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.

Doesn't whiteness studies contravene Section 18C?

So an Australian judge has found that:

People should be free to fully identify with their race without fear of public disdain or loss of esteem for so identifying.

Andrew Bolt was found guilty of contravening the Racial Discrimination Act on this basis, since he questioned why light-skinned Aboriginal activists would identify with the minor part of their ancestry.

But who else would also have to be found guilty? The thought crossed my mind that all those academics involved in "whiteness studies" courses contravene the law, given that the whole point of these courses is to associate whiteness negatively with oppression and to deny that a white racial identity is legitimate.

So I did a quick google search and within a minute had come up with sufficient evidence to run a case. In the very first section of the first document I looked at I found this:

“[t]he critique of whiteness…attempts to displace the normativity of the white position by seeing it as a strategy of authority rather than an authentic or essential ‘identity’”

Here we have a clear denial that a white person might have an authentic race identity.

In the same document we find the following:

the central overarching theme in scholarship on whiteness is the argument that white identity is decisively shaped by the exercise of power and the expectation of advantages in acquiring property

Isn't that an insulting claim? The allegation is that whites only identify as whites in order to get power and money.

Then there's this admission about whiteness studies:

This literature sits within a long history of observations of whiteness as a problem

So whiteness is looked on in the literature as a "problem". Not a tad offensive to white people?

There's also this:

Allen, as is central to the critical study of whiteness ... [describes] the invention of the white race as political rather than biological or evolutionary.

Umm, how can I be free to fully identify with my race, if the very existence of my race is denied?

It gets worse:

Again, Roediger was also responsible for editing a collection of essays concerned with whiteness. Entitled Towards the abolition of whiteness, this text contributes to the movement, above attributed to Ignatiev, of those seeking to combat white race privilege by abolishing the white race.

Now, surely anyone selling this book in Australia is contravening section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Then there's the following less than charming passage:

‘New Abolitionism’ “refers to the abolishment of the white race so that whites may gain their freedom from the enslavement of their cooperation in racism” ... It requires challenging all of the institutions that reproduce race and whiteness, and the supporters of ‘new abolitionism’ call on all ‘so-called whites’ (to borrow the language of Race Traitor) to become race traitors, telling us that “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity”

I'm not feeling fully free to identify with my own race after reading that particular rant. I'm feeling offended. Definitely a case for Section 18C.

And there's this this from Olivia Khoo:

In the Australian context Olivia Khoo uses Asian-Australian and indigenous literature to discuss the possibilities for destabilising whiteness in Australia. She suggests a strategy of ‘visibilising’ whiteness as an ‘ornamental detail’, arguing that “[s]howing up the ornamentation of whiteness enables it to be dislodged from its position of power and associated privileges”

Oddly, Olivia Khoo's own suffering at the hands of white privilege was to be catapulted into a job as an English lecturer at Monash University. Must have been a hard path to tread.

All of the above quotes are from just one paper written by a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland - the first paper I happened to look at. Just imagine, then, if Section 18C were to be applied consistently throughout academia. You would probably have to close down the English departments at most universities and at many high schools - and some of the history and politics departments as well.

Tom Hayden's wedding speech

Tom Hayden is an American left-wing activist, particularly well known for his part in the political campaigns of the 1960s. He was married at one time to the actress Jane Fonda and they had a son together whom they named Troy O'Donovan Hayden. The "Troy" was in honour of Nguyen Van Troi, a Viet Cong assassin, and the "O'Donovan" was for Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, an Irish Republican who organised dynamite campaigns in English cities.

The son is now called Troy Garity. A few years ago he married Simone Bent who is of African descent. It has been reported in the May 9th issue of The New Yorker that Tom Hayden honoured his son's marriage in the following manner:

As the evening progressed, the parents of both the bride and groom made speeches. Speaking off the cuff, Garity's father, the political activist and politician Tom Hayden, who was Fonda's second husband (neither parent want Troy to bear the weight of a famous last name), said that he was especially happy about his son's union with Bent, who is black, because, among other things, it was "another step in a long-term goal of mine: the peaceful, nonviolent disappearance of the white race."

