2018/7/13 White Privilege’s Strange Career | National Review

POLITICS & POLICY

The Strange Career of White

Privilege
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON July 10, 2018 6:30 AM

A protester holds a sign at a Trump campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in July 2016. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

Rich whites invent minority pedigrees to gain advantage while they

condemn poor and working-class rural whites as racist.

Y ou 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
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/strange-career-of-white-privilege/ 1/8
2018/7/13 White Privilege’s Strange Career | National Review

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 Now it was superseded by a far more comprehensive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.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/strange-career-of-white-privilege/ 2/8
2018/7/13 White Privilege’s Strange Career | National Review

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 knew 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
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/strange-career-of-white-privilege/ 3/8
2018/7/13 White Privilege’s Strange Career | National Review

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.

For the children of So, for careerist reasons, some Americans

of mixed descent emphasized their
intermarried couples, it
supposed non-white lineage. They began
can be a career-
ethnicizing, accenting, or hyphenating
changing decision to their names, knowing that their mere
evolve from Robert appearance might not easily prove that
Smith to Robert Garcia they were non-white. The number of
Smith (or even better students, friends, and associates I’ve
known who, for careerist concerns in their
Roberto Garcia Smith)
adult years, recalibrated their ethnic
to reflect one’s identity by nomenclature, fashion, and
maternal Latino roots. politics is legion.

Sometimes even slight changes in self-identification have consequences. For

the children of intermarried couples, it can be a career-changing decision to
evolve from Robert Smith to Robert Garcia Smith (or even better Roberto
Garcia Smith) to reflect one’s maternal Latino roots – an effort especially
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/strange-career-of-white-privilege/ 4/8
2018/7/13 White Privilege’s Strange Career | National Review

appreciated by universities and employers. As I have written in the past, if

George Zimmerman had focused on his Afro-Peruvian mother’s lineage and
become rebranded as Jorge Mesa or at least Jorge Mesa Zimmerman, an
exasperated New York Times might not have reinvented Zimmerman as a
“white Hispanic,” and the entire Trayvon Martin national controversy would
have been retold as a fatal fight between an Afro Latino and an African
American — and not become a supposed national referendum on white
supremacy and racism. Unfortunately for Zimmerman, his name instead
conjured up victimizing Germanic racism, not a victimized indigenous
person.

In some cases, the more desperate have invented minority pedigrees out of
whole cloth, like the false but self-serving and opportunistic claim of Senator
Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) that she was Native American (on the basis of
“high cheekbones” or family mythology), or Professor Ward Churchill’s
similar fake Native American get-up that got him hired as a minority at the
University of Colorado.

But even if we were all to wear DNA badges and could agree on a magical
non-white percentile that qualifies us for minority status, contradictions
would still surround the construct of “white privilege.”

Does the white Appalachian coal miner in West Virginia really have an innate
leg up on the Punjabi immigrant exec in Silicon Valley on the basis of his
appearance? Yet somewhere along the line in a supposed racist America,
being a white male in Fayette County, W. Va., did not innately trump being a
techie immigrant from Mumbai in Menlo Park. Does multibillionaire Oprah
Winfrey have less privilege and opportunity than a white cook in Provo,
Utah?

Does the recently arrived undocumented immigrant who has lived his entire
life in the Mexican state of Oaxaca become eligible for career and job
enhancement because he does not superficially look like the out-of-work lathe
worker in southern Ohio? Is the theory that the minute the immigrant crosses
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/strange-career-of-white-privilege/ 5/8
2018/7/13 White Privilege’s Strange Career | National Review

the border to the U.S. from his formerly racist society, his children will
become eligible for federally mandated advantages on the reasoning that from
now on, they will face racism as a non-white in the country to which he fled in
order to avoid racism in the country of his birth?

Federal statistics reveal that in terms of average median household income,

those who loosely identify as Asian are far wealthier ($80,720 per year) than
whites ($61,349). Do they enjoy “Asian privilege” of having on average
$20,000 more as a family to spend each year than whites?

In terms of the most More specifically, the top three ethnic

indigent counties in the income groups in the United States are

not categorized as “white”: Indian
United States, four of
American ($110,026), Taiwanese
the five poorest have American ($90,221), and Filipino
overwhelmingly white American ($88,745). What sort of non-
populations. privilege allowed them to vastly
outdistance their supposedly racist white-
majority hosts — superior education, smarter professional choices, more
cohesive family structures, all of which somehow trumped their outward
appearance?

In terms of the most indigent counties in the United States, four of the five
poorest have overwhelmingly white populations. That might suggest not only
that the term “white” is increasingly undefinable, at least in terms of status,
class, and privilege, but that “white” includes a vast array of disparate
cultures and experiences that make impossible any conclusive idea of white-
privilege solidarity.

In many ways, the greatest polarization in the country today is along class,
not racial, lines, especially between lower- and middle-class whites and rich,
coastal-elite whites — as we were reminded by Hillary Clinton’s recent
disdain shown the “deplorables” and “irredeemables.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/strange-career-of-white-privilege/ 6/8
2018/7/13 White Privilege’s Strange Career | National Review

Trump rode to victory One of the strangest elements of the

American obsession with superficial
in part on the furor of
appearance is the habit of very well
voters in the Midwest
connected and affluent whites faulting
and rural states who poor whites for their “white privilege.” It
were derided for their has become a sort of rite-of-passage
privilege (though they virtue-signaling in which rich, white
did not seem to have college students at tony universities damn
white privilege and the supposedly racist,
much) by those who
nativist, xenophobic, and sexist Trump
most certainly did Neanderthals. With this, they establish
enjoy privilege. their spiritually pure fides or, more
practically, earn a sort of insurance policy
in case the all-seeing eye of the diversity tower turns its focus on them
someday.

Donald Trump rode to victory in part on the furor of voters in the Midwest
and rural states who were derided for their privilege (though they did not
seem to have much) by those who most certainly did enjoy privilege.

Do not underestimate the Trump voter. When they channel-surfed cable

news, or heard of the antics that took place on college campuses, or saw
street-theater demonstrations on television, they boiled at the idea that they
had often worked at minimum wage, saw their jobs outsourced, never
discriminated against anyone, and yet were being damned by smug youth
who in a few years would draw on their college B.A. cattle brand, their
parents’ lobbying, and the good-old-boy network of being rich, white, and
from the proper zip code to inherit their rightful place in business,
investment, politics, entertainment, the media, or the university. Google all
the rich, white, privileged pundits who at one time or another, both in jest
and in all seriousness, have called to deport the deplorables and in their stead
give amnesty to illegal aliens or import “better” people from abroad.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/strange-career-of-white-privilege/ 7/8
2018/7/13 White Privilege’s Strange Career | National Review

In sum, the terms “diversity” and “white privilege” have now been stretched
to denote so many things, and yet they encompass so many paradoxes and
contradictions, that they have become words that mean nothing much at all.

How odd that the current revolutionary mode is to keep these reactionary
Byzantine classifications and programs that no longer sync with reality, and
to damn as reactionary the truly revolutionary act — which would be to start
treating people as unique individuals whose appearance is a secondary
consideration.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow
at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Second World Wars:
How the First Global Con ict Was Fought and Won. @vdhanson

SPONSORED CONTENT Recommended by

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/strange-career-of-white-privilege/ 8/8