The left is doubling down on its hostility to whites and males

After the election of Donald Trump I wondered if the left would rethink blaming whites and males for the ills of the world. But they are still at it - if anything they have intensified their efforts.

A case in point is a student group at St John's College in Santa Fe. An email was sent to all students and staff at this college advertising the new student group (see below). The email runs:

This is a group where those who most often exhibit racist and sexist behaviour - white males - can begin to be self-critical of the very dangerous, brutal and depraved hierarchical pathologies of superiority, supremacy, and inferiority handed down to us by white Euro-American institutions.

The main topic for discussion will be an ongoing one. How do we deal with the depravity of whiteness and the brutality of masculinity? How can we get to the root of this problem?

Once the email came to light, the college announced that it had erred in not suggesting edits to tone down the "inflammatory" language. But the point remains that it is now considered a leftist position that whiteness and masculinity are to be looked on negatively as pathologies. The obvious thing for whites and males to do in response is to decouple from the left.

White women are the new white men

It's not enough for the left to take aim at white men. Now it's the turn of white women. Case in point: the women's march on Washington (against Donald Trump). There are white women who are dropping out of the march because they are being told by black women that they should be constantly checking their privilege, talking less and listening more, drowning themselves in black poetry, and confronting their exploitation of other women.

From the New York Times:

But the tone of the discussion, particularly online, can become so raw that some would-be marchers feel they are no longer welcome.

Ms. Willis, the South Carolina wedding minister, had been looking forward to the salve of rallying with people who share her values, a rarity in her home state...

But then she read a post by ShiShi Rose, a 27-year-old blogger from Brooklyn.

“Now is the time for you to be listening more, talking less,” Ms. Rose wrote. “You should be reading our books and understanding the roots of racism and white supremacy. Listening to our speeches. You should be drowning yourselves in our poetry.”

It rubbed Ms. Willis the wrong way.

“How do you know that I’m not reading black poetry?” she asked in an interview...“The last thing that is going to make me endeared to you, to know you and love you more, is if you are sitting there wagging your finger at me.”

Ms. Rose said in an interview that the intention of the post was not to weed people out but rather to make them understand that they had a lot of learning to do.

“I needed them to understand that they don’t just get to join the march and not check their privilege constantly,” she said.

That phrase — check your privilege — exasperates Ms. Willis. She asked a reporter: “Can you please tell me what that means?”

That must be fun - checking your privilege constantly. Interestingly, the only specific evidence for white women's privilege given in the article is that white women earn more than black or Hispanic women. What isn't mentioned is that Asian-American women earn a lot more than white women do - and yet Asian-American women get to be part of the "oppressed" group rather than the privileged group:

Nor is it mentioned that life expectancy for black American women is going up but for white American women it is declining (the upward trend shown in the graph is for mortality):

White women should know that in the future envisaged by the "rainbow coalition" they will occupy a low moral status, one in which they will be expected to always defensively justify themselves as white women; to focus on making amends for their supposed privilege; and to deconstruct their own identity and culture to make way for that of others.

Much better for men and women to make a culture together they can be proud of and positively identify with.

What an American academic wants for Christmas

This is so predictable. There are some on the left who have convinced themselves that the only thing preventing the emergence of a free and equal liberal utopia is the resistance of (supposedly) privileged white people. Therefore, they are hoping for the demise of whites. Here, for instance, is the Christmas tweet of Associate Professor George Ciccariello-Maher of Drexel University in Philadelphia:

To make his meaning clear he followed up with this tweet:

The professor is referring here to the massacre of 4000 French men, women and children on Haiti during the revolution there in 1804 - a deliberate (and successful) violent act of genocide.

A Strange Privilege

Modern liberal politics is sometimes astonishing. Take the "privilege" concept. There has been a kerfuffle about the casting of white actress Tilda Swinton in the movie Dr Strange. Her character in the original comic book story was Asian, so it has been suggested that "white privilege" is at play. Margaret Cho, a bisexual Asian-American comedian and actress, criticised Tilda Swinton's casting on racial oppression grounds and she was supported by Omar Sakr, an Arab-Australian poet, in a column in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Sakr really went the whole hog in his column. Some excerpts:

Of course Cho was polite in her emails; if people of colour weren't polite every time we're confronted with problematic behaviour by powerful white people, we'd be rioting every hour of every day.

...There is absolutely nothing surprising about Cho's emails or her account on the podcast; both will be familiar to anyone from marginalised backgrounds or who faces systemic discrimination.

...Plenty of people have come to Swinton's defence with variations of the line, look how genuine she is, isn't this what we want to see?...Personally, I think a privileged person approaching a member of the underprivileged, whom they don't even personally know, to say "please explain to me how I've participated in your oppression" isn't something to champion...the whole thing reeks of white guilt seeking to be absolved.

...Having plenty to say despite openly admitting you haven't read anything on the subject surely sums up the white condition in 2016 (see: Trump) - in addition to expecting random people to educate you. This, perhaps more than anything, is the most aggravating part of the exchange. The articles, essays, books, and speeches written by people of colour already exist, and the arguments have been made a thousand times. Breezily saying you haven't bothered with any of it is the epitome of privilege.

There's a lot more of the same. The gist of it is the idea that Asian women like Margaret Cho are oppressed by white women like Tilda Swinton and that the role of Tilda Swinton is to educate herself about what an oppressor she is, to admit fault, and to let Margaret Cho have what she wants (and then to get out of the way).

The irony of these "privilege" claims is that it is often the most privileged people in society who claim to be horribly oppressed. Margaret Cho works as an actress, a comedian and an author. She has a national (perhaps even international) audience for her political views. She doesn't stand out as an underprivileged person.

Nor do Asian American women in general. Consider the issue of income. Asian women earn a much higher median income than do white American women (to the point that Indian-American women earn more than white American men).

