By and large, however, I get the game: Nobody wants to be ordinary. We all dream of being special to the world, in some regard. And for minorities, a great way by which they can feel special is to seek the world's pity and handouts by playing the victim card relentlessly. Great for them! Although it seems a bit beta-male-ish to me, the desire to be pitied as a way to be special; but, hey, whatever works. The trouble is: It has worked all too well! We see this strategy, made popular by whiny blacks, now adopted by people who pretend to be unique genders and whatever else they can pull out of their hats to be pitied as part of their special life-perks packages. And not only has it spread out to other special victim cults, but full-grown adults in America, supposedly educated, have bought into this nonsense and pity the poor self-victimized bastards to the point they're editing curricula to reflect the populous stance that all white people benefit from privilege, all nonwhite people suffer under oppression.
Sorry for the long and winding preamble here; I'll get to my point now. A good friend of mine, fantastic writer, and under-appreciated educator, Tiana Dalichov, recently posted some materials she's being forced to learn as part of her teacher training. Basically, the material states that it is a fact of life that all white people benefit from privilege, and racism is rampant, and white teachers need to learn how to treat nonwhites differently in order to treat them equally.
No. I'm not making this up.
I'm not smart enough; I don't write well enough for such fiction. This is literally the implication of the materials, not my inference. The materials explicitly suggest that all white people are privileged and thus must learn how to navigate around their privilege when dealing with the oppressed nonwhites in education.
Instead of cursing up a storm here, which Stef and Halsey will just edit out, let me just put a finer point on it: I'm okay with addressing racism and privilege. Just prove it first!
Seriously. Prove that it exists! I won't link it here, because it's not the venue, but I have a YouTube channel and have been offering a $1,000 cash prize to anyone who can prove one single instance of white privilege in society. Just one! The criteria is simple: It has to be objective, and it has to be a case of privilege from which one benefits solely due to their skin color in this "systemic" fashion we hear so much about.
If you'd like to name your examples of supposed white privilege in the comments below, I'll be more than happy to dismantle them and embarrass you.
We can objectively show how nonwhites have numerous laws and regulations and suchlike on the books that benefit them solely for their skin tone. But we have none for white people. There is no example in this nation of a law or institution benefiting white people for white skin. Why? It's illegal! It is against the law to do such, and thus we don't find such being promoted on this mythical - sorry, call it what it is: Bullshit!-level of government, systemic, organizational, or however victims love to put it in order to make themselves seem actually oppressed.
So why, then, would it infect our system so thoroughly that it was being shoved down teachers' throats as gospel to inform their teaching behaviors and decisions? One may disagree here, and this is decidedly only my opinion, but I believe it's simply white guilt at work. The people who set these rules and parameters are privileged! Not because they're white, but likely because they were born into good homes, with hard-working parents, they went to school and studied hard, and they made a career for themselves. But they have been so comfortable for so long that they see a kid with a $700 phone tweeting that he's oppressed by the system, and they buy into it. They think, "He's right! I'm white, and I have all this! He's black, and he doesn't! Therefore the system must be unfair! If it were fair, he'd have everything I have! So we need to address this privilege!"
It's an ironic level of empathy which causes one's faculties to reason properly to crash asunder and give way to the dreaded soft bigotry of low expectations. In other words, the white middle-class people in charge of creating these rules have started to view nonwhites in America as people who cannot achieve success, unless white people are willing to do more for them to assist them. Unless white people are willing to be the saviors, how will nonwhites ever be saved!?
One could see this being an issue among the exceedingly altruistic or the dreamers of the world who view middle-class whining black kids as bigger victims than those African black kids you adopt for the price of a cup of coffee every day. Sure. Everybody's an animal lover once the ASPCA shows those pictures of precious pound puppies and asks for donations. It's understandable. But we're talking about educators here. We're talking about people who, at least at one time in their lives, wanted to make a difference in the world by teaching people to think critically and to think for themselves. This has given way to simply allowing spoiled babies to emotionally blackmail them for special favor, and it's hurting mightily the Tianas of the world who are thus forced to study and use these unproven standards to teach.
Harmful standards, by any measure. Any reasonable measure.
And what, exactly, are we teaching? Look, I'm not Robert Einstein over here. Normal, average dude of over-inflated intellect boast and an inbuilt spellchecker to make it seem like I write well. But even I know that you can't "other" people to provide balm to people who claim that they're "othered!" It's illogical to the point of severe mental retardation. Just follow it through. So some whiny black people feel oppressed and feel that everyone's racist toward them. They whine and lash out about it, while wearing their brand new Air Jordans and using the new iPhone. Fine. It is what it is. Whiners gonna whine! But then the guilt-riddled white folks in power have some sort of Dr.-House-with-autism epiphany and think, "Oi, if only we taught black kids differently than white kids, admitting our privilege and navigating around it to treat blacks like special victims, we would finally have equality!"
No, you dorks! You're "othering' these people-who do tend to want to be "othered," to be sure - in the name of equality and inclusiveness.
You had one job, dumb-ass, and you're doing it wrong!
You teach equally to promote equality. You don't show that this group is black kids, this group is white kids, this group is Hispanic kids. That's separating people based on race, which gives some people fodder to simply believe that these are communists in education trying to promote their warfare to collapse capitalism! I'm not completely given over to that thought; I happen to believe white liberals are just intellectually vapid and have less spine than a jellyfish. They're just doing it wrong, believing that they must do it like this because they, the noble whites, have to save nonwhites, the dumber, can't-do-for-themselves minorities.
These teachers are literally instituting in-class segregation, based on no other factor than the color of someone's skin. And they believe that this will work to heal racial tensions and to halt racism?
If I facepalmed any harder I wouldn't be able to complete this article. Let me just wrap it up by reiterating my point from earlier: If there's white privilege out there benefiting whites and oppressing blacks, prove it!
Who would have ever thought that this would be an unreasonable standard? The status quo, the popular take, is to simply say, "Yes, nonwhites are oppressed and whites benefit because reasons... which will never name." It's actually become revolutionary to suggest evidence of a claim.
And that, my friends, does nothing but make social justice a religion which needs to be dragged into the realm of logic and reason. Kicking and screaming!
If there's white privilege, just prove it first before you teach it.
1. what is objective (in itself a subjective decision)
2. what constitutes proof etc
so its not like a rigged contest or anything, it's not like you'll be blinded by your own bias or anything.
Seriously, dude, stop lashing out and seek some education.
Maybe start with reading Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
Too bad you can't go around in blackface for a few days, see what it feels like...you know, walk through a rich white neighborhood in broad daylight so the cops come and arrest you...