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.

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?

The third degree of hostility

On the left, the Elliot Rodger murders are being blamed on privileged, entitled, white male rage. An example is a piece in Salon by Brittney Cooper with the following heading and subheading:

White guy killer syndrome: Elliot Rodger’s deadly, privileged rage

Can I go ahead and scream yet? It's time for America to admit what it's long resisted: White male privilege kills

Leftists like Brittney Cooper picked up on Elliot Rodger's sense of entitlement and fitted it very quickly to their belief that white males are a privileged class in society.

They did so despite the fact that Elliot Rodger identified as Eurasian rather than as white and that he ended up expressing hatred for both white men and women.

But the bigger picture is that leftist magazines like Salon feel comfortable expressing such open hostility toward white men. A sample of how Brittney Cooper feels about us:

But I am saying that we cannot understand Elliot Rodger’s clear mental health issues and view of himself as the supremely forsaken victim here outside a context of racism, white supremacy and patriarchy. I’m also saying that white male privilege might be considered a mental health issue, because it allows these dudes to move through the world believing that their happiness, pleasure and well-being matters more than the death and suffering of others.

This is madness.

But it is neither singular, nor anomalous. Every few years, the American public has to watch in horror as some white kid goes on a rampage, killing everything from babies to old people. Yet, neither the press nor the law will understand such perpetrators as monsters or terrorists. Few will have a conversation about white male pathology and the ways that systems of whiteness and patriarchy continue to produce white men who think like this.

We're being associated here with baby killing.

This is the third degree of hostility toward white people. The first degree began back in the late 1800s, when the Anglo-centric view of the classical liberals of the time, in which Anglo-Americans were thought to have a special dispensation to bring freedom to the world, and immigrants were therefore expected to assimilate to Anglo-Saxonism, was replaced with a pluralistic view in which all ethnic groups were to contribute equally to the American project.

This left the mainstream ethnic identity in a difficult situation as it had historic claims to be something more than just one element in a melting pot; for the new understanding to work, the mainstream ethnic group had to be reduced to something less than it had been. But it was still allowed to be one positive element in the mix.

The second degree of hostility arose at around the time of WWI. This was when Anglo intellectuals, feeling alienated from the mainstream culture, began to assert the idea that there was no worthy Anglo-American culture, and that Anglo-Americans should therefore be cosmopolitans intent on enjoying the vibrant cultures of others instead.

The third degree of hostility is the more aggressive one which asserts not just that Anglos, but whites in general, not only have no historic claim to be anything more than one element of America, and not only have no genuine culture of their own, but worse yet are responsible for systems of hatred and discrimination designed to harm others.

You can find expressions of all three degrees of hostility toward whites in America. But, clearly, Brittney Cooper prefers the third degree.

The traditionalist response to the Elliot Rodger crimes was put well by Jack Cashill (about whose politics I know very little):

Yes, there is a sickness afoot in the land, but feminists have no more hope of curing it with sexual harassment laws or enforced sensitivity training than Rodger did with his “day of retribution.”

Valenti and others on the left failed to see that this sickness set in when they and their ideological allies began to dismantle protective institutions of lasting value like family, community, nation, faith and married love.

...One Twitter post in defense of the parents sheds unwitting light on the world Rodger inhabited.

“Elliot Rodger’s parents gave, gave, gave,” reads the tweet. “Money. Housing. Resources. Therapy. Life Coaches. They got the police involved. Nothing happened.”

Here is what their parents did not give their son: a home, a neighborhood, a community, a church, a faith, a God, their time, their attention.

Feminists often talk about patriarchy as a negative thing, as a system designed to privilege men and oppress women. But in my understanding a patriarch is a man of culture and character who understands the need to uphold in society the kind of structures that Jack Cashill talks about. To describe a man as a patriarch of his community ought to be considered a very great compliment.

Modern Western society lacks patriarchs and so our young men are left with a "thin" understanding in which life is thought to be simply about having fun. In a well-balanced society fathers would be responsible not just for providing (being out of the home in pursuit of a career) but for cultivating in their sons and in the wider community a sense of the importance of:

• masculine character, with a corresponding pride in manhood
• family lineage, of ancestry and of the good name of the family
• the history of one's own people/ethny
• a man's role within the family as a husband and father
• men's role within the community, as protectors and as patriarchs
• one's faith; what one owes to God; of reverence and piety
• of culture as a higher expression of individual personality, of national character and of the spiritual life
• a connection to the land and to nature; a love of place

We traditionalists have to hold to this understanding at a time when the surrounding culture does not support us. We need to create the space which will not only allow us to hold firm, but one day to push back and retake some of the ground that has been lost.