The following charts come from the United States Department of Labor (2013). The first one shows a comparison of earnings according to ethnicity. You can see that white Americans earn only 67% as much as Indian-Americans. To put that in context, black Americans earn 80% as much as white Americans and that is considered to be evidence for the oppression of black Americans. So you would think that white Americans earning only 67% as much as Indian Americans would be evidence for the oppression of whites. But instead it is the Indian Americans who get to be thought of as oppressed, with whites as the oppressors.

The second chart includes data based on sex as well as ethnicity:

The information here is striking. White males are told over and over that they are privileged both in terms of race and sex. And yet when it comes to median earnings they do less well than Indian women and only marginally better than Chinese women.

And Margaret Cho belongs to a group (Korean women) which clearly earns more money than the group Tilda Swinton belongs to (white women - though she is British rather than American).

Maybe it is time for Asian women like Margaret Cho to stop pretending that they belong to an underprivileged group.

We're meant to listen to this guy?

Adam Kotsko is a professor at Shimer College in Chicago. He is an open borders type and was distressed by Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. elections. He says this of those who voted for Trump:

...Many of us are so disgusted by their ability to ignore his hatred that it makes it difficult to forgive them for their vote. But, our nation’s future depends on our ability to confront Trump and his bigotry through dialogue with our fellow citizens. We must swallow our pride and begin conversation with them.

...Perhaps the burden I am referring to here falls primarily on people like me. People who can hopefully relate in some way to the Trump voter and begin a dialogue. I think as long as those like me check our privilege to be sure we are acting in service to social justice this could be a positive step.

Adam Kotsko believes that he is the right man for the job of relating to Trump supporters. This is despite the fact that last year he posted this on social media:

So he is happy to tweet that whites should commit mass suicide to atone for their privilege and that a white identity exists solely for negative purposes. And yet he is putting himself in charge of outreach to white voters? White voters are supposed to put their trust and faith in him?

Now, it is true that Professor Kotsko, after some criticism of his tweets, wrote a post explaining that he had been "impatient" in suggesting that whites should commit mass suicide, and that what he really meant is that the ultimate logic of the current model of individual justice leads to the idea of white mass suicide, but that he himself prefers a different model of social justice that doesn't logically require this.

Even so, it is obvious that people like Adam Kotsko don't understand the gulf existing between his view of the world and that of most other people. He thinks that by having a dialogue with ordinary whites, that they will suddenly come around to the idea that they should dedicate their lives to atoning for their "privilege".

I expect that most whites will go the other way. They will increasingly look on Professor Kotsko's ideology as being psychologically unhealthy, requiring as it does a willingness to hate and reject one's own identity and tradition. I'm optimistic that white people will increasingly return to a more positive sense of their own identity and heritage.

Feminist professor on white men

This is from Sara Ahmed, currently Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London:

I call upon white men not to keep reproducing white men; not to accept history as a good enough reason for your own reproduction.

It takes conscious willed and willful effort not to reproduce an inheritance.

She wants us to do the opposite of what we should be doing. Reproducing the best of your own inheritance is what responsible members of any nation or people seek to do.

She seems to see us as a kind of institutional bloc, standing in the way of her own progress, and therefore worthy to be torn down.

These are the fruits of a liberal society in the year 2016.

Preaching privilege one day, love and unity the next

Leftists can be more open about what they post to social media than those of us on the right. As I have quite a few leftist friends and relatives on my feed, I get to know what really interests them politically.

Generally, they are only interested in what happens in Australia and America. And their overwhelming interest lies with the idea of white male privilege. It is what I have come to call "shakedown politics". You spot something that white men have (e.g. greater representation on a board) and you roar mightily about white male privilege, because you see the chance to get something out of your activism (i.e. board places). But if 16 Yazidi women are brutally murdered by ISIS in the Middle East for refusing to become sex slaves, it doesn't even make it onto your radar.

What I noticed about leftist messaging in the run up to the Orlando massacre, was something like the following:

Day 1: All white men are privileged, give us their stuff.
Day 2: All white men are privileged, give us their stuff.
Day 3: All white men are privileged, give us their stuff.
Day 4: Muslim massacres 50 gay people at a nightclub.
Day 5: Rage at Christians, white men are just as bad as Muslim men or worse.
Day 6: Why can't we have love and unity?

Clearly, there is a blind spot in leftist politics here. They don't see that the envy/rage/hatred towards white men (ressentiment?) runs counter to calls for love and unity.

The hostility toward white men seems, if anything, to be picking up steam. You have to wonder where it will end. To give just one example, you might be aware of the sad event that occurred at a Disney resort in Florida where a young boy was taken by an alligator. A prominent white feminist from Chicago (apparently a corporate lawyer) responded by tweeting the following:

Not much love and unity on display in Brienne's comment.

Sending up privilege politics

Good to see a young person on the right (Hunter Avellone) serving it up like this to the SJWs:

The descent of culture

The Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) is the most important theatre group here in Melbourne. This year it is performing a play called "Straight White Males". Yes, it's a case of whiteness studies now hitting the stage.

The play was written by a Korean-American woman by the name of Young Jean Lee. It's about a liberal white family dealing with their "privilege":

With Straight White Men, Lee was interested in exploring a problem: What do you do when you've got privilege — and you don't want to abuse it? Lee, who is Korean-American, wanted to create straight white men on stage who think about these things.

Young Jean Lee assembled a group of women, minorities and homosexuals to tell her what they wanted out of the straight white male characters. They wanted the character of the oldest son, who is meant to be the most conscientiously liberal one, to stay quiet and listen:

"I asked a roomful of women, queer people and minorities, 'What do you want straight men to do? And what do you want them to be like?' " she recalls.

Lee wrote down all of the answers. It boiled down to this: They wanted the straight white male character to sit down and shut up.

And so she wrote the oldest son as a character who holds back in life so as not to take the limelight from others:

The character, named Matt, is a sort of idealized straight white male. He works for a not-for-profit and is guided by a sense of trying not to — in his words — "make things worse."

