Not-So-Little White Lies About White Privilege

NOTE: The following is protected by federal copyright law and is an excerpt from the book Marxianity written by Brannon Howse and is not to be published online. The footnotes that document the content in this article are found in the book Marxianity or the eBook.

If “white privilege” is really true, why are so many white Americans living in poverty? If non-whites have such difficulty “moving up,” how did we elect Barack Hussein Obama as president? How did we end up with (black) attorney general Eric Holder? With Thurgood Marshall or Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court? How did Condoleezza Rice get to be George Bush’s secretary of state? Or Colin Powell in the Reagan administration? If we are such an intractably racist nation, how did they get where they did?

You see, white privilege is a lie. We have black congressmen (and women!), black governors, black senators, black mayors. How about black athletes who make millions and millions of dollars? And then there are the Asians, and immigrants from India. Why is Matt Chandler not talking about Asian privilege or Indian privilege? Because the Indians and the Asians generally surpass whites in most every measure—education, work ethic, and income.

So that you can be assured that I’m not making this up, let's look at some stats. In his February 16, 2016 National Review article “The Fallacy of ‘White Privilege’,” Dennis Prager says, “According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, white men, whom the Left argue are the most privileged group of all in America, commit seven of every ten suicides in America—even though only three of ten Americans are white males.” If being a white American is so easy and so unencumbered by any challenges, why are so many of them committing suicide? Prager offers a balanced perspective:

[quote] [T]here are a host of privileges that dwarf “white privilege.” A huge one is Two-Parent Privilege. If you are raised by a father and a mother, you entered adulthood with more privileges than anyone else in American society, irrespective of race, ethnicity, or sex. That’s why the poverty rate among two-parent black families is only 7 percent. Compare that to a 22 percent poverty rate among whites in single-parent homes. Obviously the two-parent home is the decisive privilege . . .

Another “privilege,” if one wants to use that term, that dwarfs “white privilege” is Asian privilege. Asian Americans do better than white Americans in school, on IQ tests, on credit scores, and on other positive parameters. In fact, according to recent data from the Federal Reserve, Asians are about to surpass whites as the wealthiest group of Americans. Will the Left soon complain about Asian privilege? [end quote]

Prager is far from alone in his assessment of the idiocy of “white privilege.” In his frontpagemag.com review of a Thomas Sowell book, Lloyd Billingsley explains how “Thomas Sowell Deconstructs Diversity Dogma.” Thomas Sowell, of course, is a black American, and Billingsley says of him:

[quote] Sowell shows that groups that have lagged behind have advanced themselves by various means, primarily hard work. But in the race industry, accredited victims only advance by means of some government affirmative action program, code for racial preference or quotas. Any problems with advancement “are due primarily, if not solely, to the malaise of other people.” Sowell sees this leading to a “never-ending cycle of revenge, the Hatfields and the McCoys writ large, with a whole society caught in the crossfire.” [end quote]

CNBC.com corroborates this notion of “Asian privilege.” In an article entitled “How Asian Americans Are Transforming the Face of US Wealth,” it reports that:

[quote] US citizens of Asian descent have made sizable gains in income and wealth in the past 25 years, so much that they are on pace to eclipse whites as the wealthiest group of Americans, according to new data from the Federal Reserve. [end quote]

So, if “white privilege” creates such insurmountable barriers to non-whites, why are Asians doing so well? The article further recounts that:

[quote] Asian American wealth had “changed dramatically” since 1989, the bank said, with the demographic’s middle-income group already overtaking that of Caucasians. This is due, in late measure, to what it calls “the remarkable increase in educational attainment by younger Asians in recent decades.”. . . According to Bill Emmons, an economist at the St. Louis Fed, Asian Americans may in fact become the wealthiest ethnic group in the US within the next few decades.

The Pew Research Center also adds to the evidence against white privilege as an economic factor. According to the article “Indian Americans Have Highest Median Income of US Asian Population, Says Pew Research Study”:

The Pew Research Center September 8th unveiled key findings from a study of the Asian population, with 20 million Asian Americans tracking their roots to more than 20 countries in the Indian subcontinent, as well as East and Southeast Asia. The median annual household income of households headed by Asian Americans is $73,060, compared with $53,600 among all US households, the study found.

Additionally, the study found that Asians overall were less likely than the general US population to live in poverty in 2015. About half of Asians age 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or more, compared with 30 percent of all Americans this age, the study found. Indians [immigrants from India] have the highest level of educational attainment among Asian Americans, with 72 percent holding a bachelor’s degree or more in 2015. [end quote] 

White privilege is a myth. Asian and Indian economic success suggests that there is no white-privilege economic inhibitor. Indians and Asians are doing better than white Americans. And many other millionaires do not have a college education, but they have something better than further education: they have a strong work ethic and great skill as entrepreneurs.

So, privilege isn’t based on a person’s people group of origin. What advances them is hard work, education, whether or not they come from a two-parent family, whether they have learned lessons of perseverance, hard work, saving, managing money, and staying out of trouble.

These traits go back to the incubator. The Founding Fathers said the family is the incubator for maintaining a constitutional republic. And that, of course, is why the Frankfurt School set out to destroy the American family.

In Chapter 3, I mentioned the book Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass by psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple. Dalrymple reveals that the most pervasive culprit in the cause of poverty is moral relativism:  

[quote] Of nothing is this [resulting poverty] more true than the system of sexual relations that now prevails in the underclass, with the result that 70 percent of the births in my hospital are now illegitimate, a figure that would approach 100 percent if it were not for the presence in the area of a large number of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. [end quote] 

With unusual clarity, Dr. Dalrymple points to uncommitted sexual relations as the foremost perpetrator of an underclass. Notice he also mentions immigrants from the “Indian subcontinent.” These people are well known to get married, stay together, get an education, and work hard in entrepreneurial businesses. Dr. Dalrymple continues:

[quote] The connection between this loosening [of morals] and the misery of my patients is so obvious that it requires considerable intellectual sophistication (and dishonesty) to be able to deny it . . . The climate of moral, cultural, and intellectual relativism—a relativism that began as a mere fashionable plaything for intellectuals—has been successfully communicated to those least able to resist its devastating practical effects. [end quote]

According to Dalrymple, the intelligentsia have taught dangerous ideas such as:

• “If it feels good, do it.” 
• “There are no wrong answers.”
• “You can do whatever you want to do.”
• “Life is about seeking pleasure.”
• “No one should listen to authority.”

The promotion of these ideas is no accident. They have been programmed into our educational system by the Frankfurt School (e.g., John Dewey, the “father” of American education”) and those who have followed in its path. And now we have men like Matt Chandler to thank for carrying their legacy into the church.