverty & Race Research Action Council)
* the formation of an umbrella group for advocacy organizations working on structural racism (the Structural Racism Caucus)
* books ("Poverty and Power: The Problem of Structural Inequality" by Edward Royce; "Color-Blind" by Tim Wise; "Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America" by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva)
* documentary films (“Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible" and the forthcoming "Cracking the Codes: Race and Relationships in the 21st Century" by Shakti Butler) (discussed herein).
* serious grant money ("Kellogg Foundation Awards Maynard Institute $1.2 Million to Improve Media Coverage of Structural Racism and its Impact")
* university administration (the University of California at San Diego agreed to take steps to boost minority enrollment after the Black Student Union complained of structural racism)
* complaints to the United Nations (300 activist groups, including Amnesty International USA and the ACLU, blasted the U.S. report to the UN Human Rights Council, asserting structural racism's claim that "discrimination permeates all aspects of life in the U.S.")
* the Lutheran church (in October 2010, the mostly white European American Lutheran Association gathered in a national conference to discuss how to "overcome institutional and structural racism, throughout congregations, the denomination, and the world")
* careers ("celebrated anti-racism essayist, author, educator and speaker Tim Wise; self-described "community therapist" Harlan Johnson)
The idea is even turning up - no joke - in the kitchen: ' eco-chef, food justice activist, and author uses cooking to illuminate the intersection between structural racism and food insecurity.'
Structural racism ideas and frameworks are spreading. Public policy demands are already being voiced (income redistribution, baby bonds, etc.). There will be increasing demands to change public policy in the name of structural racism in coming years, you can count on it.
Youth Training
The Left is also busy indoctrinating kids after school. So-called "youth development organizations" (community organizers) "are engaging youth in recognizing, questioning, and challenging the ideas, dynamics, and institutions" of structural racism. The Philanthropic Initiative on Racial Equity and another group called 'mosaic' issued a report describing the activities of groups like Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership (AYPAL) in Oakland, California, Students 4 Justice in Denver, and Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals For Community Empowerment (FIERCE) in New York. The report, entitled “Changing the Rules of the Game: Youth Development and Structural Racism” (November 2004) is at http://www.racialequity.org/docs/500393_0_YRE_Report-Jan.pdf.
The trainers in these programs teach ethnic youth that racism permeates the entire system and is the key factor that determines their chances in life. Training sessions explore "the impact that systems have on the ways people behave" and examine "youth experience and emotion in context of racialized structures of power." These programs teach that addressing the objectionable behavior of individual bigots is a loser's game. Racism is systemic and must be addressed on the institutional level.
In other words, the youth in these programs are taught 'I'm a victim, the system is stacked against me, and there's nothing I can do about it.' If you want to know how the politics of resentment is created, it is through this kind of psychological manipulation. The trainers take a small personal example - a dirty bathroom, say - and wrongly generalizes it into systemic conclusions and prescriptions - 'your school is 'dissing all students of color and you must rise up as a group to fight it.' Brainwashing ethnic youth into a "structural racism orientation" serves the Left's purpose to re-cast small grievances into grand systemic conclusions. It teaches youth that the individual doesn't matter; only the collective matters. Individualism is deliberately attacked in these programs and replaced with "politicized racial identities" and collective action. Participants are trained for leadership roles where they will go out and infect others with this poisonous world view.
How is a young person who is brought up this way (as Obama was) and trained for victimhood going to regard white people? Just as Obama does - as a privileged elite that must be made as miserable as every person of color it oppresses. Another consequence of this training is that young impressionable minds come away believing they will be permanently dependent on the intervention of a priestly class of professional civil rights agitators for any and all economic benefits which ethnic youth will forever be unable to attain on their own. This type of training could not have been more perfectly designed to create a population that will support group identity politics and redistribution when it reaches adulthood.
So while the Left is developing a cadre of young redistributionists-in-training, what is our side doing? The Jaycees and the Kauffman Foundation teach entrepreneurship, but is it enough to counter the Left's slick and manipulative "racial justice capacity building"?
Rhetorical Challenges
"Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible" (cited above) is a documentary film about 'white privilege' that, while not overtly political, contains building blocks that are being used to turn people's thinking to align with structural racism's factual assertions and policy conclusions. It presents significant rhetorical challenges to people who oppose collectivist philosophy and redistributionist policies. (Don't buy the film. Don't fund the Left. You can get the DVD for a nominal charge through interlibrary loan.)