But to Young Jean Lee's surprise, the women, minorities and homosexuals ended up hating the character because they saw him as a loser:

Lee and Stanley workshopped the character in front of the students. Who hated him.

"Hated him," Lee said, clearly still surprised. "And I realized that the reason why they hated him was — despite all their commitment to social justice — what they believed in most was not being a loser.

So all that talk from rainbow alliance types about wanting "cisgendered white men" to sit obediently at their feet and not object to anything they say is not supposed to be taken seriously - the rainbow types would be as revolted by it in real life as any healthy minded white man would be by the thought of it, as being spiritless.

There's another angle to this. Young Jean Lee does give a few hints about what she considers privilege to be. For instance she writes that she herself shares some of the privilege of being a white male:

Believe it or not, Lee discovered she has something in common with straight white men. Sure, straight white men don’t share the emotional intimacy she’s used to, but: “As an Asian-American female, I share a lot of privileges with straight white men,” she says.

“There’s a lot of positive association: Asian women today are considered sexually desirable, they’re considered smart, and hard workers. Absolutely nobody’s ever going to assume I’m a criminal.”

So privilege has to do with being perceived to be sexually desirable, smart and hard-working. More on this in a moment. First, consider the following statement from Young Jean Lee:

“The question I was asking myself when I was working on the show was: ‘To what extent am I a straight white man, and to what extent am I accepted into the continuation of straight white male ideals? Am I using the straight white man as an excuse to not have to give anything up for social justice, because I can always point at the straight white man and say, ‘Well at least I’m not him’, so I can just do whatever I want and I’m making the world a better place because I’m making it more diverse?’” she said. “There’s a contradictory expectation these days. One is that they be more deferential, be less macho, and take up less space. And the other is that we want them to continue to be typical straight white men because we’re invested in it.”

I think what this means is that she gets to pursue what she takes to be white male success criteria and still be considered a progressive social justice warrior because she is advancing as an Asian woman (a diversity figure) rather than as a white male. If white males weren't there as a foil, then she wouldn't get the free ticket.

What's interesting about this is the underlying assumption about privilege. She assumes that being considered sexually desirable, hard-working and smart, and advancing in some status seeking way in a job, are the standards by which privilege can be measured and that these things represent the cultural high ground, the ideals of straight white men, which we white men now have to vacate so that others have room to occupy this ground.

If you look at the big picture, the larger sweep of history, this is not a very elevated view of culture. It is a relatively sterile, domesticated and tame view of what it means to be a man. If I work hard, don't get arrested, get a job with some social status, and have some Asian women like me - that is supposed to make me a great white male? That is my great historic privilege?

I don't think so.

No wonder that Young Jean Lee can see us as "privileged" even as we are being shuffled out of existence - as for her, privilege is not measured in terms of belonging to a rich tradition, or to a closely connected ethny or nation, or to a longstanding culture.

Nor does she see success in life in terms of the cultivation of character and virtue. For her, "white males" are an icon for individualistic career progress, rather than an embodiment of courage, fortitude, loyalty, and integrity.

She does not care about the inner spiritual life, about piety or religion or what a man holds to be sacred. And she is little concerned about family: about the quality of a man's commitment to marriage and to fatherhood.

She does not understand that it is a privilege to be connected closely to people and place, to manhood and a masculine culture, to nature and to art, to virtue and to a love of family.

Young Jean Lee's "idealized straight white male" represents a radical descent of culture - as does her own standard of privilege. It would be a mistake to be drawn into this world view, to see it as defining the terms of what matters in life.

Privileged but dying of despair?

In my last post I criticised the views of a Christian "conservative," David Mills. He believes that all white Americans are privileged; he quotes approvingly the idea that white privilege is "a life-easing level of advantage that comes with just being Caucasian in America, no matter what your wealth, gender or any other status."

One of my readers pointed out in a comment that, amongst other things, this ignores the issue of class. There are signs that working-class white Americans are struggling:

Class also gets ignored. Recent studies have shown extraordinary increases in death rates among white working class American men. Their lack of privilege is literally killing them. Why don't Christian conservatives express any concern about this?

I checked this out and my reader is correct - there has been an extraordinary rise in mortality rates for middle-aged white Americans (both male and female), especially for those who do not have university education.


Late last year The Atlantic ran a story on this titled "Middle-Aged White Americans are dying of despair". It is as if a terrible epidemic had struck this population group:

“half a million people are dead who should not be dead,” Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics and co-author of the paper, told The Washington Post. “About 40 times the Ebola stats. You’re getting up there with HIV-AIDS.”

Half a million white Americans in the 45 to 54 age group have died prematurely. In the meantime, mortality rates have continued to improve for black and Hispanic Americans in the same demographic. Hispanic Americans have a vastly better (i.e. lesser) middle-aged mortality rate than do white Americans.


Why? The Atlantic puts it down to despair amongst this group - middle-aged, working-class white Americans are dying of despair. How then can they be enjoying a "life-easing level of advantage" when they are dying at a faster rate than other groups?

White working-class women should be single mums?

There is an article at Slate titled "Just say no: for white working-class women, it makes sense to stay single mothers".

There are some good points made in the article. The gist of the argument is that employment prospects for women have risen over the past few decades, whereas those of working-class men in the US have declined. Therefore, there is a much smaller pool of potential breadwinning partners for white working-class women. Those men who actually are in a good position to marry have so much choice that they're in no hurry to settle down. Rather than marrying a man who will be, in effect, a dependent, white working-class women are making the "logical" choice to become single mothers.

I can't vouch for how accurately the article portrays the situation facing young women. What is interesting, though, are the remedies proposed.

The writers of the article are adamant that women should still have the autonomy to raise children by themselves via state aid if they so choose:

Those who would promote marriage seek to do so largely by taking away Lily’s independence...Charles Murray would cut programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, early childhood education and child care, mandatory family leave, and other policies that make it easier for women like Lily to raise a child on their own.