Tom Hayden wants the white race to disappear. Not all the races - just the white one.

Why? The likely answer is that Tom Hayden sees the world through a left-liberal lens. Liberals assume that autonomy, or the power to do as we will, is the good that defines us as human. Therefore, if one group has more such power than another (if it is "privileged") then it is denying human equality in the most literal sense.

Left liberals have a theory as to why such inequality exists. They believe that the dominant group is socially constructed to win for its members an unearned privilege. Because whites were dominant when such theories were being formed, whites (and particularly white males) were assumed to be the source of inequality, injustice and oppression in the world.

If the left-liberal theory were correct, then you can see why Tom Hayden would want whites to disappear. Whiteness, in the left-liberal theory, is simply a pathway to privilege (or supremacy) which causes others to be treated as less than human.

You can see this left-liberal mindset at work in Hayden's book discussing his own identity (Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America). Hayden grew up in a middle-class family of Irish descent but of mainstream white American identity. But when he became a political activist in the 1960s, he turned back to an Irish identity:

After a decade in the civil rights movement, I associated being "white" with either supremacy or emptiness. Then, in 1968 ... I saw marchers in Northern Ireland singing "We Shall Overcome" and, in an epiphany, discovered that I was Irish on the inside.

But there's a problem. If the Irish are white, then they too must be classified as "supremacist" according to the left-liberal logic. Which then makes them illegitimate.

So Hayden is very keen to keep the Anglo-Saxons as the villainous privileged supremacists. He warns the Irish against assimilating into the white mainstream, preferring them instead to help defeat the whites by assimilating into coloured minority groups.

Because the Irish harbor a racial memory, however fogged by amnesia, of what it means to be treated as nonhuman, there still remains the possibility of Irish solidarity with people of color. When the Irish leave whiteness, there goes the neighborhood.

....To be genuinely Irish is to challenge WASP dominance and to assimilate ourselves not only into advanced Western societies but also into the non-white, non-English speaking world. (p.6)

Why not identify with whiteness? Because Hayden believes that those who identify as white do so to embrace privilege, just as the Ulstermen in Northern Ireland identify with Britain for their own advantage:

To identify with the Union with Britain - as with whiteness - is to embrace economic, political and cultural advantage. (p.7)

Here is Hayden once again proposing a "deeper" Irish assimilation not with the white mainstream but with a coloured multicultural America:

a deeper assimilation will mean assimilation into the nonwhite world with whom we share a common experience of colonialism, starvation, poverty and threats of extinction.

The only alternative to this reassessment will be our shallow incorporation into the Western establishment. Then we will lose the historic opportunity to play a meaningful role in the emergence of multicultural America. (pp. 29-30)

Finally there is this from Hayden:

In our long day's journey toward success, Irish Americans are in danger of becoming lost souls ... We can reap the privileges of being white or, remembering the shame of being classified as simians [i.e. as nonhumans] and asking what is whiteness but privilege?, we can transcend the superficiality of skin color to join in solidarity with the majority who are darker than ourselves. (pp.268-269)

It's clear that Tom Hayden's wedding speech to his son was meant sincerely. It was not spoken as a throwaway line; it reflects Tom Hayden's deeply held beliefs about how the Irish in America should act morally in the world to bring about justice.

But look at where Tom Hayden's left-liberalism has brought him. He wants the Irish to assert themselves as an ethny, but to do so as non-whites - in fact, to do so by assimilating into the non-white peoples of the world. But this is, at its heart, a denial of Irish ethnicity, one which ultimately would leave little trace of the Irish in the world.

And look at what he writes of whiteness: "what is whiteness but privilege?". That's the left-liberal theory in a nutshell. Being a white American has no meaning at all to Hayden apart from its connection to privilege or supremacy.

