You’ll never be radical enough.
Americans are struggling to come to terms with the significance of the ongoing insurrection on America’s streets. How does one understand the motives of those who chant “Black Lives Matter” while demanding to topple a statute erected by freed slaves to celebrate their own emancipation?
After 9/11, American citizens were encouraged by leftists to ask, “Why do they hate us?” Today the same people, trained by years of victim-blaming to hold themselves accountable for terrorism both foreign and domestic, are asking a similar question. “What flaw of ours makes these nice mobs so angry?”
The approved answer appears to be “because of our white privilege, which must be dismantled.” If the presence of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility atop the New York Times Top Ten Bestseller’s list is any indication, many Americans are coming to accept this response.
What is “White Privilege?” The National Museum of African American History and Culture offers the following definition, produced with your tax dollars:
White Privilege
Since white people in America hold most of the political, institutional, and economic power, they receive advantages that nonwhite groups do not. These benefits and advantages, of varying degrees, are known as white privilege. For many white people, this can be hard to hear, understand, or accept—but it is true. If you are white in America, you have benefited from the color of your skin.This view of America—as a country with a racial caste system—has long been prevalent in academia and has spread to the culture more broadly, even to the government. Government bureaucrats are increasingly pushing such rhetoric in mandatory trainings, as City Journal’s Christopher Rufo has been tirelessly documenting.
But it did not arise out of thin air.
The idea that there is an inherent white privilege which must be shed by individuals for society to progress stems from the desire of American Marxists to understand their own history of failure.
Despite decades of socialist labor agitation, radical union organizing and a robust revolutionary vanguard in the United States stretching back to early 1900s, the radicals of the 1960s were at a loss to explain why their revolution—which they perceived as inevitable—had repeatedly failed. They noted many potential reasons, including America’s view of itself as an exceptional nation, the open tracts of freely available land, social mobility, historical labor shortages, and the relative ethnic diversity of the working class.
But as prospects of revolution again began to emerge over the course of the ’60s, the question of how to prevent this new uprising from failing took on a new dimension.
Things came to a head amid debates within the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) over how best to proceed. The Worker Student Alliance-Progressive Labor Party (WSA-PLP) faction emphasized class consciousness, seeking to embed revolutionary students within the (predominately white) working class. They argued against growing Communist support of national liberation movements and in favor of a largely traditional Marxist-Leninist interpretation of history.
Their opponents in the Revolutionary Youth Movement faction of the SDS argued instead that it was a lack of racial, rather than class, consciousness which held back Marxist organizing in America.
The “Anti-Fascist” Con
One of the leading theorists on this topic was Theodore “Ted” Allen. Allen was a communist party member, a labor organizer, and eventually a researcher and teacher on labor organizing at the Communist Party-founded Jefferson School of Social Science.