So what do the writers recommend? Well, this:

In our view what would make the most difference to this unfair marriage market are  policies that would increase the number and quality of jobs available to working class men, retraining and unemployment benefits that fill in the gaps between jobs, and ongoing support for women’s autonomy.

Let me say, first, that it's a step forward that white working-class men are not being portrayed as privileged oppressors but instead as a group that is losing out in significant ways in modern society. It's true, as well, that it's important that quality jobs be offered to these men to allow them to play a breadwinning role within a family.

But I doubt that you will ever have a stable culture of family life when female autonomy is made such a moral aim. If young women are told that it is their right, as an autonomous individual, to raise a child alone supported by the state rather than by a husband, then some will inevitably take that option (see here for an extreme example of this).

The idea that female autonomy is untouchable seems to run deep: KJ Dell'Antonia wrote a column criticising the Slate article, but even she asserted that,

Should working-class women (or, for that matter, all men and women) be able to raise children alone? Absolutely, and the more we tailor policies, school hours and cultural expectations to reflect the fact that many parents are both solo breadwinner and single caregiver, the better off all families will be.

But if it's OK to decide to raise a child alone, then what is wrong with the trend for white working-class women to do so? KJ Dell'Antonia reaches for the "it's not an authentic choice" option:

No parent “should” raise children alone unless it is a real choice, not a choice created by a culture that is determinedly setting so many young people adrift after high school without the wherewithal to envision, plan for or create a better life for themselves.

She then goes on to provide evidence of how outcomes for children in single mother homes are statistically worse than for other children, particularly for boys (but this then raises the question of whether a government should encourage single parenthood through its welfare policies - why do this if the outcomes for children are, on average, worse?).

It seems we've reached an interesting moment in politics. It is now being recognised on the left that white working-class men have been left behind to the point that they are now in a poor position to marry. That then means that women have to raise and support children by themselves (and with state aid). Perhaps these leftist writers recognise that autonomy for these women is not such an easy or happy path - or perhaps they are hesitating at the brink of accepting a regress to societies in which men exist unproductively on the margins.

Native French under attack

CBN has broadcast a report on anti-white racism in France (hat tip: Gallia Watch). It's pleasing that a major media outlet has gone outside the expected narrative in which it is assumed that whites are the perpetrators rather than the victims.

The report begins with video of white French people being attacked by gangs of young immigrant (mostly Muslim) men. It then notes that there are "no go" areas in France into which even the police are reluctant to venture.

Interestingly, the report then quotes a sociologist, Tarik Yildiz, who is of Turkish origin but has written a book about anti-white racism in France:

"Some of those who launch racist attacks on whites use Islam as the reason they do it. They may not even speak Arabic, but they still use Islam as a 'flag,'" Tarik Yildiz, a French sociologist, said.

Yildiz, author of the book, Anti-White Racism, is not native French but is the son of Turkish immigrants.

"My book is viewed as politically incorrect and breaks a taboo: the idea that immigrants could oppress whites," Yildez said.

The report suggests that one reason for the mass influx of immigrants into France is that the left there sees immigrants as an important voting bloc. Indeed, 93% of Muslims in France voted for the socialist President Francois Hollande at the last elections. They voted for Hollande even though he represents a radical secular liberalism that is at odds with Islam.

Finally, the report notes that the French state is helping to finance a mosque in Paris which is called "Conquest."

How do you bridge this gulf?

There is a gulf in understanding between those who follow "interest group politics" and those who identify with the larger tradition they belong to.

The leaders of minority groups often understand that in a liberal society the aim of politics is to create a formal structure through which self-interest can be equally pursued (with the formal structure including definitions of rights). They see the aim of politics, therefore, as being to organise as a minority interest group and to make sure that this framework (of pursuing self-interest) is structured in a way that is biased for rather than against their own group. The minority groups will often assume that this has also been the focus of the majority, meaning that the majority has used its influence to structure society to its own benefit (hence the notion of majority privilege dominant on the left today).

White liberals who belong to the majority often perceive society the same way that minority groups do, and so tend to be sympathetic to claims of majority privilege.

But for most members of the majority all this is very confusing. They don't see their society as being a field of contest for competing rights. Their society means much more to them than this. It has a meaning as an entity in itself: as a source of identity, as an expression of the culture that is connected to one's own people, as a means of transmission of a distinct tradition.

Furthermore, the non-liberal member of the majority will want his society to be ordered according to objective moral truths, rather than being merely a system enabling the pursuit of self-interest.

So there is a seemingly unbridgeable gulf in understanding here. Unfortunately, the majority has to understand that it is liberal whites and minority interest groups who are running the show, so their understanding now dominates.

I have had readers in the past who have insisted that liberals aren't interested in the truth and that there is therefore no purpose in trying to argue with them logically. I've mostly disagreed as there do exist principles within liberal thought which liberals follow through to their logical conclusions.

However, I agree that liberals, in thinking about the nature of society, aren't as oriented to what is objectively true or good. Instead, they focus on relationships of power - on who gets to benefit from structures which limit or empower the pursuit of self-interest (when liberals praise someone for being "empowered" doesn't it often mean that the person has thrown off limitations in the pursuit of what they want?)

It should also be said that even though it is left-liberals who have made interest group politics their own, right-liberals did much to prepare the ground for it. It was right-liberals who pushed along the idea of society being made of millions of rights-bearing individuals each pursuing a rational self-interest. It was not a long step from that to the idea that the contest was not just between individuals but between interest groups.

So even though it's true that right-liberals often hate the idea of interest groups replacing individuals (with many complaints about the intrusion of ethnicity, culture and race into politics), it was right-liberals themselves who set up the idea of society as being a neutral or vacant space rather than a space that was already inhabited by a particular culture, tradition and people.