Left-liberalism is not exactly a subtle instrument when it comes to issues of identity. The culture, the achievements and the sacrifices of whites in America are all smashed into oblivion with the idea that whiteness was constructed as a means to privilege.

For something to survive, it's little use trying to appeal to those who already operate with the left-liberal assumptions. The assumptions have to be brought into the light of day and criticised.

A destructive white god?

Maxine Beneba Clarke is a woman of West Indian descent living in Melbourne. She responded to the Haiti disaster by writing a poem, which was published on the website of Overland, a leading left-wing literary journal.

The gist of the poem? God and Jesus must be white men. That would explain their visiting of death and destruction on brown people. She asks the "pale trinity" if crushing Haiti felt as good as similar acts visited on coloured peoples, such as the tsunami.

The poem attracted one comment, from a white reader, which was just as bad as the poem itself:

I think destruction comes naturally to us white men. It is almost like a religion to us that we will worship, forever creating new and more devastating ways to blow shit up.

The bonus is, when armagedon comes, it will be us what brings it and we’ll dance and sing and laugh at all the pretty flashing lights caused by the world falling to pieces as lava advances on the homes of those too poor to fly off to the moon where the best seats for the show will be.

That’s very well said Maxine, personally I don’t like to point the finger at God for natural disasters. Maybe because I’m a atheist.

Right. So white men worship destruction like a religion. We'll laugh when we finally destroy the world, just before we fly off to the moon, leaving the poor to their fate.

Overland, by the way, gets funded by the Federal Government, the Victorian Government, Arts Victoria, Victoria University and the Australia Council for the Arts.

Update: The actor Danny Glover has claimed that the Haiti earthquake is a consequence of global warming. A reader, Ned Wilobane, has written some lines to Gaia in response. His poem is beautifully subversive of Maxine Beneba Clarke's original:

Seems Gaia
That big Momma
that swallows us whole dying
must be a commie / to me
else what the hell she want / taxing
the hell outa
the brave
& the free
the state entity
takes my money in their fist
did it feel as good in
Russia / Germany / or China
what tickles her the best
giant cavernous devouring,
swallowing down the free man
Gaia is a commie / i’m sayin
Gaia is now a commie / to me

Louis CK: whites will pay

There's an American comedian called Louis CK who has picked up the gist of whiteness theory.

According to the theory, race is an artificial category invented by whites to uphold their unearned privilege over the non-white other.

Below is a You Tube clip of Louis CK, with a transcript underneath:

Sorry I’m being so negative. I’m a bummer, I don’t know I shouldn’t be I’m a very lucky guy. I got a lot going from me. I’m a healthy, I’m relatively young. I’m white; which thank God for that sh** boy. That is a huge leg up, are you kidding me? I love being white I really do. Seriously, if you’re not white you’re missing out because this sh** is pearly good. Let me be clear by the way, I’m not saying that white people are better. I’m saying that being white is clearly better, who could even argue? If it was an option I would reup ever year. Oh yeah I’ll take white again absolutely, I’ve been enjoying that, I’ll stick with white thank you. Here’s how great it is to be white, I could get in a time machine and go to any time and it would be f***** awesome when I get there. That is exclusively a white privilege. Black people can’t f*** with time machines. A black guy in a time machine is like hey anything before 1980 no thank you, I don’t want to go. But I can go to any time. The year 2, I don’t even know what was happening then but I know when I get there, welcome we have a table right here for you sir. ... thank you, it’s lovely here in the year 2. I can go to any time in the past, I don’t want to go to the future and find out what happens to white people because we’re going to pay hard for this sh**, you gotta know that ... we’re not just gonna fall from number 1 to 2. They’re going to hold us down and f*** us in the ass forever and we totally deserve it but for now wheeeee. If you’re white and you don’t admit that it’s great, you’re an asshole. It is great and I’m a man. How many advantages can one person have? I’m a white man, you can’t even hurt my feelings. What can you really call a white man that really digs deep? Hey cracker ... oh ruined my day. Boy shouldn’t have called me a cracker, bringing me back to owning land and people what a drag.

