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A White Guy on White Male Privilege
It is high time people throw off old preconceptions of Republicans as the mean descendants of cotton plantation owners, you know, the old diatribe about white male privilege. With Trump’s rising numbers among minorities, maybe we’re all finally seeing people as just people who are all just trying to persevere and build a better life for themselves and their families.
I look at my children. They are half Hungarian blood on my wife’s side; that side came to the US through Ellis Island in the early 20th century and somehow they all found each other. They were not privileged at all; they had nothing. They were the children of simple farmers whose land was confiscated by the communists. They did not come but were sent to America for a better future, which they found in the factories in and around Bridgeport, CT.
On my side, my children can count an Englishman lured here by his brother in the late 19th century. His brother had married well and joined the family business. My great grandfather first served in the Army during the Spanish American war, gained citizenship, and joined his brother. Two of my other great grandparents (Sullivan and Mahoney) fled Ireland during the potato famine. The rest were American mutts, descended from early Puritans, pilgrims, and other unknowns.
I can say this; my great grandparents were all proud, worked hard, and not one left a single trust fund dollar or any kind of inheritance. One of my great grandfathers owned a general store. Another was a doctor. Yet another was a businessman and it is said, profited during prohibition, a scandal. The last worked for his brother in a lumber and quarry business in upstate New Hampshire.
They all lived in rural New England, owned homes, and lived full lives. As for privilege or inheritance, nothing survived to be passed down. My mother was orphaned at 13 when her father died of leukemia and her mother was declared incompetent and relegated to the state mental hospital. The family farm was auctioned to pay the medical bills. In the early ’50s, my father’s father contracted polio. He partially recovered and then lost everything when disease ravaged the local chicken farms leaving his inherited general store with nothing having advanced a season of feed to all the local growers.
My parents married at 18, produced two children (I was #2) before they were 20 and moved to the city to work. We lived in the projects then later moved into a three-decker walk-up. It was a cold flat, which meant there was no central heat, just an oil heater installed in an ancient fireplace in the front room. When I was about five, we moved to Portland, ME, to our own home, a rented bungalow. My dad got a job with the phone company, which was a great thing. He was transferred to the Boston area and there he bought his first house, a small Cape Cod on a ragged, unpaved street, the last in the city, three lots from the commuter train tracks. When the heavy freight trains rode by, the house would convulse with a continued, soft, low-frequency rumble.
My point is, I don’t think any of my progenitors owned a cotton plantation. And though I may be of fair complexion (and that is not necessarily such a good thing, as my dermatologist can tell you) I’ve never felt the least bit privileged. The neighborhood I grew up in was filled with first-generation Irish, Italians, Greeks, Portuguese, and French Canadians. I felt like Schlitz and Wonder Bread in a world of basement Fortissimo and crusty rolls and exotic baguettes. When I had to continually fight my way through the neighborhood pecking order, I never once felt privilege, not once. I felt a few punches to the face, but not privilege.
Even now, with my degrees piled up, my wife the urban choir teacher, my suburban house, my educated daughters, my savings account, my cars, my stuff, I still don’t feel privileged. I may leave some stuff to my kids, but it won’t be enough to do much for the following generation.
My mother’s family was brought up to be staunch Democrats. My father’s dad was a prominent Republican. The only thing I inherited from my forebears besides my complexion was my intellect and my willingness to work and persevere. That’s not privilege. It’s just plain stubbornness. And it’s enough for me.
Published in General
What’s tiring about it is that we live in the country with the greatest economic opportunities in the World, and with probably the fewest barriers to acceptance into any preferred social class. We probably have the least racism of any country in the World with the possible exception of Israel. To hear pundits constantly harp on “race” as the cause for every little thing from which actors get to be on television to what color Barbie Dolls are, is not only tiring, but infuriating.
I don’t know the answer to the racial make-up, but I do know that people who are not successful tend to blame anything but themselves for their troubles. Racism is a convenient excuse in a multi-ethnic country like the United States. In the 1980’s I used to have a Black girlfriend who told me that she thought racial tensions between Blacks and Whites were getting lesser every year. She related that she had never felt any animus from Whites and had never been called a racial slur. (I even had to inform her what some of the slurs were, since she didn’t know!) The only racist episode that she ever told me about was that her family had previously discouraged her from pursuing her crush on the church organist because he was “White.”