Missing privilege

Which race in America suffers the most from stress? A group of researchers expected to find something that fitted the "white privilege" narrative. But the answer was more complex:

Dunkel Schetter said the study did not support a few of the researchers' original assumptions, including their hypotheses that African-American and Hispanic parents would have higher levels of most kinds of stress, and that stress would be a major reason for the racial and ethnic disparities in health.

"It wasn't that clear cut," she said. "There were forms of stress that were higher in whites than in African-Americans and Hispanics, there were forms of stress that were quite low in the African-Americans even when they were poor, and there were forms of stress that varied in Latinos, depending on whether they were U.S.- or foreign-born."

The study did find that:

A mother who wasn't living with the father of her baby was likely to have higher stress levels than one who lived with the baby's father.

Did Western colonialism create economic inequality?

There are people who believe that the reason economic inequality exists is that white people exploited others over the centuries and whites therefore became advantaged and non-whites became disadvantaged.

In a recent post I showed why that can't be true. The European economies began to advance by at least the year 1100 AD, long before any colonial contact with Asia or Africa. And there was a big jump in economic growth in about the year 1800 AD, which coincides with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution - which means that it was the innovations in industrial organisation and technique in England and elsewhere which powered the sudden leap in Western economies.

A reader, Chris, sent in a link which provides more evidence that white colonisation does not explain economic inequality. Two American economists, William Easterly and Ross Levine, have undertaken research to discover the economic impact of white colonisation on the long-term prosperity of a country.

What they discovered was that white colonisation predicts improvements in long-term prosperity rather than poverty. In other words, the more whites living in a country in 1700, the higher the GDP of a nation in the year 2000. Whites brought relative prosperity, not poverty.

From the summary:

We find a remarkably strong impact of colonial European settlement on development. According to one illustrative exercise, 47 percent of average global development levels today are attributable to Europeans. One of our most surprising findings is the positive effect of even a small minority European population during the colonial period on per capita income today, contradicting traditional and recent views.

That 47 percent statistic is explained further here:

Using the 2000 population weights, the data and estimated coefficients indicate that 47% of the development outside of Europe is attributed to the share of European settlers during the early stages of colonization ... it is striking how much of global development is associated with Europeans (not even considering the development of Europe itself).

What the statistic means is that if, say, an African country has managed to increase its GDP by $1000 per capita over the period 1700 to 2000, then $470 of that improvement can be attributed to the presence of whites in the year 1700. If there had been no whites active in that African country, then that $470 GDP per capita improvement would not exist.

The researchers found that you could predict economic improvements by the number of whites in a particular country in the early stages of colonisation. They give this example for Brazil:

...consider just a one percentage point increase in Euro share in the case of Brazil. The estimated coefficients suggest that if Brazil had a Euro share of 0.084 rather than 0.074, then its average GDP per capita over the period from 1995 to 2005 would have been $9,798 instead of $7,942.

I am not quoting these figures in order to try to prove that everything about colonisation was positive for the countries affected. But they do provide strong evidence against the claim that the Western nations got rich at the expense of other nations. Nations which were left alone by the Western colonial powers are worse off today in economic terms, not better off.

Does the white privilege theory fit the facts?

The University of Minnesota-Duluth is sponsoring an ad campaign claiming that white people are successful because they are unfairly privileged.

It's no surprise that the ad campaign is running - the message is widely believed on the liberal left which dominates the universities both in America and elsewhere. But before I get into the theory, here is the ad:



There are also posters in which a white person's face is scribbled over with the message that:

You give me better jobs, better pay, better treatment, and a better chance - all because of the color of my skin.

Why would left-liberals push this message? Liberals in general think of individual autonomy as an overriding good. This means that people are supposed to be self-determining, which then means that our race, which is predetermined, must be made not to matter. In particular, race is not supposed to affect our life choices or our life outcomes.

But it does. Statistically, on a range of social indicators, blacks in the U.S. come out worst and Hispanics come out next worst. So liberals have to account for why race still matters.

Right-liberals usually opt for the idea that society is gradually progressing toward the desired liberal outcomes. Society is becoming ever more enlightened and continuing education and prosperity will eventually do the trick and create a truly race blind society.

Left-liberals have their own explanation. They believe that inequality arises when one group of people create a false category (e.g. "whiteness") in order to "other" and then oppress and exploit everyone else. In this view, whiteness is a social construct in which one group of people gain an unearned privilege at the expense of everyone else.

This left-liberal theory makes whites exceptional. Whites become the one group who need to be deconstructed and whose success can be put down to unearned privilege rather than to effort and talent.

The argument against whiteness studies

One argument against whiteness studies is simply this: that it is generated by a political ideology rather than by a disinterested examination of the facts.

But even if we disregard the ideological origins of the theory, there are still some compelling arguments against it.

The first I have made several times before. Whilst it is true that blacks and Hispanics do worst on a range of social indicators, it's not true that whites do best. It is Asian Americans, not white Americans, who on average have higher incomes, better access to the professions, and better educational and family outcomes.

This is not what the theory predicts. If society is set up to benefit whites at the expense of everyone else, then why would Asian Americans so rapidly rise to the top?

Here is some of the data:

a) Asians are the most highly educated group of Americans, with more than half with a bachelor’s degrees or higher.

b) Asian Americans, though only 4 percent of the nation's population, account for nearly 20 percent of all medical students. Forty-five percent of Berkeley's freshman class, but only 12 percent of California's populace, consists of Asian-Americans. And at UT-Austin, 18 percent of the freshman class is Asian American, compared to 3 percent for the state.

c) An Asian American male with the same level of experience and education as a white American male receives a 4% bonus in earnings - for women the gap rises to 17%. If mean earnings remain unadjusted for education and experience, then the discrepancy is even more pronounced: in 2000, native-born Asian American men recorded a 14% bonus in mean earnings compared to white American men, and the gap for women was 32%.

