Yes, Krystie, We Know About White Privilege

On Tuesday, someone named Krystie Yandoli wrote a condescending open letter to Abigail Fisher, the plaintiff in the recent Supreme Court racial preferences case. From her soapbox at Jezebel.com, Miss Yandoli treats Miss Fisher like a cry baby and lectures her on “white privilege” and the “intricacies of systemic racism.” Gregory Hood replies in his own open letter:

Dear Krystie,

As someone who actually did get into all the colleges he applied to, I have to take issue with your letter to Abigail Fisher, the plaintiff in Fisher v. University of Texas.

You seem to think that Miss (oh, this is Jezebel, Ms.) Fisher should simply move on from being rejected by the University because, as you explain to her, “There’s this thing called white privilege. You have it. I have it. Our parents have it. And it lessens the likelihood that we’ll experience any kind of deeply rooted inequalities and discrimination.”

Of course, the heart of Fisher’s case is that she actually did experience discrimination — not an unfalsifiable mystery discrimination found in an “invisible knapsack” but real, explicit discrimination on the basis of her race, as codified in laws and regulations.

When our society made the decision to abolish legal restrictions on non-whites, the expectation was that it would lead to equal performance among racial groups. We were told, after all, that racial differences are only skin deep.

Now, obviously, that equality hasn’t materialized. The racial breakdown of crime, income, education, and other social indicators is pretty much what “racists” always said it would be. We were also right about what the public schools would look like after integration — and what the cities would look like after the end of restrictive covenants.

So the powers that be moved the goalposts and came up with something called white privilege.

Krystie (Krystie with a K and a Y? Adorable.), I went to college too, so trust me, we don’t need to “google” white privilege. From the moment we stepped on campus and went to our first mandatory “diversity seminar,” we learned all about it. In fact, at colleges like the University of Delaware, white students were required to admit they were “racist.”

So, yes, we learned about white privilege. In fact, we didn’t really learn about anything else.

In the comments section of your letter, there are the usual attacks on Miss Fisher for not being smart enough to get into the University of Texas. As I’ve never known anyone more status conscious than egalitarians, I’m going to have to pull rank for a second and confess I attended a university considerably more prestigious than Syracuse University.

But don’t feel bad — my college was a joke. Classes consisted of discussions of what Jon Stewart had said the night before, professors complaining about Republicans, and in one African history class, building a slave ship out of cardboard to learn about the Middle Passage. In the words of Joseph Sobran (google him), “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college.”

And even in this infantile playground, we couldn’t help but notice the “affirmative action people” couldn’t, shall we say, keep up. Around the country, they get poorer grades, have higher dropout rates, and more discipline problems. This is despite special programs to hold their hand and phony subjects to buttress their self esteem.

I mean, let’s be honest Krystie, students lie about their ethnicity in order to improve their chances of getting a job or college admissions. Some students even pretend to be homosexual, because that will help. Has there ever been another case of discrimination in history in which people actively try to join the “oppressed” class?

By contrast, students who come from organizations that aren’t exactly popular with the ruling class — such as 4-H or high school ROTC — actually face penalties when applying to college.

So what’s really going on here?

Well, Krystie, we on the Dissident Right recognize that even under a democracy, there are rulers and there are the ruled. James Burnham, a former Trotskyite (google him), developed a theory of the “managerial elite” that took power after the collapse of laissez-faire capitalism. The elite today derives its power from controlling social behavior — breaking down the traditional institutions that stand in its way.

And, well, you’re a part of that process and part of that elite. I realize you might not think it when you look at your “journalist” salary and student-loan debt, but you’re an important foot solider in advancing the ideology that governs the West. I’ll try to explain, and I’ll use small words.

Why is white privilege a lie? It’s because a white person — every white person — has access to wealth and career prospects only insofar as he remains actively anti-white or at least silent about race. Regardless of a person’s accomplishments, achievements, background, intelligence, or wealth, a single comment — even a truthful one — can destroy him overnight. A white person is allowed to be successful — or even allowed to exist without persecution — only insofar as he denounces his racial identity.

Where to begin? “Gender studies” majors and other ignoramuses lectured us on biology when the legendary scientist James Watson stated an unpopular (but true) opinion about the long-term fate of Africa. And let’s look at the policy world, where those “extreme” conservatives caved in almost instantly and fired Jason Richwine (and John Derbyshire, and Kevin Lamb, and Leif Parsell) for saying obviously true things. Or how about Paula Deen, a loyal Obama supporting scalawag who is now being destroyed for giving vent to a racial slur 30 years ago, after she had a gun in her face?

These denunciations of white awareness have become ritualized performances, with predictable language like “loathsome” and “noxious” and of course, hate, hate, hate! It’s all very tiresome.

Yes, whites tend to do better economically than blacks and Hispanics. Mostly it is because as a group, they are  smarter. This biological reality exists regardless of what you think about it, and racial disparities in society are the consequences of that reality. However, I recognize you literally can’t even conceive of that as an explanation and if you could — and wrote about it — all your “white privilege” wouldn’t save your career.