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.

Amy Chua to white liberals: you are not elite

Amy Chua is famous for being a Chinese American tiger mom. With her Jewish American husband, Jed Rubenfeld, she has written a new book which is startlingly outside the usual liberal narrative.

Chua and Rubenfeld have decided to write about why some groups in America do better than others:

"That certain groups do much better in America than others — as measured by income, occupational status, test scores and so on — is difficult to talk about"

So which groups do they identify as doing best? They list eight:

1. Jews
2. Chinese
3. Indians
4. Iranians
5. Nigerians
6. Lebanese
7. Cubans
8. Mormons

Note that the only white Americans included in the list are the Mormons, who aren't part of the core white liberal population.

Chua is correct that Asian Americans do better on average than white Americans - I noted that myself back in 2008.

It is significant that mainstream whites are being left off the advantaged list. For decades, white liberals have attacked their fellow whites as being privileged. Here, though, we have a Chinese American and a Jewish American identifying most whites as being part of a losing group when it comes to seeking high position in American society.

There's something else of significance to consider. Although white liberals like to see themselves as being anti-establishment, at the same time they like to see liberalism itself as an elite ideology - as something that confers status and prestige.

But Rubenfeld and Chua take the opposite view. They see liberalism as a losing ideology - as something best avoided if you want success:

in modern America, a group has an edge if it doesn’t buy into — or hasn’t yet bought into — mainstream, post-1960s, liberal American principles.'

So what does confer success according to Rubenfeld and Chua? They believe there is a triple package which drives people onward. The first is having a sense that the group you belong to is superior to others; the second is a feeling of personal insecurity; the third is impulse control.

I don't think Chua gets it entirely right here. I do think it helps if you have a sense that you belong to a high achieving group. I can remember as a boy in the 1970s the positive sense that Anglo-Australian men had of themselves as being masculine high achievers, particularly when it came to the roles of pioneers, soldiers and sportsmen. I don't remember the focus of this being a feeling of superiority over others, though. It was a positive self-focus, rather than being a superiority complex.

Nor were Australian men insecure. I think Chua focuses on this because she believes that therapeutic parenting styles, in which children are forever positively reinforced, leads to low achievement. She prefers the tiger mom style in which children are held to difficult standards of achievement.

By impulse control Chua and Rubenfeld apparently mean the ability to resist the impulse to give up.

I don't think that Chua and Rubenfelds' book, by itself, will discourage white liberals. It's likely that white liberals will respond by thinking that without liberalism you get dangerous claims of superiority, chauvinism etc.

However, the book does point to a different political scenario than the one we've had over the past 50 years. It's a scenario in which new ethnic elites confidently assert their success in terms of their own values, self-consciously rejecting the liberal values of the older, declining elites.

It's one way that liberalism might begin to lose prestige as an elite ideology.

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.

The trifecta of privilege

In a discussion about the Zimmerman verdict, an American TV host, Thomas Roberts, claimed that being white, male and heterosexual was a "trifecta of privilege":

MIKE BARNICLE: You mentioned - that it was depressing, that it was a terrible weekend, that the verdict is unsettling for so many people in this country and probably around the world. I'll tell you what’s truly unsettling to me personally as a parent. I have three sons. Not one of those sons that I have to tell listen, don't run when you see a cop, you know don’t establish eye contact with a cop.

THOMAS ROBERTS: Right.

BARNICLE: You know, watch out when you're here. Watch out when you're there. I never had to do that. But if you're a black parent, you do that. You do that. It's part of raising your children.

ROBERTS: Well, with all due respect your three boys have hit the American trifecta of privilege.

BARNICLE: True.

ROBERTS: They are white, straight males. Presumably. So they have hit the trifecta of American privilege and from there we go down hill. So if you are an other in this country, and that means if you are an LGBT, if you are hispanic, if you are black, if you are a woman right now we are fighting to prove why other is no the bad and why we are due the value of our American rights. I mean, Trayvon's rights were obviously violated, stalked, followed presumed to be suspicious from the get-go by somebody who was the self-proclaimed watch commander of his neighborhood who was packing heat to go to the grocery store.

This is a familiar left-liberal way of seeing things. The focus is on some groups, namely whites, males and heterosexuals, being privileged at the expense of other groups.

If you look at indicators such as income, education and careers then it's not clear that white, male heterosexuals are always and everywhere privileged. Asian Americans do better than white Americans in all these areas; lesbians do better than heterosexual women when it comes to income; females do better than males when it comes to education and so on.