But here's something else to consider. If the theory of white privilege were correct then it ought to be evident in data showing economic growth across past centuries. In short, Europe, Africa and Asia ought to have had a similar standard of living until European colonisation began in earnest in about the 1550s. From that time onward, the data should show a gradual rise in the economic fortunes of the white colonial powers and a gradual fall in the economies of the Asian and African nations.

But that doesn't seem to be the case. Here is a chart showing GDP from the year 1 AD to 1800 AD:

The chart shows that African GDP hardly changed over the centuries; China's rose a little until the year 1500 and then stagnated, as did India's; Japan's rose very gradually; whilst Western Europe's GDP took off from about the year 1100 AD and kept rising.

That doesn't fit with what whiteness theory would predict. The Western economies began to rise a long time, in fact about 400 years, prior to any colonial contact with other races. So the economic success of the Western nations has to be attributed to something else. Nor did the rise of the West cause other parts of the world to decrease in GDP. Africa's GDP hardly budged from the $400 per capita over the entire period, regardless of what the European powers were doing.

It's true that China and India's economies stagnated from about the year 1500, but it's difficult to link this to European colonialism as most areas of China and India weren't subject to colonisation until a long time after the year 1500 as these maps indicate:

A) Colonisation 1550

B) Colonisation 1660

C) Colonisation 1754

D) Colonisation 1822

Here are some conclusions that can be drawn from these maps:

a) China wasn't subject to colonisation prior to 1822. To my knowledge, China kept out the West up to this time, apart from a guarded compound of merchants in the city of Canton. So the stagnation of the Chinese economy doesn't seem to be due to what white people were doing.

b) There were some Portuguese trading posts established in India by the 1550s, but they are so small they're difficult to see on the map. By the 1660s the European powers were active in the coastal areas, but even so this doesn't really match the fact that Indian economic stagnation began much earlier, by the year 1500.

c) You can see too that two of the main colonial powers were not even Western European. Russia expanded greatly to the east during this time, whilst the Turks had large colonial possessions both in Europe and Africa.

d) Even in 1822 the British colonies weren't as extensive as might be thought. Yes, parts of Australia are coloured red but in 1822 Australia was barely settled by Europeans and was not well developed economically. The same would be true of New Zealand. It's not really until very late in the 1800s that the expansion of a territorial empire starts to look more impressive on a map - and that was after the real take-off of the British economy, not before it.

What happened after 1800? Instead of a gradual rise in the economies of the colonial powers and a gradual fall in those of Asia and Africa, as the whiteness studies theory would predict, we get something very different:

What you're looking at is the effect of the Industrial Revolution. That is what really shot up GDP per capita in Western Europe and the U.S. - rather than some sort of white colonial "othering".

So let me summarise: Western European GDP per capita did rise gradually for a long time - but this rise predates any contact with non-Europeans by a period of 400 years. So it can't be attributed to the "invention of whiteness". Second, a big increase in GDP happened quite suddenly at the very time the Industrial Revolution was taking place. So this was a matter of industrial organisation and technique taking place in England and elsewhere, rather than a transfer of wealth from non-whites to whites.

Finally, I'd like to give some publicity to a group called Campus Reform which has criticised the University of Minnesota-Duluth campaign against white students. It's refreshing that there is some kind of organised opposition to what is happening.

Scalzi: whites play on the lowest setting

John Scalzi is an American science fiction writer. He has fallen for liberalism very hard. In a recent blog post, he set out to explain to straight white men how they are a privileged group:

I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies.

So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it?

Being a white guy who likes women, here’s how I would do it:

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

He's arguing that straight white males have manipulated the settings of society so that they get to have the easiest time.

That's the standard left-liberal position. Left-liberals want a society in which there are equally autonomous life conditions. That would mean that there would be no differences between the races when it comes to educational or professional outcomes. But such a world doesn't exist.

Why not? The left-liberal answer is that one group in society (straight white males) created a series of false categories to oppress all those who were "othered" in order to enjoy an unearned privilege. The structures of racist/sexist oppression are considered to be systemic.

The left-liberal solution is to deconstruct whiteness and masculinity at a systemic level.

That's obviously not such an appealing prospect for the average non-liberal white male which means it's perfectly understandable for white men to react negatively to claims about white privilege.

What are the problems with the Scalzi left-liberal position on race?

First, it's not even true that whites do best in the U.S. when it comes to employment or education or family outcomes. As I've pointed out before (here and here) Asian Americans do significantly better.

The U.S. Census Bureau just recently released data on which groups in America are most likely to have university degrees. As you'd expect, Asians did the best (were the "most privileged" in Scalzi's terminology):

Asians are the most highly educated group of Americans, with more than half with a bachelor’s degrees or higher, the Census Bureau reported on Thursday.

Among groups of Asian Americans 25 and older, 74 percent of Taiwanese and 71 percent of Indians had at least a bachelor’s degree, the agency said as part of its release of American Community Survey data on hundreds of racial, tribal and Hispanic groups.

The comparable figure for the U.S. population overall is 28 percent.

Whereas 31% of white Americans have a university degree, over half of Asian Americans do. It's a significant difference.

Of course, someone could jump in and argue that the difference is because Asians value education more, or have stronger family support, or have higher average IQs and so on. But that would then illustrate another problem with Scalzi's left-liberalism. He assumes that if whites (at 31%) have an advantage over, say, blacks (at 18%) it's because whites have an unearned privilege. But if Asians have earned their advantage through greater effort or talent, then why can't whites? Why treat whites differently?

What Scalzi ends up doing is to take one relatively successful group (not even the most successful) and tear it down simply for being relatively successful. It's a case of punishing one group for doing the right thing (valuing education, holding together a strong family life etc).

In that sense, the left-liberal position is perverse.

Finally, note too the triumph of ideology in the left-liberal position. The ideology tells Scalzi that whites are dominant and so he continues to believe that they are a privileged group with the system rigged in their favour at the very time that in the real world whites are sliding demographically.

