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...... 

Cult Programming in Seattle

The city is training white municipal employees to overcome their “internalized racial superiority.”

Christopher F. Rufo July 8, 2020

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Reprinted with permission from the City Journal I recommend subscribing to their e-mail alerts.

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Last month, the City of Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights sent an email inviting “white City employees” to attend a training session on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,” a program designed to help white workers examine their “complicity in the system of white supremacy” and “interrupt racism in ways that are accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color.” Hoping to learn more, I submitted a public records request for all documentation related to the training. The results are disturbing.

At the beginning of the session, the trainers explain that white people have internalized a sense of racial superiority, which has made them unable to access their “humanity” and caused “harm and violence” to people of color. The trainers claim that “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “intellectualization,” and “objectivity” are all vestiges of this internalized racial oppression and must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles. In conceptual terms, the city frames the discussion around the idea that black Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “blackness” and white Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “whiteness”—that is, the new metaphysics of good and evil.

Once the diversity trainers have established this basic conceptual framework, they encourage white employees to “practice self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism” and work on “undoing [their] own whiteness.” As part of this process, white employees must abandon their “white normative behavior” and learn to let go of their “comfort,” “physical safety,” “social status,” and “relationships with some other white people.” As writer James Lindsay has pointed out, this is not the language of human resources; it is the language of cult programming—persuading members they are defective in some predefined manner, exploiting their emotional vulnerabilities, and isolating them from previous relationships.

It’s important to point out that this “interrupting whiteness” training is not an anomaly. In recent years, nearly every department of Seattle city government has been recruited into the ideological fight against “white supremacy.” As I have documented, the city’s homelessness agency hosted a conference on how to “decolonize [their] collective work”; the school system released a curriculum explaining that “math is a tool for oppression”; and the city-owned power company hired a team of bureaucrats to fight “structural racism” within their organization. Dozens of private companies now offer diversity training to public agencies. The idea that all whites have unconscious, “implicit bias” that they must vigilantly program themselves to overcome has become an article of faith across corporate boardrooms, academia, and law-enforcement agencies, even though the premise is unscientific and impossible to verify.

The endgame is to make Seattle’s municipal government the arbiter of the new orthodoxy, and then work outward. At the end of the session on “internalized racial superiority,” the diversity trainers outline strategies for converting outsiders and recommend specific “practices for interrupting others’ whiteness.” In effect, the activists have organized an ideological pyramid scheme—using public dollars to establish their authority within the government, then using that authority to recruit others into the program. As Lindsay writes, “the goal is no longer to indoctrinate on what is ‘rightthink’ and ‘wrongthink.’ It is to make the [subject’s] thinking be completely in line with the view of the world described by the cult doctrine.”

How far can this racial-justice shakedown extend itself? The new racial orthodoxy has seen exponential growth in the past few years and has proved extremely difficult for local governments and elite institutions to resist. The movement’s key rhetorical premise is designed as a trap: if you are not an “antiracist,” then you are a “racist”—and must be held to account. Skeptics might dismiss Seattle’s “interrupting whiteness” training as a West Coast oddity, but it is part of a nationwide movement to make this kind of identity politics the foundation of our public discourse. It may be coming soon to a city or town near you.

Christopher F. Rufo is a contributing editor of City Journal and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty. He’s directed four documentaries for PBS, including his new film, America Lost, which tells the story of three “forgotten American cities.” Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529).

Let's Talk about Black Privilege

July 9, 2020 By Rich Logis

There are approximately 250 million Americans aged 20 and over. How many don't believe that black lives matter? I want a number, backed up by evidence — not a dissertation, pontification, polemic, manifesto, or Socratic dialogue. A number.  Not having to provide a fact-based number: black privilege — yes or no?

Take NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, who imagined a noose the way the narrator in Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart imagined a droning beating heart. A hysterical black American creates unnecessary panic over a noose found in his garage; draws 15 FBI agents to investigate, at a total of tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money; investigation confirms the black American's story was paranoia; FBI goes home; nothing happens to the black American for making a false accusation and creating unnecessary panic; continues to receive fawning press in the DMIC (Democrat Media Industrial Complex). Black privilege — yes or no?

Lincoln County, Ore. exempted  from mandatory mask-wearing "[p]eople of color who have heightened concerns about racial profiling and harassment due to wearing face coverings in public." Black privilege — yes or no?.........To Read More....