EDWARD CLINE: THE “SIN” OF WHITENESS
https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/
Let’s start at the beginning about “whiteness” and “white privilege.” Wikipedia seems to be one of the rare venues that discusses the concept with any (relative) intelligibility. As can be seen in the Wikipedia text, the idea of “whiteness” is rooted in Marxist ideology (shall we call it theology?) or “critical race theory,” whiteness is becoming a substitute for “class.” Race theory was imported from Germany via the Frankfurt School and quickly infested our school system from K1 to academia.
White privilege (or white skin privilege) is the societal privilege that benefits people whom society identifies as white in some countries, beyond what is commonly experienced by non-white people under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. Academic perspectives such as critical race theory and whiteness studies use the concept to analyze how racism and racialized societies affect the lives of white or white-skinned people….
In sociology and political philosophy, the term critical theory describes the neo-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s. This use of the term requires proper noun capitalization, whereas “a critical theory” or “a critical social theory” may have similar elements of thought, but not stress its intellectual lineage specifically to the Frankfurt School. Frankfurt School theorists drew on the critical methods of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Critical theory maintains that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Erich Fromm. Modern critical theory has additionally been influenced by György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, as well as the second generation Frankfurt School scholars, notably Jürgen Habermas. In Habermas’s work, critical theory transcended its theoretical roots in German idealism and progressed closer to American pragmatism. Concern for social “base and superstructure” is one of the remaining Marxist philosophical concepts in much of contemporary critical theory.
“Critical theory maintains that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation.” “Liberation” from what? The ideology of freedom is not an “obstacle” to human liberation. The ideology of Marxism, on the other hand, has been responsible for all of the mass murders and slavery implemented by Marxist or Fascist governments.
This version of “critical” theory derives from Kant‘s (18th-century) and Marx‘s (19th-century) uses of the term “critique“, as in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Marx’s concept that his work Das Kapital (Capital) forms a “critique of political economy”. For Kant’s transcendental idealism, “critique” means examining and establishing the limits of the validity of a faculty, type, or body of knowledge, especially through accounting for the limitations imposed by the fundamental, irreducible concepts in use in that knowledge system.
Wouldn’t you know it? Immanuel Kant inspired Karl Marx. Kant, too, promulgated the philosophy that everything is a matter of interpretation, because our senses – because they are senses and naturally misleading or fraught with deception – give us arbitrary knowledge of what a thing is and what it isn’t (although according to Kant – and to the postmodernists, who’ll tell you that you can’t say with any certainty what a thing or idea is isn’t; a car key may actually be a kernel of popcorn; but if it works in your ignition and turns over your engine, pragmatists will then say it seems to be a car key).
Critical theory addresses race and one’s race, and has dubbed “whiteness” as an inconvertible and innate cause of “unearned” unfairness,” injustice, and privilege. You have no control over your race or skin color; but you’re still guilty of being “privileged” and will benefit from living in a culture that rewards “whiteness.” The idea harks to the idea of one’s “original position of John Rawls,” an idea that caught on decades ago and which later helped to advance the idea of race theory (A Theory of Justice, 1971).
If you are white, and have had a benign upbringing, and the advantage of a better education than has a black man or a Hispanic, then you have an “original position” that is automatically better than that of a black man or a Hispanic and virtually guarantees success. This is “unfair” and not just. Rawls’s “theory of justice” in the pursuit of “fairness” would punish the most able and intelligent and reward the less competent.
Heritage wrote about Rawls:
Upon awarding him the National Humanities Medal in 1999, President Bill Clinton praised John Rawls as “perhaps the greatest political philosopher of the twentieth century” who “helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy.”[1] Since the publication of his first book, A Theory of Justice, in 1971, Rawls has indeed been the fashion of the academy, and his influence has increasingly spread beyond the ivory towers of American universities.
Today, Rawls’s theory—which defends the principles of egalitarianism, toleration, consensus politics, and societal fairness—informs much of contemporary liberalism’s aspirations,
These basic institutions include the political constitution, which specifies procedures for legislating and enforcing laws and the system of trials for adjudicating disputes; the bases of the economic system, including the norms of property, its transfer and distribution, contractual relations, etc. which are all necessary for economic production, exchange, and consumption; and finally norms that define and regulate permissible forms of the family, which is needed to perpetuate society….
Today, Rawls’s theory—which defends the principles of egalitarianism, toleration, consensus politics, and societal fairness—informs much of contemporary liberalism’s aspirations, constitutional interpretations, domestic policies, and public rhetoric. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the principles behind such laws as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, are most thoroughly argued by John Rawls. Much the same can be said of the Supreme Court’s reference to the “evolving understanding of the meaning of equality” in the 2013 same-sex marriage case, U.S. v. Windsor. Rawls’s silent influence has been immense…..
Rawls-inspired policies (Obamacare) and Supreme Court decisions (U.S. v. Windsor) are met with passionate responses on both sides of the political aisle. His project takes American constitutionalism as a given, but it is ultimately in opposition to the political thought of the American Founders.
Nell Painter in the New York Times, in November 2016 noted:
Conveniently, for most white Americans, being white has meant not having a racial identity. It means being and living and experiencing the world as an individual and not having to think about your race.
To the left wing, the progressives, and to the liberals, that is a bad and undesirable thing.
You needn’t even be conscious of being white and privileged. Until now. Now white people are expected to be painfully aware of their “whiteness,” and to accept guilt for a variety of things.
Just as one does not need to think about how Western civilization was created by white men – with rare, with very rare exceptions – as Painter does not point out, advances in technology and science did not spring from the Congo or even from China (except perhaps for fireworks and explosives, or from India, the source of our number system).
Schools and colleges are moving to remove pictures from their campuses of white men who innovated and advanced the medical profession. The pictures were of white men. They will be relocated from the main auditorium to less auspicious venues.