I have an anecdote:
Years ago I went to a local comedy club to see a contest between a dozen or so comedians to win a trip to Las Vegas to perform. At the end of the night, the judge, a local radio personality, picked a White woman as the winner. After it was all over I hung around the bar and bumped into a Black comedian who had performed, and was pretty good. He lamented to me in a derogatory tone, “Yeah, I knew they were gonna pick a White person to win.” A bit later another contestant, a White guy (and sort of a redneck, but I don’t mean that disparagingly) strolled into the bar and said to me in a similarly derogatory tone “Man, I knew they were gonna pick her because of this woman’s lib crap.” I got the feeling that if either of those men had been the winner, then the loser would have blamed it on race, and the winner would have credited his own talent for the prize.
No offence taken, and to start with congratulations on your hard work paying off. Nice!!!
Would you say that the only difference in outcome is hard work, or do factors like race also come into how and why people succeed or fail?
Race matters. How much I don’t know. Being physically attractive matters. Again, how much I don’t know. If you have a strong Southern accent in America, the average New Yorker or Californian seems to subtract about 25 points from his estimate of your IQ. Not good in a job interview. Still, all I’d bet on is that if you won’t put in the effort, you’ll fail. And if you won’t put in the effort, accept what life hands you and quit whining.
Ask Tom Sowell.
And thus, Django was unchained. See what I did there?
You can quantify at least some of it.
Also – I think it’s a false binary to contrast trying your hardest with discrimination. They’re both simultaneously possible, though one is more palatable to consider than the other?
In my opinion, none of the biases from human nature, including racism, sexism, ageism, ugly looks, or most physical handicaps is bad enough to hold back a hard-working motivated person from leading a successful life in America. It may not be true in many other countries but it is certainly true here. I knew a guy from the chess club who was a paraplegic and only had little use of his arms, and he ran a couple of successful businesses and had an active social life. He did however, have the advantage of loving parents who cared after his physical deficiencies.
I’m not entirely sure I understand your comment but I can tell you this: I’m retired now, but when I was in a position to offer employment to people, I discriminated quite severely against those who didn’t try hard.
Arguably so, but that’s an answer to another question.
Why does it come so automatically in response to this one?
There’s no question that some people discriminate against others solely on the basis of race, and that this grows more common as you look backward in American history.
But…it is now a very rare thing, I think.
And…though non-white “races” were systemically discriminated against, we now live in a time when it is possible to go from nothing to fabulously wealthy, for anyone of any race or creed, in a generation. Barack Obama’s mother was a nobody. She didn’t come from nothing, but she was just a middle class woman and her mixed race son got himself a Juris Doctorate from Harvard University and ultimately found himself sitting in the Oval Office. I shouldn’t have to say it but I will: I don’t care that he was mixed race. But there was a time when the children of a mixed marriage would have been shunned. That time is gone.
I just don’t buy the notion that the systemic racism of years past is still a barrier to most people.
I wasn’t responding to a question. I was commenting on the two quotes that are shown in comment #68. Your quote was saying that it is possible to have discrimination against people who are motivated and work hard. I was saying that the low level of discrimination in this country is not enough to stop the self-motivated hard workers.
Good post, Doug.
My impression is that the “white privilege” claim is generally deployed for a combination of two reason: (1) to excuse poor performance by a particular person, and (2) to support a claim for explicit, legal “minority privilege” in forms such as racial quotas or differential performance or admissions standards.
The idea of litigating the entire past, in order to give everyone a precisely equal starting point in life, seems patently absurd to me. It is even more absurd to attempt to do this on the basis of a few broad racial or ethnic groupings.
Retail Lawyer made a great point (in #12 above) about “intact family” privilege. This is not something that should be corrected, except by encouraging people to form and maintain intact families.
Django made a great point (in #64 above) about the benefit of attractiveness. There are others. High IQ (much of which seems to be innate), size and athletic ability (ditto), and many other individual characteristics very widely from person to person. Are we going to correct all of these? How, precisely?
Kurt Vonnegut saw this mess coming, in 1961, when he published Harrison Bergeron. Here’s the opening:
The whole short story is available here.
Jordan Peterson’s lectures on Genesis discussed the great importance of the story of Cain and Abel, and the toxic nature of envy.