In a “Mr Reagan” video posted approximately three months ago entitled “Why Black People Hate White People,” Christopher Kohls tells the story of his former Black friend Liz, a women considerably overweight and not terribly attractive. When he expressed interest on a particular occasion in a gorgeous, blond, White girl, Liz responded that given the way that type had made her feel in her school days, she could not possibly continue to be his friend should he choose to pursue the lady in question. Feeling bad for Liz, Kohls asked her to elaborate on just what sort of hateful things pretty young White girls had done or said to her in her youth. Oh, she more or less answered, they were always kind as can be to me. But still they made me feel like crap about myself.
When Ibram X. Kendi celebrates his resistance to the “assimilationist” tactics of White Culture, is he motivated by a genuine concern for the truth or a mere racially based resentment of that culture? Is the source of his angst external or buried deep within himself?
In “The Beauty Myth” [1990] Naomi Wolf suggests Male standards of Female Beauty are arbitrary cultural constructs designed to keep Women insecure and politically impotent. “Fat is a Feminist Issue” [1997] by Susie Orbach makes more or less the same argument. Every straight man on the planet knows this is a gross simplification. No one is exonerating ignorant Male behavior of any sort. But what each of these classics of postmodern Feminism does is exonerate those Females not particularly blessed by Biology of the need to come to terms with who they are by placing the burden of guilt on Men for preferring the appearance of others. Such is the basic dynamic of “progressivism,” the denigration of a cherished human value, in this case Female Beauty, simply because not all women share equally in that value.
Orbach invokes the notion of “privilege” in referring to the benefits which naturally accrue to those women blessed with physical beauty, the very word implying that an injustice has somehow been perpetrated. Do I have the right to resent that I am not as intelligent as some others, not as strong, or creative, or charismatic, or athletically gifted, or musically talented? Or are these variables the simple, ineradicable Facts of Life, facts with which each of us must deal as best we can?
The word “privilege” brings to mind the oft invoked contemporary notion of White Privilege. But just as Feminists minimize the impact of Biology on the relationship between the Sexes because it does not suit their Egalitarian agenda, so those obsessed with Racial Inequality insist on deleting History from their narrative because it suggests that the way the world has unfolded is not some random accident, not a mere matter of “privileges” from which certain peoples have been arbitrarily excluded, but the simple, inevitable result of the achievements and failures, both past and present, of the peoples in question.
In typical Egalitarian fashion, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s 2018 book “The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity” suggests those factors which tend to separate us [creed, country, class, color, culture] are more illusory than real, the implication as usual being that we are all more or less the same. His subject, the relationship between Culture and the Individual, is of course fraught with complexity and ambiguity. But is his dismissal of what he terms the 19th Century “fiction” of genetic variation among the Races validated by history or in fact exposed as a self-indulgent denial of Reality? According to the N.Y. Times [Sept. 9, 2018], Appiah argues “that we should “give up the very idea of Western civilization” because the notion of a distinct Western essence ……. “individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific” …….. ignores basic facts about the West and everywhere else.”
Have hundreds of millions of White Westerners through the ages failed to exhibit or revere the values cited above? Of course they have! Have hundreds of millions of non-Whites been more rational, more tolerant, etc. than their White contemporaries? Of course they have! Can we ever say anything of substance about any Individual based on their Identity, racial or otherwise? Of course we can’t! But, Mr. Appiah, in rejecting the notion that Western European Man has shown a predilection to respond to the challenges of Life in a fashion distinctly different from other peoples, it is you who are ignoring certain basic, inarguable Facts. This is a Blog and I don’t have time for a history lesson. But what could be more absurd than the notion that the Culture produced by a given people says nothing about who they are? What could be more absurd than Jared Diamond’s hypothesis that the dwellers of the Amazon rain forest are still lodged in the Stone Age while the Ancient Greeks were rationally discussing the most imponderable of human mysteries 2500 years ago, simply because of the impact of Geography and Weather?
The never ending effort by “progressives” to ignore, deride or rationalize Human Achievement because it does not fit their Mindless world-view, leads inevitably to the notion of “privilege.” White Westerners are, relatively speaking, living in the lap of luxury while many of the peoples of Africa are the victims of starvation, disease or tribal strife, simply because of random good fortune [or, of course, the predatory evil of Westerners]. It is a narrative that marginalizes that self-awareness which Socrates saw as essential to a moral mode of being, replacing it with the simplistic, Neo-Marxist notion of Victimhood. It entails a vacuous vision of the world which implicitly grants Kohl’s friend Liz the right to feel that she has somehow been cheated because she is not as pretty as others; indeed which grants to all those who deem themselves “underprivileged” the right to be filled with anger, resentment and perhaps hatred, whatever the actual causes, both past and present, of their condition.
Simple fact: While there are racists, misogynists and homophobes among us, the notion that their biases are systemically tolerated in the West is more often than not the product of the infantile, self-exonerating delusions of that portion of the species simply unable or unwilling to confront Reality. So much easier to resent others than to look in a mirror! And these are the people who are being allowed hi-jack our Civilization!