Some columnists are referring to white privilege as an “original sin.”
Margaret Wente in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail on May 27 2017, wrote, on the occasion of a CBC program on the subject of white privilege:
White privilege is now a part of the Ontario school curriculum. It is taught in teacher training, and is a routine part of anti-bias education. The idea is that white people benefit from unearned advantages based on race. Canada is depicted as a deeply racialized society where people are automatically advantaged, or disadvantaged, by their skin tone, race and (by extension) gender….
“If you took out the word ‘white’ and used any other race, it would be perceived as racist,” said one of the participants of a CBC program on the subject. “It’s stereotyping in reverse.”
The doctrine of white privilege entered the Ontario school system around 2013,…It is a modern version of original sin, which demands confession and atonement – even from people who are deeply anti-racist. “The term implies that whiteness itself is a problem,” Ms. Walker says. “That’s profoundly hurtful.”
The murder of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts, although it had sporadic coverage for over a month before her body was found in a cornfield, was largely ignored or down-played by the MSM because she was white; so it didn’t matter to the MSM and wasn’t considered “news worthy.” The discovery of the body seemed to make the MSM yawn. That she was allegedly murdered by an illegal immigrant, however, was cause for many newscasters to worry that this would fuel the anti-immigrant position. Tibbetts was just another white who was a victim of an “illegal” immigrant, or was shot by a Somali cop – as Justine Damond was – or , or assaulted by an illegal immigrant. Tibbetts was stabbed to death.
In a speech he gave in South Carolina, Daniel Greenfield said:
On January 26, 2018 Daniel Greenfield gave a brilliant speech in South Carolina in which he argued that politics make civil wars – not guns. “Guns are how a civil war ends. Politics is how it begins.” What does that mean?
“Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge. That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.”
To indirectly second that, Tiger Woods said something that got him a lot of abuse:
As Tiger Woods so concisely pointed out, “He’s the president of the United States and you have to respect the office,” Tiger said. “No matter who’s in the office, you may like, dislike the personality or the politics, but we all must respect the office.”
For making that cogent observation, Woods earned the smear that he wasn’t really black. ESPN in effect, called Tiger Woods, an “Oreo cookie”: “white” on the inside, and black on the outside.
The talking heads on ESPN went on the attack against Tiger, instead, for the crime of not being sufficiently full of hate for the president. ESPN in effect, called Tiger Woods, an “Oreo cookie”: “white” on the inside, black on the outside.
“Well, first of all, we don’t know what Tiger Woods believes. He’s Cablinasian. He’s not black,” Smith said. “When he got arrested, he was black. He was listed black on the report.”
So, you aren’t allowed to be black if you don’t hate Trump?
And if you’re white, you aren’t allowed to speak at all.
ESPN’S full-handed insult of Woods could qualify as “hate speech.” But I don’t believe in “hate speech.” Basically it is hot air expelled by a fool and you can take it or leave it, shaking your head. I don’t think Woods was harmed much by ESPN’S remark. Hate speech never hurt anything but the feelings of someone with “self-esteem” teetering on a precipice, the “hurt” person being held up by the hands of a collective. Had Woods been white and made the observation, about twenty dozen hateful remarks would have been tossed at him. Anyone uttering a rational statement about Trump becomes the MSM’s dart board.
On the surface, the whole issue of “whiteness” is absurd. You may as well accuse snow for being white. Only lefties and liberals, with their brains stuck in a tire-spinning rut, take it seriously.
But let us not forget about South Africa. Its Parliament, president (Cyril Ramaphosa), and chief thug (Julius Malema) have announced that the government will confiscate the private property of white farmers without compensation after the country’s Parliament has amended the Constitution to allow it. Malema has also advocated that the whites be eradicated. British Prime Minister Theresa May shook hand with president Ramaphosa and said that the confiscation of white property would be okay provided it was “legal.” She had nothing to say about Malema’s proposed, Stalinesque genocide of whites (the current attacks on white farmers by government sanctioned marauders is in the neighborhood of 600 a year). The Times of London reported in April 2018 that:
While the West turns a blind eye, South Africa is embarking on the same path that led to Zimbabwe’s economic and humanitarian catastrophe. On February 27, the South African parliament overwhelmingly voted in favour of a motion that will begin the process of amending the country’s Constitution to allow for the confiscation of white-owned land without compensation.
The motion was introduced by Julius Malema, leader of the radical Marxist party Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), who in 2016 stated that he was “not calling for the slaughter of white people — at least for now.”
Economic Freedom Fighters? Which in Marxist terms means that the EFF is committed to fighting against freedom, not for it. The term “freedom fighters” has always made me laugh because of its contradictory meaning, particularly when it refers to Islamic and ISIS killers.
The confiscation resolution has accelerated attacks on white owned farms throughout South Africa. Over the past 12 months, more than 90 white farmers were killed in 340 attacks, making farming more dangerous than being a police officer. Immediately after the parliamentary vote, EFF thugs occupied white-owned farms across the country, murdering, raping, and beating the occupants (including black workers to “teach them a lesson about cooperating with the criminals who stole our land”).
Stole “our” land? A South African, Bradwyn Sean Petersen, has another explanation of the “theft”:
The Khoi (my ancestors) had a different land policy. What the settlers did was more like claim property that was always something afforded by Mother Nature to a community, and turning it into private property….
Sounds much like the enclosure of “common” land in pre-industrial England.
So the individual farmers who feed South Africa and employ blacks will be dispossessed, if not murdered. They don’t have to be “white”; successful black farmers and farm workers are also victimized. Marxism and collectivization of any kind will guarantee mass starvation and death for those being corralled into collectivization, just as they did in Soviet Russia
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