Separate and unequal

I am in favor of white privilege. And male privilege. And heterosexual privilege.

Those who care about these things are almost always against them. The very language is a negative judgment, like xenophobia or Islamophobia or homophobia.  Privilege, in this context, is by definition unjust: it is a social benefit earned not by an individual's merits, but by mere belonging to a group. This is supposed to be bad. And it is usually cartooned into seeing them as but one step away from black slavery, female debasement and gay-bashing. But it is inevitable and necessary.

It is especially ironic that the folks who banter about privilege are almost always the same ones who see people primarily as groups. Another irony is that the theory, groundwork and the actualization of the anti-privilege movement, whose primary target is white heterosexual males, comes entirely from cultures created by white heterosexual males.

The assumption is that privilege is bad and that it should be dismantled so that everyone can be equal.

Which never happens, has happened or will happen.  What the dismantling of these privileges means is their replacement by another group's privilege. People of color privilege. Female privilege. LGBT privilege.

Has there ever been a society past the stage of the small hunter-gatherer groups where it was not composed of a complex of group identities in more or less hierarchical relation to one another? Has there ever been a society without a center, or centers, and a margin, or margins? Without definition and assumption you cannot have a viable culture.



If you want to expand this notion of unearned and oppressive privilege past the standard one of race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, you can travel quite far afield: there is privilege connected with being an adult, speaking the national language, being able to walk, see and hear, being naturally either male or female*, knowing how to read and write, being healthy and goodlooking, being tall, etc. And horrifyingly, being a natural born citizen of a country gives you an unearned privilege over immigrants...And if you talk to an animal rights activist, there is the speciesist privilege of being human. It goes on and on. A revolt against reality.

The classless society was a catastrophic illusion which produced the deaths and the soul murder of many many millions in a mere seventy years...and never produced a classless society. The Marxist engineers of the movement became the new privileged and ruling class. I am much disinclined to believe that a society can become truly egalitarian about sex or race, either. The effort will produce a lot of dislocation and damage (Harrison Bergeron) and in the end, social hierarchies will reproduce themselves.

Our recent societal obsession with and fetishization of equality as the primary and perhaps only value, the heart of contemporary Western liberalism, is a symptom of something wrong. 

The anti-privilege industry is a prime example of liberalism: the use of social control and state power to raise the status, wealth and power of traditionally less successful groups (victims) at the expense of the status, wealth and power of traditionally more successful groups (oppressors). Anyone who thinks that equality is the goal, that the effort will cease when balance is struck, is deluding himself.

So if you are going to have a society with a set of centers, of groups who will be dominant or assumed to be the norm, I would much prefer one where white heterosexual males were that group.



*Transexual activists have created a Newspeak: if they are trans-gendered, then people whose gendered bodies and psyches match are called cis-gendered, from the Latin, on this side. And so there is cisgender privilege...a result of the oppressive binary gender regime.