“Woke” white people, I’d like to ask you a favor:
Please stop asking for forgiveness for your “white privilege.”
You’re not fooling anybody. You’re not helping black people—or any other minority.
And your public confessions don’t make you look virtuous. They make you look disingenuous,
which is a really nice way of saying fake, phony, and fraudulent.
For starters, what is “white privilege” anyway? Because you were born with white skin,
you have all these advantages that I don’t have?
Like what? Like, you can get a mortgage loan that I can’t get?
Hmm. I got a loan—at a great rate, by the way—and I got the house.
Why would a banker not give a loan to someone who met the loan requirements?
He doesn’t want to make money? I’ve never heard of such a banker.
Or, how about this: You can enter a store and not be looked upon with suspicion,
but I—a black person—cannot. Except...that has never happened to me.
But if I was a young dude with my pants hanging down to my butt, I could understand why a
store owner would be concerned. I used to be a cop. Believe me, I understand. If I owned
the store, I’d be tracking that kid, too—whether he was black, white, or anything else.
Or, what if I had a store that had a history of being shoplifted by young black women,
and a young black woman with a bad attitude walked in. Would I be suspicious? Yeah, I would.
Who wouldn’t? I call that common sense, not bigotry.
But there’s another way of looking at this: In many ways, in today’s America, blacks
have more privilege than whites. It’s been my experience that whites bend over backwards
to give blacks every possible advantage. If two people are equally qualified for a
job, the black person will usually get it. Big companies and prestigious universities fall
all over one another trying to sign up talented black people.
If you deny this, you are denying reality. Which is what the person who dreamed up this
whole thing did—a professor of women’s studies at Wellesley College by the name of
Peggy McIntosh. She wrote an article in 1988 about all the “white privilege” she thought
she had. She listed 46, including this one: “I can choose…bandages in ‘flesh’
color and have them more or less match my skin.” Wow, that’s some kind of privilege!
Soon others took up the cause. Today, these so-called progressives dominate
our colleges and universities, imposing this absurd notion of white privilege on their
students. That’s too bad. Because it does nothing good for white students. And it does
nothing good for black students. But of the two, ironically, the white students get the
better of the deal. Let me explain:
To acknowledge your white privilege is supposed to make you feel bad. Only it doesn’t. It
makes you feel good because by acknowledging your white privilege, you’re declaring yourself
to be enlightened. And as a virtue-bonus, it also makes you a better person than those
whites who don’t acknowledge their privilege. White privilege, which is supposed to make
you feel bad, ends up making you feel good. Meanwhile, the real damage is to blacks. What
makes whites feel good makes blacks angry. More than 50 years after the start of the
Civil Rights movement, the message is: “You’re still oppressed.” How can this not create
a victim mentality? And anyone—of any color—who sees himself as a victim gets angry.
Now, I wouldn’t deny for a second that there are privileges in life. They’re all over the place.
There’s two-parent family privilege (that’s huge); there’s being lucky to
be born in America privilege; there’s good gene privilege. But white privilege?
Doesn’t it depend on the person? Let’s take this, for example: A black lawyer
and his wife have a baby. And a meth addict, single white woman has a baby.
Which kid has privilege? The white one? Because he’s white? Come on now.
And here’s the kicker: Even if it were true—all those claims about white privilege, so what?
Would it change a single thing I did? If white people apologize for being white, is that
supposed to help me? In what way? So, let’s be real: White privilege is an
attempt by the left to divide Americans by race.
It’s all theory and all nonsense. If you want to fall for it, go ahead—it’s a free country.
But don’t try to sell it to me. I’m an American who deals with my fellow
Americans one-on-one. Try it. It works.
I’m Brandon Tatum for Prager University.