Thomas Roberts is himself homosexual. He wants to put himself in a non-privileged group, despite the fact that he has a high status, high income professional position.

So what explains the idea that white, heterosexual males are privileged? I think it happens for the following reason. Liberals believe that it is the act of choosing for ourselves that makes something moral. For this moral system to work, everyone must be equally free to self-define their own good. And this means that liberals will think it most wrong for some people to pursue their own self-determining choices at the expense of others seeking to do the same thing - that becomes the focus of moral evil.

The sense that liberals will have is that American society was created by the self-defining choices of white American males. That is what brought about the culture, the institutions and the environment that people live in. But that is a morally inadmissible situation; it means that the self-defining choices of this group of people defines the environment that other people live in.

A consequence of this is that it becomes important to deconstruct that culture and those institutions until they no longer exist as the environment that people live in.

So what then replaces them? There are two angles to this. First, it won't be thought so bad if the white culture is replaced by another one, as minority cultures are associated with resistance or subversion rather than the creation of systems of dominance or privilege. But, second, liberals might also aim at a diversity or plurality that prevents any one group from establishing a "hegemony".

And so the very mixed suburbs, in which no single group predominates, and which is experienced by traditionalists as lacking a clear expression of culture, fits in with liberal aims. The environment is no longer influenced by the self-defining choices of any particular group.

Therefore, it is not just markers of education, income and career which matter to liberals in defining privilege (though these are certainly part of the equation). There's also this other concern with the way that American institutions and culture have been defined by white heterosexual males and this concern cannot be allayed until traditional America has been thoroughly deconstructed.

Traditionalism has a very different starting point to liberalism which leads us in a radically different direction. We do not believe that it is the act of choosing for ourselves that makes something moral. Instead we believe that there are objective moral goods that can be known to us.

And so the aim is to discern and to defend what is good in human life. When we look at the culture and the institutions we inherit, our aim is to recognise the good that has been handed down to us within this tradition, and to build on it, rather than to look for patterns of privilege in how a social environment has been defined.

A part of the good that traditionalists recognise is being connected in our identity to our own culture and people (ethny). And so we do not wish to deconstruct these in order to create a "definition free" environment, but rather we want to maintain their continuity - we do not want to lose something that has a significant value, that inspires our love and which forms part of our identity and part of the setting which makes our social commitments meaningful.

Nor do we think of diversity in the same way that liberals might. For us, diversity is a world in which different peoples are allowed to predominate in different areas and so flavour those areas with their own distinct cultures. When liberals invoke diversity it has the sense of mixing cultures within a particular area so that no single one can predominate and define the environment. But that means that such an environment is likely to lack any clear cultural flavour.

Who gets to not be privileged?

Julie Burchill is an English feminist. She has written a controversial column for the leftist Guardian newspaper attacking transsexuals. The interesting thing about it is her response to transsexual accusations that she and others like her are "privileged white feminists". That provoked this defensive response:

She, the other JB and I are part of the minority of women of working-class origin to make it in what used to be called Fleet Street and I think this partly contributes to the stand-off with the trannies...We know that everything we have we got for ourselves. We have no family money, no safety net. And we are damned if we are going to be accused of being privileged by a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs.
 

It's interesting the way the leftist system works. In an objective sense, Julie Burchill is more privileged than 95% of men. From the age of 17 she was given a series of highly sought after jobs in the media, despite the fact that her commitment to some of the jobs was poor (she sent her husband of the time to do some of the film reviews she was supposed to complete or just made them up without having seen the films). She earned enough money from relatively creative, glamorous work to sustain a lifelong cocaine habit (she has written colourfully that she has "put enough toot up my admittedly sizeable snout to stun the entire Colombian armed forces").

And yet in her own mind she is not privileged because she worked to get where she is, i.e. she is self-made.

But the vast majority of white men could claim the same thing. Very few of us get to live off the old man's money. Most of us are plugging away in ordinary, unglamorous, uncreative jobs to support our families. And yet we're supposed to accept the loss of moral status that comes with being tagged "privileged" whilst the cocaine snorting Julie Burchill gets to be proud of being self-made.

Let me put all this another way. Given Julie Burchill's claim that she is not privileged because she got where she is by her own efforts, that then commits her to one of two positions. Either she has to admit that most men are also not privileged or she has to sustain a mental fiction in which she imagines men getting significant goods from some sort of secret boys' club.

Big fall in life expectancy for less educated white women

Laura Wood has a really interesting post up about mortality rates in the U.S.

