The Strange Career of White Privilege

You hear the phrase “white privilege” nonstop in America these days, as the slogan has transcended the campus and entered popular culture.

Historically, the term apparently refers to the original European settlers who came to the United States and later equated the protections of the U.S. Constitution solely with their own majority ethnicity and race — a tribal and chauvinistic mindset that still governs politics and immigration the world over, from China and Japan to most African and South American countries.

Yet the singular transcendent logic of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence was that all people innately were created equal. It took over two centuries on the ground to catch up to such lofty idealism.

Yet given that immigration by the early 19th century was already bringing in millions of so-called non-white immigrants, in addition to Native and African Americans, America soon was at least evolving into a multiracial democratic nation united under one shared culture — a radical idea and the first such edgy experiment in human history.

During the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, the nation’s racial tensions were mostly still defined as a binary of a dominant white majority and an often discriminated-against African-American minority.

Years of past prejudice had sparked the idea of affirmative action, or federal reparatory programs accorded to a historically discriminated-against black minority.

However, by the 1980s, owing to new cycles of massive immigration, other minorities likewise explained their own inequality in terms of white-majority oppressors. They lobbied to be included in government reparation programs in job hiring and college admissions.

During the Obama administration, affirmative action was informally recalibrated again well beyond grievances by black and Latino groups against the white majority. Now it was superseded by a far more comprehensive notion of expansive “diversity” — a sort of update of Jesse Jackson’s old notion of a Rainbow Coalition of various aggrieved groups uniting to press their claims for various set-asides to a white majority.

The bizarre academic term “intersectionality” likewise followed, suggesting that gays, feminists, and minorities were united in focusing on supposed white-privilege pathologies. Yet no one quite new how to calibrate all the competing claims of victimhood by race, class, gender, and sexual orientation — as if a white transgendered actor should merit more grievance points than a black impoverished lesbian versus an Egyptian immigrant female CEO or a gay Latino policeman. Such musings are not caricatures, but the logic of the preambles to the usual progressive politicking, when a politico such as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama did not welcome a crowd as a collective of Americans but ticked off all the various identity-politics groups present, all with claims against the majority.

Unfortunately, “diversity” was never exactly defined — and perhaps could not be. The ad hoc buzzword now referred to all white people on one side who enjoyed supposedly innate skin-color-based privilege, set against almost everyone else — at least sort of.

Those purportedly without white-based privilege included everyone from African Americans and Latinos to recent immigrants from Asia, Africa, and South America. A graduate student could be a descendent of a white Italian immigrant to Argentina, but have come to the U.S. as a “minority” because of his Latinate name and Spanish-speaking ability. The diversity assumption was that the minute a wealthy grandee from Buenos Aires applied for a teaching job in the U.S., he “counted” as a minority, although he could often be more affluent and whiter than those born with “white privilege” in the U.S.

“Diversity,” unlike prior affirmative action for blacks, rested on a number of other assumptions that soon proved even more incoherent.

What exactly did “white privilege” mean in an ethnically diverse society?

Mere appearance? Yet many Arab Americans and Latinos were indistinguishable from fifth-generation Southern European Americans or Armenian Americans. Politics had something to do with skin color, but how and why was inferred rather than defined. If a white-looking second-generation Arab American put on a head scarf and declaimed against U.S. policy, and if she had a name that was clearly not European in origin, then she too was a “minority” and could advance claims against “white privilege.” But should she dress in assimilated fashion and voice support for the state of Israel, then she probably possessed “white privilege” and joined the victimizers rather than the victims.

Intermarriage is increasingly common, if not the near norm. Millions of Americans are one-quarter something, one-half something else, and again one-quarter something still different.

Once race rather than character became preeminent, stranger ideas followed. In the racist past, a non-white or someone of mixed lineage sought to “pass” as white to obtain parity; in our racist present, someone of mixed descent seeks to pass as non-white to obtain advantage.

Read more