(no subject)

[somedaybitch]

from today's Opinion Journal:

The New White Power Movement

"For the first time, the Seattle Public Schools is sending students from four high schools and their chaperones to a conference on 'white privilege,' sponsored by the University of Colorado and a variety of other groups," reports the online newspaper Crosscut Seattle:

What makes it noteworthy is the fact the school district's policies regarding race have been in the news lately. Officially, the district presumes racism is institutionalized in Seattle schools and that students of color are inherently disadvantaged.

A particularly strident articulation of this notion was once posted on the school district's Web site. It said, in effect, that in America only whites are racist and that examples of white cultural racism included individualism and expectations that students learn standard English. When it came to light last year, the statements were removed.

Here is the Web site of the White Privilege Conference, and here's an excerpt from the frequently asked questions page:

Q. What is privilege?

A. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was meant to remain oblivious. White Privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.

Peggy McIntosh
"White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"

Do these people stop to think about what they are saying and what effect it is likely to have on children? Judging by the picture on this page, Peggy McIntosh is easily old enough to have come of age before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which means that she doubtless is steeped in white guilt, which informs her concept of the "invisible knapsack."

But what happens if you tell some white kid born in the 1990s--decades into the post-civil-rights era--that he has an invisible knapsack? Race means little to him, white guilt is an incomprehensible relic of an earlier time. Probably his reaction to learning of the knapsack is, "Cool!" Who wouldn't want a knapsack full of treasures?

It seems likely to us, then, that the White Privilege Conference will end up promoting a sense among young whites that they are superior.

my being white got me exactly jackshit. my grades got me into private high school and my grades got me into college. my parents divorced because my dad was an alcoholic wife-beating, son-beating asshole when he drank; my mom had to work, we had no money, no new clothes, no new toys, no new anything, but she loved us and put food on our table. i had to get financial aid just to go to high school, and worked two jobs, along with financial aid/loans to get through college. i thought everyone lived that way and it had nothing to do with the color of my skin. it's just life, for fuck's sake.

true equality is the absence of racism; that means racism in the other direction is just as racist, people. don't bash on me because i was born white. i have no control over who birthed me. that's just as utterly fucking moronic as the belief that anyone who isn't white is a lesser human. we'll have equality when skin color stops being important, and that's a concept that goes in all directions.