The basic message of the Louis CK rant? Whites have always been privileged at the expense of everyone else and will be justifiably harshly punished for it.

So confident is Louis CK of the theory that he even extends it through known time. Go back in a time machine, even to the year 2 A.D., and there will be whites lapping up their privilege by denying a decent life to others.

The theory explains quite a bit about the liberal attitude to white forms of identity. If you accept the theory, then it makes sense to treat whites differently and to see any expression of white identity as an assertion of supremacy. After all, if it's true that whiteness was created to oppress others, then anyone defending it must be in favour of white supremacy.

The theory, though, is rubbish. First, it's clearly nonsensical to claim that what European villagers were doing in the year 2 A.D. had any significant effect on the lives of African or Asian villagers of the same era.

Second, it simply isn't true that Europeans have always had the upper hand when it comes to conquest and colonialism. For much of history Europe itself was conquered by foreign powers and subject to colonial rule.

Think of Russia under the Tatar yoke for several centuries. Or Spain under the Moors. Or the Balkans under the Ottomans.

It's not even true that whites are the most privileged racial group in America today. That distinction clearly goes to Asians:

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.

Asian Americans have the highest percentage of two-parent families (73%) and the highest mean family income ($77,000). White Americans were somewhat lower on both counts (67% and $70,000).

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.

So what are white Americans being punished for? They have been singled out for the sake of a political theory.

Liberals want to make unchosen qualities like our sex and our race not matter. But this means they have to explain why these qualities mattered in the past.

Some right-liberals are content to simply explain their existence in terms of the backwardness of history which progress will finally overcome. But left-liberals generally go further than this.

Left-liberals assert, first, that categories like our sex and race are not natural entities but artificial social constructs. Why were they constructed? As an act of power. They allowed one privileged class of people to assert a dominance of will over another oppressed class of people.

So there has to be a dominant oppressor group with an artificial, supremacist identity for the theory to work. Whites got tapped on the shoulder for the role.

As a result, we get to be the ones who deserve what's coming to us.

But again, it's all theory. It all depends on a number of doubtful claims, such as that our sex and our race are social constructs, and that male identities and white identities have an essentially negative purpose and origin in oppressing others.

(For some further reading on whiteness theory, see here.)

Who does Catherine Deveny want to purge?

Catherine Deveny is impatient. There are too many middle-aged, middle-class white men holding responsible positions in the workforce for her liking. They're not easy to get rid of. Catherine doesn't want to wait for them to fade away - she wants them culled. They're standing in the way of change.

That's the gist of a recent column Catherine Deveny penned for the Melbourne Age. Here are some choice extracts:

... there are too many rich, middle-aged, middle-class white men in suits running the place. They are the ones who got us into this financial and economic mess. An impenetrable wall of them is not the answer to getting us out of it ...

We're not saying Ians should be exterminated. God knows we need them. Who else would file the tax returns, perform hip replacements and keep Harley Davidson in business? We're just saying it wouldn't hurt to cull a few. My suggestion is to organise a program to reduce the number of Ians by 70% ...

Even more terrifying than the disproportionate number of Ians who have always held the power is the mindless chant of "It's just the way it is" when you mention it. This may be true, but it doesn't mean that ... it's not time to subvert the dominant paradigm ...

The Ians are not taking the involuntary redundancies ... The Ians are too expensive to sack ... Many being strapped to the rocket of power at the moment are Ians who've been waiting patiently in line ... Blokes being rewarded for playing the game by the rules ... They're out of touch. They're not the answer ...

The Ians set up the power structure and it's tricky for anyone else to get in without knowing the password, the secret handshake and the magic dance. Apparently you had to have your name down before you were born.