His concern ought to be that whites are in too vulnerable a position right now and what to do about that, but he is too blinded by his ideology to even register that whites might be in difficulty.

Sisters of Marxianity

Laura Wood has posted some items which are rightly critical of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), the largest organisation of American nuns.

I went to the LCWR website and found it to be inspired more by radical leftist ideology than by Christianity. A good example is a statement on racism which runs like this:

Racism in its institutional form continues because some people assume, consciously or unconsciously, that white people are superior. Therefore, the dominant race of whites develop and maintain institutions that privilege people like themselves and give less credibility to the contributions of other peoples and cultures. White privilege often goes unnoticed because it has been internalized and integrated as part of one’s outlook on the world by custom, habit and tradition.

Peggy McIntosh, author of White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, wrote about her experiences of white privilege. Her education gave her no training in seeing herself as an oppressor and advantaged person. Any work to benefit others was to allow "them" to be more like whites. She described white privilege as similar to an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks.

Social rules about what work is, who works for whom, how work is compensated, and the social process by which the result of work is appropriated operate to establish relations of power and inequality. These relations are reinforced by a systematic process in which the energies of the have-nots are continuously expended to maintain and augment the power, status, and wealth of the haves. This structural relationship between social groups is exploitation. (Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference)

That's a left liberal analysis of race, not a Christian one. The left liberal analysis goes like this:

i) The aim of politics is to disband unchosen social ties so that we are left as self-determining individuals subject to the same autonomous conditions of life

ii) Our race, just like our sex, is predetermined rather than self-determined and therefore must be made not to matter

iii) But race does still seem to matter. Some races do worse than others in education, in employment, in crime statistics etc.

iv) This is to be explained by a dominant group setting themselves up as a false racial category (whites) in order to enjoy an unearned privilege at the expense of an oppressed group (blacks)

v) Whiteness is therefore an artificial and oppressive social construct which only those whites seeking supremacy would want to uphold.

vi) White privilege is also to be regarded as systemic, as the institutions and culture of society were created to serve it

vi) Whites should therefore seek to deconstruct themselves and their society as whiteness is a uniquely immoral category associated with race supremacy and privilege

When the nuns endorse Peggy McIntosh's complaint that she was not educated to see herself as a white oppressor they are following not Christianity but left-liberalism.

Christianity cannot follow along the same lines as left-liberalism as Christianity accepts that we have a creator which means that we do not autonomously self-create who we are. To put this another way, if you believe that you are autonomously self-created, then you do not have the Christian view of man's relationship to God.

So Christians will focus on different things to liberals. Less on achieving equally autonomous life conditions and less on making predetermined qualities not matter.

If race does matter in certain respects that does not invalidate the core purposes of Christianity. It does not require Christians to resort to a class/oppressor analysis or to seek to deconstruct white people and white society.

The minds of the nuns of the LCWR have been colonised by a secular ideology. They may as well be just any other kind of leftist academic or political activist. They have made themselves redundant as nuns and therefore it is no surprise that their numbers are falling so rapidly.

Why the left doesn't care

I used to wonder if white leftists ever had pangs of conscience over their policies (if carried on for long enough) imperilling the existence of a whole race of people.

But then I realised that if you look at the world through a left-liberal mindset that you're unlikely to register the fact of white decline.

Why? The official end goal of liberalism is a world of "equal freedom" - which means more specifically a world in which individuals are equally autonomous - which means more specifically a world in which no-one is impeded in carrying through their individual life aims by predetermined qualities like their sex, race, ethnicity, sexuality etc.

But liberals have to recognise that qualities like sex, race and sexuality do affect life outcomes. An example would be lower average incomes and educational achievements of black Americans compared to white Americans, or lower lifetime earnings of women compared to men.

So liberals are confronted with a world they see as immorally ordered. And they have to explain why such an immoral order exists.

They are not likely to argue that different outcomes occur because of the differing natures, interests, talents, capacities or life aims of the sexes or races. They would see this as a pessimistic view, one in which the immoral ordering of society was inevitable.

Instead, liberals "optimistically" stick with the idea that society is progressing toward a more moral social order and that the continuing distinctions between the sexes and races are socially constructed and can therefore be reformed.

But why was society constructed immorally to begin with? This is where left-liberals, as distinct from right-liberals, take a particular path. They believe that one group of people organised themselves as a false category in order to "other" and oppress everyone excluded from that false category. The whole system of society, the theory goes, was structured to maintain the supremacy (the unearned privilege) of the false category group.

So who exactly are these people running a false category scam and morally disordering society? Unfortunately if you are a straight white male like myself, the do-badders identified by left-liberals are whites, males and straights.

That left-liberal theory has some very unfortunate consequences. First, it means that white society is treated as being exceptional in a negative sense. If a non-white group does well it can be explained in terms of hard work or a stable family life. But if whites do well, it is due to an unearned privilege. Similarly, left-liberals can look sympathetically on the expression of non-white cultures, whilst taking a hostile view toward a similar expression of a white culture (since the white culture only exists to assert an unjust privilege).

That's why left-liberals are quick to label a white person who takes pride in his culture as a 'supremacist'. That might seem illogical to the average person, but if you are a left-liberal and you believe that whiteness was created for the purpose of maintaining supremacy over others, then someone identifying positively with a white culture will be assumed to be supporting "supremacy".

And a final consequence of the theory? Left-liberals are unlikely to recognise the seriousness of the position that the white peoples of the world find themselves in. After all, the left-liberal theory is that inequality continues to exist because whites are a dominant power oppressing the non-white other. So your whole focus will be on white privilege and dominance in the world rather than vulnerability.

I recently saw an example of this kind of thinking in a comment to a story in the left-liberal Salon magazine. It began with a more conservative commenter challenging the Salon readers with a question: why is it that the solution to the race problem is thought to be mass immigration into Western countries, a measure that if continued will lead eventually to the genocide of whites, whilst Asian and African peoples are allowed to continue their own existence?