But let’s set aside biological reality for a moment. Let’s concede that whites get some benefit from the actions of their ancestors and from the social systems they set up.

But which whites? The descendents of WASPs? Some of them, yes. We’ve all read How the Irish Became White, but the fact remains that non-founding stock white populations faced obstacles when they came here, many as refugees or penniless. Perhaps the archetypal American story is a family slowly lifting itself up through the generations. We’re all familiar with people who are the “first in their family to go to college.”

To say their accomplishments are because of “white privilege” is not just to say that they didn’t earn it. It’s to say that it is somehow illegitimate for families as a group to improve their station. It’s to say that all advantages from birth or station are wrong, and that government’s job is to eliminate them. This is a recipe for unlimited government. Is this what you want?

Moreover, affirmative action doesn’t punish only whites. Asian families are outperforming whites despite the fact that they have no “white privilege.” They are even outperforming whites on the “culturally biased” standardized tests. Should they be punished too? And what does that tell you about “white privilege”?

But if is only whites who are uniquely privileged and evil, what about poor whites? In recent decades, many Americans are doing worse, and my generation takes for granted that we will not do as well as our parents. Most poor people in this country (by absolute numbers, not per capita) are whites. Perhaps that’s why “white trash,” i.e. white workers, can be publicly insulted and dehumanized without consequence. Even “white privilege” believer Louis CK is with me on this one.

If you really believe that whites are collectively guilty as a people, why can’t you just say so? But then don’t give me any nonsense about equality. And don’t ask the rest of us to share your perverted morality. As I’m sure you’ve seen on the Internet — anti-racism is just another word for anti-white.

Of course, there’s another big problem with the idea of “white privilege.” If “white privilege” says America was set up by and for whites, why can’t whites openly advance their interests in “their” country? Why are WASPs — the onetime “elite” — all but invisible as a group today?

Only white nations are told they have a moral responsibility to allow mass foreign immigration — even countries with no history of non-white immigration, such as Switzerland or Germany. No non-white countries are stupid enough to think they have a similar obligation — their leaders know mass foreign immigration has, in the long term, identical consequences to military conquest. The Tibetans with whom you have at least some familiarity are being dispossessed by a Chinese state-sponsored program of genocide — through mass Han Chinese immigration — and they are doing their best to fight back.

So if we are so privileged, why can’t we have our own country? Just pack us all off into a corner of the country. What’s the downside? Everyone else will be free from our oppression, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. There will be no non-whites we can exploit or discriminate against. After all, whatever white people say, they keep trying to move away to white communities — and non-whites keep following them, presumably because they have some kind of inner compulsion to be oppressed.

A country for whites isn’t that radical an idea. Your friends over at Gawker don’t have a problem with the idea that Jews get to have their own country.

But we know that won’t happen here. America isn’t a “white” country – it’s not even a country, really, just a market. And who benefits from that? Look at the amnesty issue: The National Council of La Raza and “civil rights” squawk about it, but it’s corporate America that really pushes it.

Just like on a college campus, the multicultural mascots are pampered pets of the administration, or in a larger sense, they are the clients of the government and are the ideal consumers and workers. It’s about cheap labor, driving down wages, and trampling any institution that gets in the way between consumer and exploiter, be that family, nation, or union. And the results are all around you, in the decline of living standards, the collapse of public infrastructure, the end of social trust, and the dispossession of American workers.

Lefties like to pretend that capitalism is responsible for perpetuating ethnic divisions to hold down the working class, but it’s the other way around. Multiculturalism is the ultimate path to making sure our rulers don’t have a national community — and don’t have to worry about social solidarity, class justice, or traditional institutions that could get in the way of making a quick buck. Even Noam Chomsky said as much.

Come on, Krystie — you majored in ethnic and gender studies. Why does that major exist? Because there’s an industry behind it, funded by the powerful. Why is it funded by the powerful? Because it breaks down the institutions — especially the family — that stand in the way of greater social control for the managerial elite. You’re as much a part of the system as Dick Cheney or Goldman Sachs — just much farther down on the totem poll. “White privilege” isn’t some ideological weapon against the system — it’s one of its slogans.

If you really want to fight the “One Percent,” take a look at the Dissident Right’s critique of the financial elite. Otherwise, you’re just another SWPL pretending to suffer from white guilt as a way to prove your social status while gleefully participating in the system.

Look, I feel for you. You’ve been brought up in a country that deliberately left you uneducated. Your whole life you’ve wanted to be a good person and so you defend happy words like “equality” and “freedom.” But they are lies — marketing slogans. I don’t blame you for your contempt of conservatives. The Beltway Right are just low paid corporate lobbyists.

But, Krystie, when all is said and done, so are you.

I hope you become something other than another hipster leftie. After all, the worst part of the last men (and women, got to be gender inclusive) is not that they are wrong — it’s that they are boring.

Love,

Gregory Hood