It's interesting to consider the way Deveny crafts this piece. She's trying to tell an audience of "Ians" - white male professionals - that they are redundant, holding back progress and should be shunted aside. She humanises the message somewhat by throwing in some humourous quips. Written any more bluntly and the message would come across as more obviously vicious.

Note too the way that Deveny slips in the idea that white Australian men are responsible for the world financial crisis. She doesn't debate the idea or make any arguments for it. She simply assumes it as a given.

Yet it's a ridiculous claim. The crisis began in America at a time when the Australian economy was strong. The origin of the crisis was a misguided egalitarianism promoted not by the average white collar worker but by those in the political class who demanded that banks equalise mortgages given to ethnic minorities in the US, even if this meant approving loans to those unable to repay them.

Deveny also simply assumes that she is a deprived outsider, locked out of a power structure dominated by white men. Again, we are supposed to simply assume this to be true.

It's difficult, though, to see Deveny as a marginalised, excluded outsider. She has a cushy, influential job, writing for a major newspaper with an audience of hundreds of thousands. How many men really have a greater chance to influence society than she does?

She wants us to think of her as the outsider, the dissenter, the maverick, the creative innovator. In reality she is yet another member of the left-liberal political establishment, which has fashioned the course of Western societies for generations now. She is an orthodox insider offering us the same politics and the same ideas which have dominated the West for decades.

There's craftiness too in her portrayal of white men. On the one hand, she emphasises the idea that white men have power that others lack. She doesn't want to give the impression, though, that this makes white men strong or capable. No, white men are old, stale, burnt out, and incompetent. White men are "Ians" - all too ordinary and comfortable. Pretenders in cardigans.

It's an odd picture; white men are "terrifying" in their power but at the same time to be ridiculed as bumbling suburban uncle types. We are invited to smugly look down on white men even as we complain about their "impenetrable" power.

Which raises an important question. Why would any self-respecting white man go along with the politics of the left? Why put up with this kind of treatment?

Lawrence Auster made a similar point in a column posted yesterday. He observed that the real development of liberalism is not toward a race neutral society, but toward the disempowerment and denigration of whites. In other words, if you're white then you're not going to be treated neutrally:

Liberalism is not a journey from a historically white society to a society in which race neutrality is the guiding principle. It is a journey from a historically white society to a society in which the advance of nonwhites as nonwhites—along with its corollary, the disempowerment and denigration of whites as whites—is the guiding principle. And if those are the rules of the game, why should any self-respecting, non-suicidal white person play?

Unpacking whose privilege?

As expected, whiteness studies is beginning to be picked up and run with by rank and file leftists.

What is it? It's a field of studies based on the theory that whiteness was socially constructed to maintain the unearned privilege of whites.

The theory is steadily increasing in influence and it's not difficult to imagine it going mainstream.

We should do what we can to resist this process. The theory suggests that it is the very fact of being white which is a problem, and not just any particular kind of behaviour or attitude.

The claim is that all whites benefit from "white privilege" at the expense of the non-white other; in other words, there is an unjust system of privilege built into the way society operates through which whites are given privileges and advantages denied to others.

If you are white and you believe this theory you are going to be mightily conflicted in your identity and affiliations. You will not have a healthy regard for your own tradition - there will be no celebrating your part of the world's ethnic mosaic.

The best you will be able to do is to act against your own identity and your own kind (one whiteness studies professor has written that "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity").

I have written a detailed criticism of whiteness studies elsewhere; I'd like to focus in this post on just one particular problem with the theory.

Whiteness theorists usually focus on just two races: whites and blacks. As blacks, on average, are worse off in some respects, it might seem plausible to talk about white privilege and black oppression.

The theory becomes much less plausible if we allow Asians into the picture. Asians do better than whites in certain important social outcomes. How is this possible if a system of white privilege exists in society? Why, if society is a system of white privilege, should whites be privileged in comparison to blacks but disadvantaged compared to Asians?

