The latest obsession of the social-justice warriors is something called "white privilege."
The concept is seldom precisely defined, but seems to mean that white people don't deserve what they have because it was systematically stolen over time from "people of color." White America is still solely to blame for the problems of black America, even if white people can't quite figure out what they did wrong other than being born the same color as slave owners were centuries ago.
We have to give credit where credit is due--leftist concepts might not make much sense when examined in light of facts or data, but that is seldom their purpose; rather, it is to advance a "narrative" that controls public discourse. The abuse of language has always been crucial to obscuring the illogic inherent in the leftist approach to politics.
White privilege does this in impressive fashion, providing an over-arching synthesis of just about every leftist trope in only two words.
There is, most obviously, the notion that America, despite the many legal and political advances since Jim Crow and Bull Connor, remains incorrigibly racist, and that if you disagree you're a racist too. There is nothing to talk about except how racist white people are and how much they have benefited from it.
The use of the white-privilege concept therefore allows the left to further tighten the strictures of political correctness and make resistance to the agenda of groups like Black Lives Matter more difficult--however extreme that agenda, white folk have no moral standing to object or even participate in the discussion, other than as supplicants on bowed knee seeking absolution for their sins.
Under the concept of "white privilege," it isn't necessary to hold racist ideas or commit what could be considered racist acts, you are guilty simply because you are white (although white liberals can apparently get a certain dispensation if they accuse other white people of racism often and loudly enough). This takes the already ambiguous and essentially non-falsifiable notion of "institutionalized racism" to an entirely different--and even less amenable to falsification--level.
Precisely because we live in an age when overt incidents of racism in American life have, thankfully, declined to the point where isolated cases become major news stories, it becomes all the more important to leftism as a belief system to sustain itself by seeing racism and its consequences everywhere.
When viewed from a theoretical level, white privilege even offers a roundabout means of refurbishing the Marxist core of leftist ideology--instead of being discredited by the horrors flowing from communist experiments in various parts of the world over time, we can salvage the old crank's conception of class struggle by recasting it in racial terms, with the oppression of blacks by whites taking the place of bourgeois oppression of the proletariat.
The labor theory of value and the slogan that "profit equals theft" can thus be expeditiously updated to suggest that white America is affluent and black America poor because the former has persistently stolen from and exploited the labor of the latter.
From all this, it wouldn't be too large a jump to link the white privilege concept to Occupy Wall Street and the ongoing leftist obsession with income inequality--that at the heart of that inequality is a capitalist system operating in tandem with racial oppression to concentrate wealth (and thus privilege) in white hands at the expense of those with darker pigmentation.
In seeking to entrench the notion of white privilege, and the assumptions underlying it, the left also hopes to achieve several more practical goals.
First, at a time when many of the pathologies of the black community are being attributed to the pernicious cultural effects of welfare-state dependency, white privilege can shift the focus back to white racism in a manner that absolves the white liberals who sponsored that welfare state of any blame for the black condition.
Second, white privilege can be used to preserve and even expand the system of racial preferences in American life at a point when both its legality and effectiveness have come into question. Under such circumstances, preferences become not so much "reverse discrimination" as a belated expression of justice itself.
Third, and most ambitiously, the white-privilege idea provides the perfect justification for reparations for slavery and other impediments to black progress by effectively refuting the most obvious argument against such reparations--that they would benefit those who were never slaves at the expense of those who were never slaveholders. After all, if the current distribution of resources in American society represents the cumulative effects of white racism, then whites today are benefiting from it in the same way their slave-owning ancestors did; hence, some form of compensation is in order.
Put differently, if one buys into the idea of white privilege, there is no logical way of avoiding some form of reparations as a solution.
If Republicans were smart (which they're clearly not), the GOP nominee would turn to Hillary Clinton in the first presidential debate next year and ask "do you favor reparations for slavery?"
Whatever the answer, she would lose the election.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 12/21/2015