The film purports to remain on the level of personal witness. Ostensibly, it is not a political movie. The term 'structural racism' is not used. The film does make some good points about consciousness-raising as regards race prejudice. Better race relations is a laudable goal. Race relations can still be poisonous in America. Black churches still get torched in Alabama. There is still plenty of need to change social attitudes because not everybody has gotten the message yet.
But what we have in this film is white liberal guilt on parade, the same liberal guilt that got Barack Obama elected. This writer had an exchange with a liberal Democrat in 2010 who said, "I voted for Obama because he's black. We needed an African-American president." There you have it. The speakers in the film all elaborate in one way or another on the guilt they feel about events they have seen or the history of race relations overall in this country.
"Mirrors of Privilege" starts out with personal stories interspersed with scenes of police cars and other artifacts from the old civil rights-era South. Dated examples of white prejudice are trotted out, such as the candidacy of David Duke and God-fearing southerners having no qualms about lynching black people. A black speaker in the film describes how he still slows down when driving through Skokie, Illinois, site of Klan rallies years ago.
Thus, the first building block is dropped into place. Because the civil rights era was inarguably a time of blatant injustice, everything that follows in the film must be inarguably unjust as well, starting with the bridging stories, accounts of blatant race prejudice in more recent times. One speaker recalls how his father spewed racial venom in front of the kids for years after his wife divorced the speaker's father and married a black man. And thus another building block drops into place - there are still prejudiced people in America.
About mid-way through the film, the term 'privilege' begins to appear. By this time, viewers outraged by civil rights-era and more recent injustices have been softened up to accept the bait-and-switch from 'prejudice' to 'privilege'. The choice of words is not accidental. 'Privilege' implies a legal structure that must be taken down. Getting people to recast their thinking in terms of 'privilege' instead of 'prejudice' is key because 'privilege' is the pivot point from which the discussion can move from the realm of personal and social attitude into the domain of political process and governmental remedy. We need laws to dismantle 'white privilege' just as much today as we needed laws to desegregate lunch counters and guarantee the right to vote 50 years ago, get it?
What does the film mean by 'white privilege'? White people need to realize, the argument goes, that they're part of a system that favors them over people of color in every aspect of their lives. White people aren't reminded of their color every day, but black people are. Whites never have to think about race, but blacks do. A white lady in the film describes how she counted up 46 examples of personal favors she received at work over a three-month period simply because she is white. 'We benefit every day from our whiteness,' she says in the film. And thus another building block is cemented into place: The racism that exists today is subtle but puts whites in privileged positions, nonetheless.
The next building block: Racism is not only subtle, it's systemic. White people of good will have to look beyond their own tolerant racial attitudes and realize that there's still something wrong with the system. Whites must no longer deny or remain silent about their own privilege but must oppose the status quo and fight for racial justice. And thus, the structural racism edifice is nearly complete. All that remains is to put the roof on - to take structural racism into the political realm and for Congress to enact redistributionist policies, a task left to the next film, "Cracking the Code" cited above.
But the film should really have been entitled 'Mirrors of Deception'. The personal stories in the film meant to illustrate 'white privilege' completely fail to do so. The story about the angry husband related above only demonstrates personal prejudice, not systemic 'privilege'. In another story, a parent feels compelled to explain to a 12 year-old daughter that a black man will take care of a neighbor's cat while the neighbor is away, something the parent would not bother mentioning if the caretaker were white. Again, this is in the realm of personal outlook on race and the choices individual people make. To mislabel it 'white privilege' implies a legal structure that must be dismantled. But there is no legal structure in this story and you can't change the choices individuals make on a personal level without changing personal attitudes or jettisoning free society altogether.
Another example, not from the film, came in 2010 with the public statements of kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart, who was 14 years old when she was abducted in 2002. Observers complained that lots of black girls get kidnapped, too, but white girls get all the publicity. Again, all this shows is that social attitudes towards race aren't what they should be in this country, not even in the newsroom. 'There oughta be a law'? No, not on the strength of this example.