It's not difficult to find evidence of better social outcomes for Asians. In the US, for example, Asians do much better than whites in gaining entrance to university (college) courses:

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.

An even more telling statistic is provided in a book titled Asian Americans by Pyong Gap Min. In this book (p.66) there is a table in which the earnings of white Americans are compared to native-born Asian Americans. 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%.

Unsurprisingly, Pyong Gap Min concludes that:

there is no clear evidence that native-born Asian American men systematically face a net racial disadvantage in terms of wages, earnings or occupational attainment.

It's a similar story when professional outcomes are looked at. Pyong Gap Min provides a table (p.68) listing the percentage of Asian Americans in each profession.

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.

So Asian Americans are privileged compared to white Americans when it comes to jobs, earnings and education. But why? Does Pyong Gap Min resort to accusations that "Asianness" is a social construct designed to systematically oppress others?

Not at all. He ascribes part of the success of Asian Americans to stable patterns of family life:

educational attainment is strongly affected by parents' emotional encouragement and financial support. Hence, high educational attainment amongst Asian American youth reflects in large part the heavy investment of Asian parents in their children. (p.70)

On p.71 he provides a table showing the percentage of each American ethnic group living in a two parent family and mean family income. There is a correlation between family stability and income level. Asian Americans have the highest percentage of two-parent families (73%) and the highest mean family income ($77,000). White Americans were somewhat lower on both counts (67% and $70,000). African Americans fared much worse in both areas (40% and $45,000).

Pyong Gap Min is not bound by any political ideology and is therefore free to look to the strengths of his own community in explaining Asian American social advantage.

For whites, though, it is not a stable family life or self-disciplined work patterns which are held to create success - but rather an unearned privilege bought at the expense of everyone else. We are held to a different standard - singled out as having a uniquely bad role in human society.

We shouldn't accept this characterisation lightly. It is a kind of vilification, one which will become more serious as whiteness theory is accepted more widely in society.

Why go crazy over Palin?

The response to Sarah Palin is sometimes startling. There are some on the left who seem to literally hate her for being white and Christian. She is also routinely condemned by left-wing feminists as a misogynistic, anti-feminist patriarchal stooge. She seems also to bring out the elitist strain in the modern left: we are supposed to feel superior by looking down on her as an ordinary, unthinking, unsophisticated white person.

Cintra Wilson is guilty of all these things. She wrote a column on Sarah Palin which included the following:

Like many people I thought, "Damn, a hyperconservative ... Christian Stepford wife" ... Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms ... The throat she's so hot to cut is that of all American women ... the thought of such an opportunistic anti-female in the White House ... is akin to ideological brain rape ... I feel it is really time for women to be angry ... Not just with old white Christian patriarchs and their hopelessly calcified, religiously condoned misogyny, but also with the self-abnegating, submissive female Uncle Tommies ...

We must regard Sarah Palin as ... an enabling wife of organized crime, who sees, hears and speaks no evil of the boys in her old-boys network ... The Republicans are in effect saying ... You don't like thinking. Here's an It Girl vice president who is easy on the eyes, you stodgy old white baby boomer ... Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She's such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty ...

And on and on it goes. Cintra Wilson manages to fit in negative references to whites; attacks on Palin as a woman-hating stooge; elitist sneers at Palin's "backwater" lifestyle; and undisguised hostility toward Christianity.

Alan Howe writes an opinion page for the Melbourne Herald Sun. He was less vitriolic than Cintra Wilson in his comments on Palin, but he followed the same themes:

we should all be very afraid ... Palin would bring to the White House not just the usual baggage of the deeply conservative American rural constituency, but a fearsome religious commitment ... Palin favours the language of ... inarticulate gum-chewing teenagers ...

A picture beneath Howe's column of Sarah Palin sitting on a bearskin rug was captioned:

Unlike the sometimes deadly evangelical white Homo Sapiens, the endangered grizzly is native to Alaska.