A Salon reader responded with this:

Nobody is advocating the "genocide" of white people. It's laughable how you equate a moderate decrease in the economic and cultural influence of whites as some kind of spectacular genocide.

But when you've been privileged for that long, I guess you do lose all sense of perspective.

The Salon reader simply hasn't registered the real position that whites are in. He or she is still fixated on the idea on the idea of whites being privileged, and as such can only recognise a "moderate decrease" in the position of whites. There are no pangs of conscience from the Salon reader because:

a) The focus is on whites being privileged and so nothing more than a "moderate decrease" in the position of whites is recognised

and

b) It is implied that this "moderate decrease" in the position of whites is a moral thing, a taking away of privilege rather than an assault on historic human communities.

What can be done to challenge the left-liberal position? Plenty of things.

i) The left-liberal position thrives when it goes unchallenged. The more non-liberals we get into the political class, the less room there will be for unexamined assumptions on the left.

ii) We can point to the fact that the system doesn't work to privilege whites the way that the left-liberal theory assumes it to do. For instance, whilst blacks do worse than whites in certain areas such as income and education, Asian-Americans do significantly better than white Americans, i.e. it is Asian-Americans who are, on average, the most privileged and not white Americans.

iii) We can point to other explanations for group distinctions. Among them are differences in IQ, in other inherited traits, and in deeply rooted aspects of culture and family organisation.

iv) We can challenge the underlying assumptions on which the whole edifice of the left-liberal approach rests. Is a well-ordered society really one in which predetermined qualities are not allowed to matter? Does that really lead to the freedoms which are most important to people? Does the use of the state to suppress group distinctions really create a free society? And aren't there other important goods alongside freedom which contribute to the moral ordering of a society?

v) We can point to the injustice in regarding whiteness as exceptionally immoral, for instance, when the success of migrant groups is attributed to hard work and determination, whilst that of whites is attributed to unearned privilege.

vi) We can point to ways in which it is obvious that whites do not occupy the oppressor role, for instance, the trends in interracial crime in which whites are more likely to be victims rather than aggressors.

vii) We can personally reject liberalism to the degree that we no longer give it moral authority. And, following from this, we can attempt to organise our own non-liberal networks, institutions and, perhaps one day, communities.

The folly of whiteness studies and those Duluth billboards

The town of Duluth in Minnesota has hit the headlines. The white mayor of that town, Don Ness, has backed a billboard campaign attacking white people for enjoying a racist, unearned privilege.

What's that all about? It goes back to an academic movement called whiteness studies.

There is a split between liberals when it comes to race and ethnicity. Liberals generally agree that race should be made not to matter in society. For right liberals that means adopting the idea of being colour blind, including to one's own race. But left liberals take things further. They explain racial disparities the same way they explain disparities between men and women. They believe that a dominant group created a false category (whiteness) in order to impose a system on society which granted them an unearned privilege at the expense of the "other".

That makes whiteness exceptional in a negative sense. It connects whiteness, as a matter of definition, to supremacism and racism. That's why students at the University of Delaware were taught, in compulsory diversity training sessions, that:

[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.

Whiteness studies is an academic spin-off of this left-liberal approach to race. The academics teaching these courses are concerned that whites have bought into the "I am colourblind" mentality, so they want to force whites to confront their whiteness and their privilege.

And what exactly is white privilege supposed to consist of? Two things are emphasised. First, whites are supposed to have better educational and employment outcomes not because they have worked hard or created stable forms of community and family life, but because they benefit from hidden privileges which advantage them.

Second, whites are thought to be privileged because, as the majority group, they get to set community norms, i.e. to define what is normal.

But neither of these supposed instances of privilege really stands logical scrutiny. First, when it comes to education and employment, whites are not the most privileged group in America - Asians are. In 2010 the median income for Asian-Americans was a considerable 18% higher than that for white Americans. In terms of professional outcomes, Asian-Americans are doing remarkably well:

In the year 2000, 4.1% of America's population was Asian American, but Asian Americans were 13.6% of doctors and dentists, 13.2% of computer specialists, 9.9% of engineers, 6.1% of accountants, 8.7% of post-secondary teachers (such as uni professors) and 6.9% of architects.

They are doing well, in part, because of a high level of family stability and a strong commitment to education and career. But their success undermines the claims of the whiteness theorists. After all, Asian-Americans aren't white and nor are they a majority. And yet not only have they done well, they have done better than whites when it comes to employment and income. How could they have done this if the whole system was based on securing white privilege?

Second, whites are supposedly privileged because as the majority they get to set the cultural norms that they feel comfortable with but which don't suit those from other races. But if that is true, then it undermines the original liberal claim that categories of race have no real content and can be made not to matter. What liberals are admitting to, in adopting this argument, is that if you put one large group of people from one race together they will create a culture that will feel alien to those of another race.

And, furthermore, if the argument is true, then the logical response is the exact opposite of what is being demanded by the left-liberals in Duluth. If it is a privilege to live within your own cultural norms, and a hardship to be deprived of this, then it makes sense to preserve the cultural norms of the 90% majority. Why attack something that is an important good to such a large number of people within a community?

Has there been opposition to the billboards? Yes, but from what I've seen mostly as a defence of the right-liberal position, that the billboards are racially divisive, we're all just humans, can't we forget about race etc. The problem with that position is that it doesn't allow white Americans to assert a collective defence. And the attacks are likely to keep coming. In Duluth, for instance, there are left-wing churches offering courses titled "Cracking the shell of whiteness". Similarly, the billboard campaign is supported not only by the mayor's office, but also by the local YWCA (an astonishingly left-wing outfit), and by the local campuses of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin Superior.

Where is the pushback going to come from? It won't happen if white Americans don't identify with a communal tradition of their own. If white Americans take a right-liberal position, they will be left as individuals to complain about the situation, whilst being hamstrung in offering any real resistance.

Finally, the discussion at VFR of this issue is worth reading.