From The New York Times of course:
Indeed, in recent years, several documentaries filmed inside these schools — including Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster’s“American Promise,” Kavery Kaul’s “Long Way From Home” and “Allowed to Attend,” produced by Trinity’s director of communications — present in excruciating detail the alienation many minority students experience. The schools are depicted as institutions teeming with white students oblivious to their outsize privilege — the lavishness of their spring-break vacations, weekend homes and lunch money — and unaware of the challenges faced by their less privileged classmates.
Ahem. So apparently rich kids have no idea what it's like being poor. Having been one of the poorest kids to attention a private high school I can certainly understand that. Yet somehow this rather unremarkable observation has been twisted by a class of diversity consultants, that's actually a line work these days, into a question of race.
Today “white privilege” studies center on the systemic nature of racism as well as the way it exposes minorities to daily moments of stress and unpleasantness — sometimes referred to as “micro-aggressions.” Freedom from such worries is a privilege in and of itself, the theory goes, one that many white people are not even aware they have.
Freedom from being made mildly uncomfortable by other people's unconscious behaviour. The satirist is without employment in this modern age. This is petty collectivism harnessed to create a class of self-hating rich white people. Why? Because as religious leaders have observed down the ages the best way to control people is to make them feel guilty. But what if they've done nothing wrong? Then you invent something called original sin.
White privilege is the original sin of our post-religious world. Thus small children, many as young as eight, are being told that they are guilty of the terrible crime of being white. No matter what they do, or say or think there is no escaping from the horrible whiteness of their existence. Even if they search deep within their young souls, struggle mightily against this Obama era version of the mark of Cain, they will never be able to escape being white.
For years people on the Right have joked that the Left has transformed itself into a religion. The joke has now stopped being funny. This is no longer a darkly amusing scam put on by polished upper middle class versions of Al Sharpton. This is child abuse. You are teaching children to hate themselves, to doubt their own goodness, before their minds are fully formed. What will emerge from all this a decade or two hence? A generation of decadent self-hating neurotics who will cavil and surrender to the grievance mongers without a fight.
This is, of course, nothing new. This is how Ayn Rand described it more than seventy years ago:
"If you learn how to rule one single man's soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It's the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That's why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can't be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it--and the man is yours.
Ellsworth Toohey
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