Finally, there's our own Catherine Deveny, regular columnist for the Melbourne Age. This is her considered view of Sarah Palin:

She's the closest thing Republican stragegists could find to a man with a vagina ... New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd likened the Sarah Palin story to the chick flick Miss Congeniality. I think of it more as an in-flight movie. Like Dumb and Dumber ...

The running mates look like an old rich bloke with erectile dysfunction and his white trash trophy wife ... the comedy writer in me really, really hopes Palin gets in ... God-fearing, anti-abortion, book-banning, homophobic, white trash moron. I'd love to see the White House lawn covered in cars up on blocks.

... like it or not, she'll be used as an example of a female politician. Regardless of the fact she should be filed under dangerous white trash fuelled by fear, propelled by power and supported by halfwits ...

Amazingly, having attacked Palin for her race and her class, Deveny goes on to write:

We're at the mercy of the morons. People who vote for race, gender, class ...

She then goes for an extra dose of hypocrisy by writing:

Sarah Palin personifies the cockiness of ignorance. Bertrand Russell said: "Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts".

Are Catherine Deveny's columns unedited? She writes a ranting, vitriolic attack on Sarah Palin and finishes by claiming that she, unlike Palin, is wisely full of doubts.

The message we get from these kind of columns on Palin is that there are leftists who hate whites and Christians, who are elitist, and who view Sarah Palin as an anti-feminist conservative.

Now, if you are white or Christian or anti-feminist or conservative or if you live an ordinary suburban or rural lifestyle, you might therefore conclude that Sarah Palin is your dream candidate.

I don't think anyone should rush to this conclusion. It's not exactly clear yet where Palin stands on important issues. However, there are reasons to believe that she is not, in her politics, what the left believes her to be.

For instance, it's unlikely that Palin is anti-feminist. She belongs to a group called Feminists for Life; she has written positivley about Title IX legislation, a feminist affirmative action law; and she has spoken of her candidacy as "shattering the glass ceiling" for women.

Camille Paglia, a leading academic feminist in the US, is excited by Sarah Palin's brand of feminism. Having watched a speech by Palin, Paglia tells us that:

I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist.

In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

Palin might not follow all the usual patterns of an established left-wing feminism, but this doesn't necessarily make her a traditionalist.

It would be a mistake to support Sarah Palin on the basis of left-wing denunciations of her as a conservative. We'll have to see how she performs as a politician, what political positions she takes and what larger political effect her candidacy has - and on this basis decide how well she represents a genuine conservatism.

Father Demagogue

American readers might already have seen the following extraordinary video. It shows a Catholic priest, Father Michael Pfleger, giving a grotesque sermon at Barack Obama's church.



The video is striking because it's so unusual to witness a Catholic priest working an audience like this and straying so far from normal standards of dignity (which is my polite way of saying that Father Pfleger comes across as a buffoon).

Pfleger's message, though, is all too familiar. It is the common left-liberal response to inequality. In the liberal view what matters is the power to self-determine: to enact our own will. Therefore, if one group has less of this power they are being treated as less human - there is a fundamental breach of human equality. Why would this occur? The common left-liberal answer is that an oppressor group has organised society to maintain an unearned privilege at the expense of an oppressed group.

It's a theory which assumes that American society is structured in a racist way and is therefore morally illegitimate; that America will be morally illegitimate for as long as any inequality between white Americans and black Americans can be identified; that white Americans are well-off because they have forced down black Americans; and that there must be powerful, racist white Americans upholding the system of oppression.

(This last point helps to explain why white American college students are so often vilified on American TV shows. They are portrayed as domineering types: as arrogant and ready to enact violence against the less privileged. I watched an episode of Cold Case last night (set in the early 1960s) in which the formula was worked hard: the murderer was the only young white character with a flicker of human sympathy, the rest being cold, angry and violent.