One story in the film does touch on legal structure. One speaker recalled an instance of the police showing up within ten minutes of black fraternity pledges lining up on a sidewalk for a group activity. However, this story at best only justifies a pin-point remedy in the particular police department involved. The fix here would be to change racial profiling policies or improve training in that one department. The fact that there may be a legitimate grievance against that one department does not get structural racism proponents to where they want to go - indictment of the entire society and total redistribution of wealth. Particular injustices cannot carry the weight of imposing the grand redistributionist schemes of the Left. None of the stories in "Mirrors of Privilege" take us to affirmative action, reparations for slavery, redistribution, or anywhere else in the Leftist's version of Nirvana.
Now let's take a moment to examine the true meaning of the word 'privilege' and establish a frame of reference by which assertions of 'white privilege' may be judged. A privilege is a special advantage, right, or benefit granted to an individual or group of people. As noted above, it implies a legal structure. To apply the term 'privilege' to all instances of personal prejudice is to debase the word and strip it of all meaning. The supposed existence of 'white privilege' in 2011 America pales in comparison to the legal systems of REAL privilege that existed in by-gone eras and that still exist in some places outside the U.S. today.
Aristocracy and royalty set the frame. Consider the medieval ideas of divinely ordained classes with complete social immobility, hereditary nobility, and primogeniture. Inheriting property because you are the first-born son while little sister loses out every time - now that's REAL privilege. Or look at the Bourbon kings who ruled France for 200 years and the aristocrats underneath them who came by their position by birth and maintained their exalted status by law. The nobles were undeniably abusive in pre-Revolutionary France ('let them eat cake'). Unshakeable position conferred by birth, that's REAL privilege. In the present day, the entire kingdom of Saudi Arabia is run for the benefit of one family, which controls all oil revenue and doles out all favors. The playboy lifestyle of the Saudi princes, that's REAL privilege. Moreover, Saudi Arabia is not the only country left that still has royals. Or how about corruption in third world countries where friends and mistresses of government ministers fly on state airlines for free? Again, REAL privilege.
Royalty and aristocracy set the frame in bright, vivid colors. 'White privilege' in today's America, assuming arguendo it exists, is trivial by comparison. America's open society cannot reasonably be compared to the true legally ensconced privilege of aristocratic times or the privilege of rulers in certain other countries today. If 'white privilege' is not entirely hogwash, it is but a pale pastel when compared side-by-side with REAL privilege. We're supposed to get whipped up into the same frenzy about 'white privilege' that sent Marie Antoinette to the guillotine in 1793? Hardly. Moreover, the facts of 2011 America fall far short of justifying even the level of animus or the politics of resentment that the structural racism industry is spewing forth today.
Those bemoaning 'white privilege' will have to get in line. There are other people in front of you. America is a horrible, rotten place, not just for racial minorities. There are other privileges that could be asserted with equal plausibility. There's nothing special about 'white privilege'. The grievance industry has no shortage of potential customers. Before we get to 'white privilege', we have to tear down -
* Male Privilege
* Straight Privilege
* Gentile Privilege
* Judeo-Christian Privilege, and
* Non-Native Privilege
And that's just for starters. We can't stop there. We have to tear down the big daddy of them all - American Privilege - because everybody knows that Americans (blacks included) don't deserve to live better than anyone else in the world.
The point of all this reductio ad absurdum: 'White privilege' is no more a problem than any of these other non-problems. Only by repeating their claims loud enough and long enough can structural racism advocates obscure the fact that they don't have a case, any more than the people affected by these other supposed 'privileges' do.
Where others see a big conspiracy, this writer sees only individual choices and individual responsibility. It's a personal choice to make race the central fact of one's existence. Not every person of color does. Not everyone in a minority group buys into the artificial identity and warped identity politics that the liberals and the Democratic Party peddle to the unsuspecting. Individuals can choose to be pumped full of the politics of resentment by the Left and professional civil rights agitators who are only in it for the money, or simply go about their lives without waiting for anyone else's permission, approval, or meagerly hand-outs. Individuals can refuse to drink the Kool-Aid and can make the free choice to stop 'waiting for whitey' and get on with whatever they want their own lives to be.
America is an open society, not a frozen society like traditional Britain with its rigid class structure. There is no REAL privilege bestowed by birth in America. Anyone can work more than 40 hours a week to improve their own circumstances.
