David Horowitz: ‘White Privilege’ Is a Racist Idea

Across the country, re-education sessions are routinely held in businesses, professional offices, medical schools, universities, and even kindergartens. Their purpose is to teach the un-woke about the evils of “white privilege,” and make white people who participate uncomfortable about their skin color.

Whites are to own up to the fact that regardless of their intentions, beliefs, behaviors or status in life, they are elite participants in a racist system that oppresses “people of color,” and are so merely because they are white.

But discrimination on the basis of skin color has been outlawed in this country for more than 60 years. One might reasonably ask, “WTF is white privilege”?

Here’s my politically incorrect answer: White privilege is the gift of being the only racial/ethnic group on the planet which it is okay to single out for abuse.

Indeed, such abuse is obligatory for all who regard themselves as “woke,” and who aspire to promote “social justice.”

This is a category that includes the media, the popular culture, the educational system, and such shapers of public opinion as Don Lemon; Joy Ann Reid; Joy Behar; Brian Stelter; Rachel Maddow; the editorial boards and reporters of the New York Times and the Washington Post; and the Democratic Party.

“White privilege” is the privilege of being regarded as untrustworthy, prejudiced, and blind to the injustices one’s skin color is said to inflict.

“White privilege” is the privilege of being damned for alleged racist public safety measures like like “Stop and Frisk” policies, and also the often imaginary crimes of one’s alleged ancestors.

Thus, it is fashionable in today’s political culture to seek reparations for slavery from Americans whose ancestors never owned slaves, were not even in the country at the time, and were oppressed themselves in ethnic and religious ghettos across the globe. Reparations for slavery are also sought from the descendants of Union soldiers who gave their lives to abolish slavery.

White privilege is the privilege of being held responsible for slavery when white America accounted for a small proportion of the African slave trade globally, which was mainly run by “people of color,” while white America led the world in abolishing slavery, an institution that still exists in non-white Africa today.

Our country is now facing a national political crisis over borders because of the poverty and oppression caused by the corrupt politics and leftist economies of Central and South America, which has prompted their citizens to break into our country illegally.

Conditions in the resource-rich southern hemisphere are so bad that 20 million of its residents have already broken the law to violate our sovereignty, bankrupt our social services and educational systems, and fill our jails.

And yet according to the left, to seek a wall to stem this flood is white racism.

As a top Democratic strategist put it recently, “Building a wall says: ‘If you’re brown turn around.”

Such twisted logic would also provide an excuse to open our borders to the world’s Islamic terrorists, who have killed hundreds of thousands of mainly “brown” victims since 9/11.

Here is how the social justice website, Tolerance.org, which is run by the Southern Poverty Law Center, explains the invisible powers of “white privilege” to its target audience of K-12 teachers:

It seems logical that a person should have the chance to prove themselves individually before they are judged. It’s supposedly an American ideal. But it’s a privilege often not granted to people of color — with dire consequences. For example, programs like New York City’s now-abandoned ‘Stop and Frisk’ policy target a disproportionate number of black and Latinx [sic] people.

“Stop and Frisk” was originally a New York law enforcement policy designed to make random checks for concealed weapons, and thus to prevent potential armed robberies and homicides. It was instituted by conservative Republicans and subsequently “abandoned” by left-wing Democrats as “racist.”

To make “Stop and Frisk” a racial issue, its opponents inevitably leave out its specifics, including the profiles of the individuals whom the police target for searches. Like all analyses generated by identity politics enthusiasts, the Tolerance.org explanation eliminates details like the motivations for the policies, and the characteristics of their applications. It thus obscures from view all the actions of individuals that might account for the disproportionate number of blacks and Hispanics affected, in order to focus on the invisible but sinister oppressor, “white privilege.”

In reality, the selective nature of the policy was dictated by the fact that 98% of the shootings in New York are committed by blacks and Hispanics, according to Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute. The policy has an explanation that is behavioral, not racial.

So-called “white privilege” is a mirage. The primary beneficiaries of the decline in homicides in New York since 1990 are blacks and Hispanics, according to MacDonald. So “Stop and Frisk” could be seen as a privilege for the black and Hispanic communities who are the disproportionate potential targets of lethal criminal behavior, and therefore favored for protection. (Or were, until the left-wing mayor of New York ended the practice.)

“White privilege” is a racist term, but also part of a totalitarian ideology — identity politics — that erases the individual in favor of collective identities based on race and gender.

So detached is the idea of “white privilege” from any reality that CNN analyst Areva Martin accused Fox News host David Webb last week of being conservative because he had allegedly benefited from “white privilege.”

Webb is black.

That’s a working definition of racism. Everything you don’t like, everything you reject, is white. Every white is a prisoner of his or her skin color.

In the end, “white privilege” is an Orwellian construct to scapegoat white Americans who in reality, and in alliance with minorities, have helped create the most tolerant and inclusive society in human history.

David Horowitz is the author of the forthcoming book Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, which will be published by Humanix Books on February 19.