[ExI] White Privilege

[Lee Corbin]

Olga writes

> [I could] see that [books like Sowell's] were written for a specific
> reason for a specific segment of  people - i.e., mainly white people
> who needed reassurance that they were not doing anything wrong and
> could continue living their lives behind their virtual white gated communities,
> and that they need not concern themselves with lazy-ass people who
> could not "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and all the rest of the
> cliches.

Evidently, you don't really want to talk about the "History of Slavery",
or "Class Differences Among Black People".  You want to talk about
(and condemn) White Privilege, so I have changed the subject line
accordingly.   :-)

Basically, I suppose that you want to talk about White Privilege
with an eye towards what can be done about it, which is a very
interesting inquiry.

At one point I thought you admitted that it was a world-wide
"problem", but then in another place said that it was basically
American.  What is basically American---due to the South's
need to defend its ideology before the Civil War---is the 
historically first instance of extremely virulent racism. (According
to Sowell.)  Of course, I presume that we are exempting those
like Ghengis Khan, or the Romans, who would sometimes
simply kill everyone they could find of a certain ethnic group.
What they failed to do, unlike the southerners, was mount an
intellectual defense of racism.

Anyway, the problem of white privilege *is* world-wide. As I said,
in every country in which they exist in significant numbers, whites
have taken charge of the basic structures of society. For example
Amy Chau's book "World On Fire" describes in detail the current
reigning groups throughout South America. I myself was
astonished in the 1970s when on TV I saw a Presidential
reviewing stand in Mexico City during some big parade:  all the
Mexican big-shots looked very white to me, and a couple of the
women were blondes.

But there isn't really anything special about white people. Soon
you'll have to recognize that there will be (or is!) Asian privilege
and Jewish privilege as well. Wealth and power "naturally"
comes to some groups more than it comes to others.  So either
by their natures or by their cultures, at the present time, whites
rule.

Big deal. They're fairly benign as ruling classes historically go, and
it's even far from monolithic: many middle-class African American
or Mexicans live in exclusive "white" neighborhoods, or, in California,
in exclusive "white/Asian" neighborhoods.

But nonetheless, your focus is on a Solution, and I appreciate
that. Let's turn to history for some lessons. In Europe the past
500 years, there was this problem of "Jewish privilege". Money
somehow kept getting collected into their hands. A solution was
"ghettoization", restrictions on ownership, restrictions to institutes
of higher learning, and so on. The controling WASPs were
trying to defend themselves from Jewish takeover, but eventually
they failed, at least insofar as many kinds of current American
institutions go.

You could try the solution that Hugo Chavez may succeed with:
seize control away from the ruling white groups by whatever
means necessary.  Or you could try putting whites in ghettos.
But there will still be this abnormal tendency for the Chinese,
Indian, Jewish, Mormon, and fundamentalist White Christian
groups to keep most of the money, the power, and the influence.
(I leave out demographically negligible groups.)

I am sure that you don't want to embrace a Final Solution,
although you have to admit that it "worked". A few years after
the war, there were only a few thousand Jews left in all of
Germany.

I suggest instead that we focus on *why* other groups, e.g.,
brown peoples, can't be more like Chinese and Jews, even
if heavilty discriminated against, and rise up to rule anyway.

That's what Sowell is doing: trying to isolate the cultural 
characteristics of different groups that account for their
prosperity.  (He neglects possible genetic causes, which
could be an important factor too, but that's reasonable,
since we won't be able to do anything about them for
decades yet.)

Lee