The data shows that life expectancy has fallen sharply for less educated whites in the U.S., particularly for less educated white women:

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

Over a short period of time (18 years), life expectancy for less educated white women fell by five years, at a time when it was rising for less educated members of other races:

Jesse Powell has also looked at the data and found that life expectancy has fallen for the "prime of life" age bracket of whites of all educational levels, particularly for women. Over a period of just 10 years (1999 to 2009) life expectancy for all white men in the U.S. aged 25 to 54 fell by 3% and for white women it fell by 9%. Again, this compares unfavourably to other races, whose life expectancy rose during the same period.

Even the overall outcomes are not what you might expect. Yes, it's true that whites are still living longer than blacks. But whites are doing worse than Hispanics and a lot worse than Asians.

Here's the data for white women aged 25 to 54 (the lower the score the lower the death rate):

Asian women: 73
Hispanic women: 116
White women: 171
Black women: 276

And remember the rates are improving for all the races except for whites.

How does this reflect on our modern liberal order? Well, liberals would no doubt be happy that the gap between white and black mortality is closing. That fits well with the liberal programme.

But the rest of it doesn't. The gap between rich and poor is growing rather than closing when it comes to life expectancy, in spite of all the wealth transfers arranged by the welfare state. So the liberal programme has failed miserably in that respect.

Nor does feminism seem to have improved the lives of poor white women, or white women in the prime of their lives, as life expectancy has declined rapidly for these groups.

Nor does the data support the idea of whites as a privileged group. Once again it is Asians who do the best when it comes to life expectancy - by a large margin. And Hispanics are also doing considerably better than whites.

Which leaves the question of what has gone wrong for whites? The researchers don't claim to have an answer for the rapid decline of life expectancy amongst less educated white women. And it's difficult to explain this decline when less educated women of other races are improving their life expectancy.

Perhaps part of it is that numbers of women don't cope so well when left to raise families on their own. They would do better with a husband to support them. Sure they can be kept from absolute poverty with the support of the state, but the state isn't there to help them cope with everyday life.

It's possible too that people in this social class rely on a moral culture to help them make good life choices and so have suffered from this moral culture being run down by the Western elites since at least the 1960s. The elites are better at playing a game in which it's thought cool to endorse amoral behaviour whilst still keeping to a traditional morality in your own personal life.

Privilege in education?

You know how whites are supposed to check our privilege? Well I did some checking with the United States Department of Labor and here is the data on who is enrolling at universities in the U.S.:

Of the 3.1 million youth age 16 to 24 who graduated from high school between January and October 2011, about 2.1 million (68.3 percent) were enrolled in college in October 2011. The college enrollment rate of recent high school graduates was slightly lower than the record high set in October 2009 (70.1 percent). For 2011 graduates, the college enrollment rate was 72.3 percent for young women and 64.6 percent for young men. The college enrollment rate of Asian graduates (86.7 percent) was higher than for recent white (67.7 percent), black (67.5 percent), and Hispanic (66.6 percent) graduates.

So more female than male high school graduates enrol at college (72.3% vs 64.6%) and more Asian high school graduates enrol at college than whites (86.7% vs 67.7%). A white high school graduate is no more likely to enrol at college than a black or hispanic graduate (all roughly around the 67% mark).

So if one measure of privilege is who gets to enrol at college having completed high school, then Asians and females are doing best.

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.

Blamers

Here is a banner from the 2009 Pride parade in Stockholm. It was part of a float organised by Swedish anarchist feminists. The banner reads "We hate white rich straight men".

There's reason to take note of the slogan. It expresses openly a political idea that is widely held on the left. The idea is that the reason there is injustice in the world is that white, rich, straight men created society to be unjust in order to enjoy an unearned privilege over those that they "othered".

Most on the left don't conclude from the theory that white men should be hated. But many do conclude that the great moral cause is to oppose the white racism and the sexism which is thought to maintain white privilege and patriarchy. To be against white racism, in particular, is thought to be the great moral crusade of our times.

That has a number of negative consequences for ordinary whites. It means that any success that white people have is attributed to an unearned privilege rather than to hard work, or to family stability, or to stable community life. That's in contrast to the success that people of other races have, which is, in ordinary fashion, held to be a result of their efforts and talents.

It means too that it's difficult for whites to identify positively as whites. Most young white people are subjected at school and at university to a barrage of messages about white racism, and those who do attempt to identify positively as whites will often be assumed to be motivated by a desire to uphold "white supremacy". Again, whites are treated exceptionally in this regard - there is no similar pressure on, say, Australian Aborigines, to identify negatively as a people.