We're supposed to believe that America is a horrible, rotten, racist place when Oprah has more money than God, a black man is President, and half the NBA makes more than a lot of corporate CEOs? Try peddling structural racism theory to Michael Jordan, LeBron James, or BET founder Robert Johnson. They would be too busy building their financial empires to listen. Try selling it to Franklin Raines (former CEO of Fannie Mae), Stanley O'Neal (former CEO of Merrill Lynch), or the five black, seven Hispanic, and seven Asian CEOs in the 2008 Fortune 500. Try convincing all the middle-class black homeowners in Prince George's County, Maryland, a majority-black jurisdiction, that they have been denied the American dream. Or the descendants of Chinese and Japanese immigrants in California who as a group have higher-than-average education and incomes. If race is axiomatically holding people back, then none of these examples could exist. There are just too many data points proving we have an open society for the claim of structural racism to hold up. Moreover, in our open society, even a family like the Kennedy's can fall to the bottom. The Kennedy clan gathered a few years ago in their compound to receive the bad news, 'we're down to our last 30 million bucks, folks, we have to clean up our act.' Yes, fools and their money are soon parted, regardless of their skin tone. That's life.
Here's the question for anyone arguing that economic opportunity is foreclosed by race: Why aren't you actively providing goods or services to the black market? The 2010 Census racial data was not available at this writing but, in the 2000 census, blacks were 12.3 percent of the population, thus comprising an addressable market of 36.6 million people of the same race, a market in which race prejudice cannot possibly be a factor. That's bigger than a lot of countries. There are no legal impediments in your way, no exclusive franchises conferred by birth, no one with a privileged position shutting you out of the market. What are you doing with the second 40 hours of your work week to find your pot of gold, if that's what's important to you? And to anyone who suggests that blacks are weak and not capable of succeeding, this writer says YOU are the racist. Until the structural racism crowd responds to these questions, their commentary will continue to exude an air of unreality.
Structural racism advocates would dismiss much of this analysis. It's not true, they argue, that anyone can make it in America if they try hard enough. There are race and class barriers that prevent it, they assert. The point is: they're ready. They've heard a lot of first reactions to their claims and have fashioned their responses. Anyone hoping to compete with them rhetorically had better come to the battle well-prepared and able to match their sophistication.
Debating Points
This is an early attempt to craft rhetoric for people who must publicly confront the topic of structural racism or its advocates.
* Structural racism is the same old Leftist drivel about redistribution.
* You're skipping right over the bad stuff, starting with deficit spending and state coercion. Washington has mapped out trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see and states are going bankrupt from social spending. There is no more to get. Moreover, using state coercion to guarantee equality of outcome will cost everyone their freedom. Let's call it what it is: liberal fascism. Your freedom may not mean anything to you but mine means everything to me.
* Assigning ancestral guilt breaches the principle of individual responsibility and no end of mischief will result. If group guilt is a good principle, why stop with structural racism? If you think reparations for slavery would be a big bill, just wait until you see the counterclaim against blacks as a group for making the inner cities unlivable - all the crime, the loss of life, the blight. It's all on them. How do you like your principle of group guilt now?
* To the law professors, if you think redistribution is such a good idea, let's start with you. You make above-average salaries. Fork it over. If you're not willing to settle for the same pay as the janitor who cleans your office, you're just another garden-variety liberal hypocrite - think Left, live Right.
* And professors, if you think affirmative action and prohibiting word-of-mouth employment for high-status jobs are such good ideas, let's start with you. You can no longer pick your own assistants from students you know. We will pick your assistants for you. And, while we're at it, Elena Kagan will no longer select her own law clerk. Oprah Winfrey and Robert Johnson will no longer be allowed to hire the people they want. We will make those selections for them. So, professors, how do you like your liberal fascism now when it's thrown right back in your face? If you can employ state coercion for your purposes, so can we.
* Let's suppose you get everything you want - total affirmative action and redistribution of wealth. What about the fact that wide disparities of outcome never go away in socialist countries? The rulers all get dachas while the peasants get mush. It's already starting to happen. The committee staffers who wrote Obamacare exempted themselves and get something better than the rest of us. You can't deal with the fact that total equality has never existed in supposedly equal societies, or anywhere else for that matter, and never will. You're either chasing a pipedream or deliberately luring people in with false promises about a future you know will never arrive.
* Let's have a conversation about the structural racism industry and the politics of resentment. About how the whole structural racism edifice falls when you consider that every single one of its proponents is either a Left-wing crazy or financially self-interested.
* Debaters need to be ready to address the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina. It's a staple of structural racism advocacy ('The government didn't care about the poor black people in New Orleans and that's why everything got so bad.').
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