White Privilege

I need a little help. I'm up here alone and I've got 50 MiGs cornered!
Radio call, F-86 Sabre pilot, Korea 1952, via Al Nofi at strategypage.com

White Privilege is a malevolent enterprise, a creepy spawn of times past skulking around to the present day, avoiding daylight and mirrors, springing on the unwary from the dank sanctuary academia provides it.

The Depression was the mother of all adversity but it steeled the working family's determination to build a better life using whatever resources they had for whatever opportunities were offered. This is the only privilege they ever asked for or needed. But the Depression taught other people a different lesson.

A generation later our plentiful and open society attracted the attention of those with little to offer beyond hostility and envy, and the sense of entitlement that goes with it. They scented an opportunity of their own, one that traced back to that different lesson, a lesson peddled relentlessly all through the Depression: posturing as a blameless victim brings indulgent, doting attention. This time they were careful to select more malleable clients, the destitute yeomen of rural America having rejected collectivism out of hand*.

As the victimhood racket went from success to success it evolved, bifurcated and specialized. Ever smaller groups adapted the basic posture, remodeled the template to suit their franchise, staked out territory and enlisted claimants until the boundaries of absurdity itself were crossed.

For instance, homosexuals claimed victimhood because, among other alleged grievances, they were denied sexual access to schoolchildren. The usual suspects not only opened the classrooms to them, they were invited to supply coursework preparing kids to be their partners. Ordinary parents who stand against them are excoriated as vile haters.

For another instance, the militant Latino organization La Raza—"the race"—whose stated goal is to throw whites off the continent, whose literature bristles with violence toward the hated gringo, claim victimhood merely because they are opposed. The federal government funds La Raza with our own tax money. Any who stand against them are excoriated as vile haters.

Emboldened by the expanding feeding frenzy, the usual opportunists—meaning, let us be honest, academics and similar encumbrances—gussied up black supremacist cant and called it White Privilege, a malevolent notion which rewrote white people's achievements as unearned and inevitable, the unavoidable spoils of a race-based conspiracy. They paint White Privilege as so pervasive its practitioners are unaware of it, conveniently. This is their opening to invent an unexpunged evil and provide the way to redemption. It's good ol' Hegelian dialectic, a tried and true trap for the gullible.

Those who saw themselves and their families through the Depression would be astounded anybody could believe them culpable for lifting themselves from penury by their own effort and, not incidentally, rescuing the nation from outright ruin. They found themselves in a train wreck not of their making, lived by the hard rules of deprivation, resisted that which would dishonor them or their family, prevailed against the horrors of a world war and the challenges that followed. Yet White Privilege presents the story to their grandchildren as if it were a criminal record. The perpetrators of White Privilege, to their everlasting dishonor and deep personal disgrace, have embezzled a generation's heritage.

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