It’s not Wrong to be White

When I was twenty-one, I transferred from my small southern Christian college to New York University.  At the time, I was a feminist and was eager to shed the confines of my conservative Christian college for the more liberal streets of Manhattan.  I figured they’d welcome me with open arms, ready to embrace their long lost sister who’d finally made it “home.” 

I was woefully misguided.

Apparently, there were things about me that were…  just wrong.  First, my accent made me sound like a racist, they told me.  My hometown of Paris, Tennessee pretty much guaranteed that I was one.  I was heterosexually married, which meant that I couldn’t understand the plight of the oppressed homosexuals in my class.  I believed in God — worse, that He was a “he” — so I was a bigot.  I did get some points for being a female.  (They told me I was a bird trapped in a birdcage of missed opportunities, even though I lived in Gramercy Park, had a car service, and attended one of the more expensive private universities in the nation.  My husband famously told me, “Um…  you are not a member of the oppressed minority.”)  But worst of all, I was white.

Ever feel like there’s something wrong with being white?  Certainly you would think so if you were learning everything you knew about America from television, where pundits talk incessantly about whiteness as if it’s a choice that reveals your moral compass is surely broken.

David French, writing at National Review, explains:

For those soaked in progressive identity politics, skin color was a stand-in for virtue. It was impossible for a black person to be racist; it was impossible for a white person not to be. Any in-depth discussion of history had to acknowledge past injustice. It was tough even to talk about, say, Omaha Beach without in the next breath acknowledging the systematic segregation in the World War II-era U.S. Army.

And, even though President Obama was supposed to usher in a post-racial world, it’s not getting better.

Now the true cultural and historical demons are white — gasp! — “cisgender” males, and any white cisgender woman who doesn’t appropriately check her privilege. The ticket to white acceptability in progressive politics is a form of self-loathing: a constant attitude of repentance not just for the sins of the past but also for the benefits of the present, which are presumably enjoyed only or mainly because of the plunder and exploitation of “brown bodies.”

The wealthy among us — the elite at the higher universities and the media moguls who shove this racial identity politics down our throats — don’t really pay a price.  But the rest of America?  Well, it’s pretty expensive.  David writes:

Here’s the problem: Progressives don’t like to admit this, but identity politics work as the mirror image of white supremacy — compressing the extraordinary rich and complex histories of nations, continents, and cultures into one characteristic: skin color. For the white supremacist, white people are natural-born victors. For the identity-politics leftist, white people are natural-born predators.

But actual history belies the stereotypes. To take just one hot-button example, the history of slavery since the Colonial Era is not just a history of Europeans and white Americans enslaving Africans. It’s of Africans enslaving Africans, of Africans enslaving Europeans, and of Arabs enslaving Africans (and that’s just a partial summary). Yes, brown people enslaved white people by the millions: Should Americans of North African or Turkish descent check their privilege and believe their wealth was built on plunder?

That gets to the heart of it.  Why didn’t the election of America’s first black president usher in a better day?

When identity politics rule, racism and polarization thrive. It is no coincidence that we are seeing a resurgence in outright white nationalism — embodied in the so-called alt-right — at the same time that America’s leftist cultural elite are decisively rejecting Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that Americans be judged by the “content of their character” and not the color of their skin. When one side decides that skin color is a virtue, then — as sure as the sun rises in the east — the other side will eagerly agree.

So, in this day of political correctness, here’s a good reminder:

There is nothing wrong with being white. There is nothing right with being white.

David concludes:

We’ve always had a race problem in this country, but to deny our progress on this front is to deny reality. That progress, however, is not inevitable, and this political generation — in its mindless rage and commitment to identity politics — threatens to undo the work of generations before. When one side screams that white is wrong, another side will scream that white is right, and the concept of an actual “racial conversation” — much less the notion of “racial healing” — will be little more than a sad joke.

Read the whole thing here.