Finally, the theory that whites are to blame for social injustice means that few on the left are concerned about the future fate of historically white nations and peoples. First, the theory portrays whites as all powerful, so it's difficult for many on the left to recognise that whites might be vulnerable. Second, the aim of the theory is to bring whites down, so the focus is on how to disempower whites, rather than how to help them survive into the future.

Will the world enter into an era of social justice - of perfected freedom and equality - when there are no more rich, white, straight men around? That is what the leftist theory predicts - but given human nature it seems highly unlikely. Already it's the case in the U.S. that Asian Americans are on average wealthier, better educated and are over-represented in the professions compared to whites. As whites decline, it's likely that Asians in both the U.S. and Australia will come to dominate in these areas. So what, then, was the point of the decades long assault on the white majority?

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.

Who is worse off on Australian campuses?

It's been known for some time that women are doing much better than men in higher education. But I was surprised to learn by how much. This is how things stand in Australia:

International education consultant Alan Olsen said about 603,000 domestic female students had obtained higher education qualifications between 2000 and 2009, almost 50 per cent more than the 404,000 completions by their male counterparts.

50% higher! How did it get to this? One reason is that government policy back in the 1990s continued to list women as a disadvantaged group in higher education, even though women were already a majority of enrolments. One researcher, Ian Dobson, noted that in 1995 a government equity paper decided to keep listing women as a disadvantaged group, despite higher female enrolments, because men were still the majority in engineering. Dobson was sceptical that women could be thought of as being victims of gender privilege when they were numerically superior on campus. But proponents of the idea of continuing female disadvantage won the day:

Proponents of this view react adversely to the use of analytical material which demonstrates female numerical superiority in higher education. Tanya Castleman, for instance insists that the complex and entrenched dynamics of gender and culture privilege' are working against women in their participation in higher education. Such advocates fail to explain how women could have advanced so rapidly to overtake male student numbers in total at a time of great competition for university places.

Tanya Castleman was so "oppressed" by the "complex and entrenched dynamics of gender privilege" that she is now Head of the Deakin Graduate School of Business.

Let's be clear: at a time when women were poised to slaughter men in the field of higher education, feminists like Tanya Castleman were continuing to insist that it was men who were privileged. And it was her view which the liberal state chose to follow.

Who is most privileged in the US? (No, it's not whites)

The U.S. Census Bureau has released income statistics for 2010. There's a lot of interesting information contained in the report.

a) Which group is the best off?

We're used to white Americans being portrayed as the privileged group, which then leads to calls from the left for "whiteness" to be deconstructed.

But the Census Bureau report confirms information that I've presented previously, namely that Asian Americans are significantly better off in terms of income than are white Americans. So all the talk about "white privilege" is false when it comes to income.

The information is contained in Table A-2 on pages 36 and 38. In 2010 the median income for whites alone (not Hispanic) was $54,620 and the mean income was $73,439. For Asians alone (not Pacific Islander) the equivalent figures are $64,308 and $84,828.

In other words, the median income of Asian Americans is 18% higher than that of white Americans.

b) Money spent to help black Americans hasn't worked

On page 9 of the report we learn that the ratio of income of black Americans compared to white Americans has hardly changed since the early 1970s:

Between 1972 and 2010, the change in the Black-to-non-Hispanic-White income ratio was not statistically significant.

That doesn't surprise me given the poor state of the black family in America. If you look at a report called "The State of Our Unions 2010" you find (p.56) that the illegitimacy rate in black families (births to never married mothers) soared between 1982 and 2008, so much so that the illegitimacy rate amongst black women without a high school degree has reached 96%.

If black women choose not to marry, and so do not engage black men in a provider role within a family, then it seems highly unlikely that income levels will rise relative to other groups.

c) Women who marry are less likely to live in poverty

Men do still play a significant role in keeping families protected from poverty. In married couple families the poverty rate was 6.2% in 2010. In single mother families the poverty rate was 31.6%. So a single mother family is over 500% more likely to experience poverty than a married couple family. (p.18).

Perhaps there are liberals who will respond to this information by concluding that single mother families need more wealth transfers to reduce the gap. But the more obvious conclusion to draw is that married couple families should be encouraged as promoting a better standard of living for families.

d) Median male earnings have fallen since 1973

In the US, real median male earnings have fallen by $1500 since 1973 (see Figure 2, p.12). Men without tertiary level education have been hardest hit.

Men have also been hit harder than women by the depressed economy in the US. Since 2007, the number of men working full-time fell by 6.6 million, compared to 2.8 million for women. (p.5)