A Funny Kind of Privilege

August 11, 2020 By William Sullivan

Black female billionaire Oprah Winfrey recently “encouraged her white viewers to acknowledge that they will always have a “leg up” in culture because of the color of their skin.” White people, she says, “no matter where they are on the rung or ladder of success, they still have their whiteness.” To be white, she argues, is to enjoy peculiar social advantage in America today.

You have to give credit where it’s due. A famous black female billionaire convincing her suburban hovel-dwelling white female audience that they should self-pillory for enjoying a culture of “white privilege” that is actively oppressing people like her? That is nothing short of brilliantly manipulative persuasion. It reminds me of that scene in The Silence of the Lambs when the audience is informed that Hannibal Lecter managed to convince a neighboring inmate to swallow his own tongue.

But it’s worth asking -- would the words “black female billionaire” even sequentially exist in the America that Oprah imagines? What about the words “black female First Lady?”

Former First Lady Michelle Obama is another rich and powerful black female who claims that the system is rigged against people like her. That assertion is belied, however, by comments to be found in her successful memoir, Becoming.

As an example of this systemic racism that supposedly exists in America, Obama relates that she felt the “shadow of affirmative action” in her years at Princeton.

“It was impossible to be a black kid at a mostly white school and not feel the shadow of affirmative action,” she writes. She says that she “could almost read the scrutiny in the gaze of certain students and even some professors, as if they wanted to say, ‘I know why you’re here.’”

She admits that she was probably “just imagining some of it,” but her own statements in the past suggest that she may have had some reason for that anxiety. As Mark Steyn writes in his book, After America, Obama told an audience in Madison that she has always “confronted people who had a certain expectation of me,” continuing:

Every step of the way, there was always somebody there telling me what I couldn’t do. Applied to Princeton. ‘You can’t go there, your test scores aren’t high enough.’ I went. I graduated with departmental honors. And then I wanted to Harvard. And that was probably a little too tough for me. I didn’t even know why they said that.

“But hang on,” Mark Steyn observes. “Her test scores weren’t “high enough” for Princeton? Yet, rather than telling her “you can’t go there,” they took her anyway.”........To Read More......