Is Racial Privilege Real Or Is It A Cover For Moral Superiority?

"In the village of Drimcaggy, four were dead together in a poor hut – brother, two sisters, and daughter. The flesh was pulled off the daughter's arm and mangled in the mouth of her poor dead mother” (recorded by a parish priest, Ireland 1849).

In the West, we view starvation and famines as ‘happening elsewhere.’ That elsewhere used to be on the European continent. Ireland’s "Great Famine" was from 1845-1849. While cannibalism erupted in parts, the landed gentry continued to export livestock, butter, peas, beans, rabbits, fish, and honey to Britain and elsewhere  Over two million died reducing the population from 8 million to 6 million with another million later immigrating. 

Ireland, by the greatest irony, has joined the march against “white privilege” with woke policies surpassing the US from which the ideology sprang. That their history had been emblematic of the suffering of a people under a semi-feudal system, is now subject to official amnesia. It is the same amnesia that has plagued the US for some time. 

In my working-class Catholic High School, we learned of the horrors encountered by immigrants. We learned of the dangerous factories, the brutality of child labor, threats of violence, and the continuous hunger in crowded ghettos. Many, like me, were only one or two generations removed from such hardships. It was surely an intent to remind us to be grateful.

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This essay does not argue that impoverished European immigrants embodied virtues of the highest order. That would be a lie. Many brought the same tribalism they sought to escape. Hatred of fellow immigrants was common. Union movements were created to promote fellow tribal members at the expense of others, particularly Black Americans. 

The Irish were particularly virulent in this regard. But hatred became transcended over time. A friend’s Italian grandmother hated the dirty Irish - my primary heritage. My friend and I laugh at such notions with signs of “Irish need not apply” decidedly in the rearview mirror. 

Arguably the theory of “white privilege” is linked to advertising from the 1940s onward. The Neo-Marxists who fled Hitler for the US, being both Jews and communists, looked upon American advertising with abhorrence. 

A contemporary of these Neo-Marxists was Marshall McLuhan who wrote the seminal book “The Mechanical Bride’ (1951.) With visceral disdain, he dissected advertisement and pop culture for the unattainable fantasy it portrayed. While his brutal commentary is understandable in light of the reality of the then-human condition, advertising allowed the average person a fantasy to achieve. 

Interestingly he quoted Gertrude Stein, the darling of the literary crowd in Paris, who teased American GIs about their desire to fit into culture and how the war saved Europe from such infiltration. Considering Ms. Stein was a gay Jewish woman who survived while her fellow Jews perished demonstrates how disconnected the elite can be.

If the white picket fence, flashy car, and perfect clothes were reality then white privilege surely fits. But it was a fiction created by advertisers, movie executives, and others to make potential consumers believe they could experience the same lifestyle enjoyed by American “royalty.” 

Whether by accident or design, this mythology seems to have been elevated to a ‘fictional’ reality (much like "reality" tv shows) to become the basis for erasing past struggles. Thus, if a white janitor is accused of racism by a student, it must be so because he is white and therefore privileged. The reality is irrelevant and the fictional marketing prevails. 

Erasing struggles does nothing to promote harmony in the US. Forgetting that immigrants, including Asian immigrants, escaped their hellholes does not promote peace. All stories need to be interwoven into a tapestry that holds us together. Essential to the tapestry includes the horrific treatment of Black Americans - segregation, lynching, and medical experimentation - to name a few. 

This tapestry of humanity was demonstrated by Jewish Viennese psychiatrist Victor Frankl when addressing the crowd at the 50th anniversary of the Nazi annexation of Austria. While he survived the camps, his family, including his young wife, did not. Despite such anguish, he told the crowd he would not utter words of hate. He spoke of his love for Vienna choosing to see it through the lens of those who risked their lives resisting the Nazis while refusing to blame those who feared doing so. 

He emphatically rejected the notion of ‘Collective Guilt', especially for those who were not even born at the time. He argued that collective guilt would be a crime of madness risking a relapse into the ‘clan’ mentality promulgated by the Nazis. But the rejection was more than just a moral stance. He feared collective guilt would push the young into the hands of Nazi-type groups. He proclaimed there are only two races of people: decent and indecent. 

Race insanity in the West has been resurrected but with a bizarre twist. We are creating a class of young people told that their skin color and ethnicity give them undeserved ‘privileges’ denied to others. While the category is intended as a restraint, the undeniable underlying message is that they are superior. 

Accordingly, penance and special offerings are mandated to overcome the sin of privilege. Instead of whips, the young flagellate themselves and their culture to appease the new gods who demand sacrifices. Thus these young people are embarking on a journey repeated over human existence - turning on one’s own for their own ambition.

Understanding the stain of privilege limits their options, they will grow more ambitious to ensure they have the right credentials to get into the right schools and the right approved jobs. It is like an inverse Ubermensch quest infused with the religiosity of guilt for their superiority. 

What this means for society is unknown, but prospects seem dim. Moral superiority combined with a belief you are designated to lead the masses to the collective good does not end well. Something the ghosts of Maos’s cultural revolution could well attest to.