Spencer Case: Skepticism About White Privilege
I'm not sure about a couple of the arguments in here because I haven't quite woken up yet. But, honestly, I'm just happy to see someone pushing back against this nonsense. As I've said a gazillion times, the right concepts in this vicinity are discrimination and disadvantage, not "privilege." I don't actually think that it's a completely hopeless/useless idea, but it's largely crap, and it's part of a crap theory. Part of the strategy of the PC left is to restructure the discussion in terms of loaded concepts that help to distort the discussion in their favor.
posted by Winston Smith at
6:51 AM
1 Comments:
Well that wasn't very good. Case gets hung up, as most critics of do, on the element of undeservedness. Trying to argue that some personal contribution to, say, getting into Harvard makes the background arbitrary factors somehow deserved at best misses the point, at worst it reinforces the requirement that luck be plead for. Case tacitly accepts the intractable, childish, and ultimately totalitarian idea that everything undeserved deserves to be taken away. Dessert has nothing to do with most goods a person enjoys, thankfully.
As a heat generating rhetorical device, privilege is pretty brilliant, since it invites this time-wasting, foolish effort to justify the circumstances of one's birth. The internet media, with its need for "engagement", and the campus lifestyle bureaucracies, with their need for perpetual progress against perpetual problems, find this heat useful. But in the midst of all this useful defensive sputtering, the material implications of applying privilege to an injustice go unchallenged, and that is what makes the spread of this kind of talk dangerous.
Lie the old time Dixiecrats, the intellectual class near unanimously tells middle class white people that their comfort, economic security, and physical safety entail, and therefor require, that everyone else be exploited, demeaned, and destroyed. After a while middle class white people might believe them.
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