Where does the left-liberal theory leave white Americans? With nowhere to turn. They get no kudos for hard work, or sacrifice for family, or financial responsibility, or commitment to education. Whatever they have is held to be a product of a racist, unearned privilege. Nor do any efforts, individual or social, to contribute to the welfare of the black community put them in better standing. The moral taint will be there until that day in which an absolute equality is achieved.

It's not how life is supposed to be lived. We ought to be able to celebrate our own communal identity; the left-liberal theory demands, instead, a defensive, apologetic, guilt-ridden identity. It is hopeless to attempt to satisfy the demands of the theory; a better response is to consider its defects and to speak and act against it.

I don't think it's a coincidence that speaking for the theory has lost Father Pfleger his dignity.

(BTW, I should note that Father Pfleger doesn't speak with the blessing of the Catholic Church. His Cardinal, at the last report, has suggested that Father Pfleger take some time off to reconsider what he's doing.)

Does Catherine Deveny embarrass the left?

The destructive, self-loathing, suicidal aspect of left-liberalism has never been better revealed than in the columns of Catherine Deveny.

Deveny writes a regular column for The Age, a newspaper which claims to be Melbourne's quality broadsheet. Her latest effort is an argument against the baby bonus, a payment of $5000 to mothers on the birth of a child.

This is Deveny's gentle introduction to the issue:

From July 1 our Government will be bribing nice white, or almost white, women with $5000 to have a baby. When I say white or almost white, I'm referring to breeders born here or breeders deemed by the Government as acceptable to live here.

Deveny is shocked that white women might be encouraged to have children. It would be better, she thinks, if they were paid not to have kids. Why would you encourage white women to have families of their own when there are non-white families who could be brought here? The answer must be the evil racism of whites:

I see the baby bonus as an extension of the White Australia Policy ... What I don't understand is why the Government is trying so hard to get the Aussie girls breeding when there are hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers with young children gagging to live in Australia ... No one has any answers for me. Here's my answer. Racism.

Deveny herself is a white woman with three children. Is she therefore an evil white breeder? Her answer is very close to a yes:

To be honest, had I known about the environment what I know now, I never would have had three children ... I've met many people who've decided not to have kids ... Whatever the reasons, good on them. Give them a "no baby bonus" I say.

Having just made clear her opposition to family formation, Deveny then offers advice to the Government on how best to support families. Despite being an anti-market leftist, she wants family roles to be commodified:

If government was committed to families, it would be setting up low-cost, high-quality child care in conjunction with fully paid parenting and paid grandparenting ...

Read the whole piece if you want to get the ugly tone of it. Two things are particularly striking about the article. First, it doesn't matter to Deveny that both major parties are committed to very high levels of non-white immigration. In her mind, whites are the dominant oppressor group and therefore society is structured in a systemic way to maintain their privilege. Ideology trumps reality.

The second striking thing is the disdain and contempt for her own coethnics that this ideology produces. She is troubled by the thought of white babies, despite having several herself. Why would any self-respecting white person sign on to such a self-destructive leftism?

What's really happening in Deveny's mind? I suspect that she has absorbed the theory that a white ethnicity was artificially constructed for the purpose of power and domination. Whiteness is therefore to be treated as a uniquely evil phenomenon.

It's not a difficult theory to challenge. It's much more likely that the different Western ethnic groups developed over time in much the same way that the non-Western ones did. In both cases, ethnicity was valued primarily as a source of identity and meaning. Although Western ethnic groups have dominated others at various periods of history, so too have non-Western groups been dominant over others.

Deveny is an end product of an unlikely ideology. The first impression on reading her column is a sense of what is unhealthy and unviable in her mentality. It's difficult to miss, too, the inconsistency in what she herself has chosen to do (have a family) and what she suggests it is politically correct to do (remain childless).

It seems reasonable to doubt the moral authority of a writer like Deveny and to choose instead to subject her political beliefs to critical scrutiny.