White Privilege: the Lie That Won’t Die

At a time of heightened racial tension not seen for decades, white people are constantly being told to check their privilege; which is just as well, because you need to know you’re getting your money’s worth. ‘Check your privilege’ is a lazy, though sadly ubiquitous phrase, levied at white people who voice the wrong opinion, or sometimes simply dare to speak at all.

It’s lazy, because it assumes a detailed knowledge of an individual’s life based on their skin colour (we used to have a word for that didn’t we?). It’s scientifically illiterate, bypassing the obvious importance of other factors like parent’s marital status, attractiveness, IQ, diligence, health and so on. It’s also disingenuous, a means to simultaneously shout ‘shut up, while boycotting any retaliation.

The term ‘white privilege’ initially gained popularity after the 1989 paper White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by ‘Women’s Studies’ scholar, Peggy McIntosh. It’s worth reading, if only to understand what utter tosh you’re up against. In a ‘personal account’, with no empirical underpinning whatsoever, McIntosh lists 50 items which she believes illustrate the daily effects of white privilege.

It is clear that many items in the knapsack are simply not true, or at least hinge greatly on where you live. It is also clear that McIntosh has confused ‘majority status’ or ‘wealth’ with white privilege. For instance, ‘I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time’ or ‘If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live’.

The natural corollary of which, is that successful Indians, Chinese, Japanese and South Koreans, have all done so on the back of their non-existent white privilege; perhaps that’s why, according to McIntosh, the knapsack is invisible?

Like McIntosh, those most keen to push the white privilege line, are also those least imaginative when it comes to personal action. Former Liberal Democrat leadership hopeful, the impeccably white Layla Moran claims her party is ‘too old and white to appeal to modern British voters’. Keir Starmer calls for all-BAME shortlists, but obviously not for the Party leadership. Prince Harry lectures us all on our ‘unconscious bias’ from his 9,000 bedroom mansion in LA, oh and could the taxpayer please chip-in for the next security bill?

Yet while Liberals talk a good game, they rarely come up with practical solutions like resigning, donating, committing suicide, or otherwise practicing what they preach to those less fortunate. Still, hypocrisy aside, we should take them at their word and investigate – if white privilege were to have any objective validity, it would certainly be worth knowing.

White privilege would suggest that in terms of education, white pupils should be over-represented at the vanguard of opportunity, but this is not the case. According to government figures, white working class boys are the worst performing group at GCSE, with only 24% obtaining 5 good GCSE’s. White British pupils overall, are also the demographic least likely to go to university (29%), compared with Black (41.2%), Asian (46.7%) and Chinese (66.3%) pupils.

This is unfortunate, because it means more White Brits are unable to benefit from compulsory race awareness courses, such as that taught at Magdalen College Oxford, which focusses on ‘cultural appropriation’, ‘implicit bias’ and ‘institutional racism at Oxford’.

Not to worry, let’s turn to money – a white privilege domain if ever there was one. Unfortunately not, say ONS figures. Chinese and Indian workers are currently out-earning their British counterparts by almost £10,000 a year. No doubt we can expect calls to end the ‘ethnic paygap’, or ‘Asian privilege’ any day now.

Ok, employment then – surely our white privilege will give us a leg-up there? Again, sadly not. Thanks to the government’s Culture White Paper from 2016, increased diversity is now a must:

We will ask Arts Council England, Historic England and the national museums and galleries to develop and share strategies for tackling the lack of diversity in leadership across the cultural sectors and to provide regular reports on what has been achieved

While employment quotas are ‘technically’ illegal, unofficial quotas are being achieved by stealth, either by accepting less-qualified minorities on the grounds of ‘positive action’ which Cheshire Police tried against Matthew Furlong, or by simply banning whites from applying in the first place – which appears to be the preferred option at BBC, Historic England and the National Trust.

If you’re banking on media depictions of whiteness being favourable, you’ve come to the wrong place. The BBC is ‘hideously white’ according to Greg Dyke, as is the West End according to Andrew Lloyd Webber, while the Football Association is a bunch of ‘old white men’. In fact everything white is now too white, and consequently racist: sandwiches, classical music, maths, punctuality, the climate, science, Dr Seuss books, being white, having black friends, not having black friends, liking rap music, not liking rap music, disliking foreign food, liking foreign food and so on.

The print media meanwhile unofficially hold a daily competition as to who can come up with the most anti-white headline. Honourable mentions must go to:

The Guardian: ‘We tend to empathize with our online avatars. So let’s get rid of white emojis’

The New York Times: ‘Can my children be friends with white people?’

Salon: ‘White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it’

With hostility so widespread, white people might be tempted to band together. The problem being of course, any gathering of more than 4 is likely to encourage a visit from Jon Snow, who with hernia-induced exasperation will comment ‘I’ve never seen so many white people!’

Even the English Language, which you might expect to harbour inveterate signs of white privilege, appears increasingly anti-white. As a prefix, white is now almost entirely pejorative: white privilege, whitesplain, white fragility, whitewash, white extinction anxiety. And while racist terms against non-whites have been replaced by the positive-sounding ‘people of colour’ or BAME, ‘gammon’ and ‘Karen’ (obvious racial slurs against whites) are considered fair game.

Free speech itself also comes surprisingly expensive when it’s whites picking up the tab. Find yourself a Cambridge professor who wants to ‘abolish whiteness’ or ‘kneecap white men’, and you’ll find yourself someone in-line for a healthy promotion. Find yourself Joe Public who believes ‘All lives matter’ or that ‘It’s ok to be white’ however, and you’ll find someone facing a police investigation and losing their job.

With woke companies like Ben & Jerry’s jumping on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon: ‘we must dismantle white supremacy’, to Instagram’s inclusion of a ‘mute white people’ button, the assault on whiteness is interminable.

If white privilege accorded half the benefits we are told it does, you would expect these times of self-identification to evoke long-repressed yearnings to be white from the non-white population, but the reverse appears to be true. Mixed-race celebrities for instance, invariably identify with their black side: Lewis Hamilton, Colin Kaepernick, Meghan Markle, and Obama to name but a few.

White celebrities meanwhile are either falling over themselves to denounce their whiteness: Eminem, Rosanna Arquette, and Ellen DeGeneres, or go one step further and simply pretend to be black: Shaun King, Rachel Dolezal, and Emma Halberg who was accused of ‘blackfishing’ – pretending to be black through a combination of makeup and traditionally black hairstyles and fashion, in order to secure an online audience.  

At the current state of play, being white is now an impossible game. Whites are ordered to speak out against racism (silence is violence), but also to ‘pass the mic’ (stop being a white saviour). When whites see colour they’re racist; when they don’t see colour, they’re denying racism. White people are told they are automatically racist, and if this upsets them, it’s a sure sign of white fragility – i.e. automatic racism.

Far from a useful concept, White privilege is a curious ménage of self-loathing liberals and rabid anti-whites, for whom the notion of white privilege is a useful vehicle. While the former simply employs the term to score woke points, the latter has used it ingeniously to repackage racism: I hate you because you’re white; it’s your fault, and it’s your responsibility to assuage it.

It also shows no signs of abating. The news broke last week, that Brighton Council has come up with some revolutionary new diversity training for teachers, which instructs children as young as seven that they are ‘not racially innocent’. It is hard to exaggerate just how evil this is.

Despite all the hype, white privilege is not paying much of a dividend to its shareholders. So the next time someone tells you to ‘check your privilege’, you probably should – you may have been mis-sold.