The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Miss Knoxville and ‘White Privilege’

Posted on | November 9, 2021 | Comments Off on Miss Knoxville and ‘White Privilege’

One of the most toxic phrases of left-wing social-justice rhetoric is “white privilege,” which serves to demonize white people as beneficiaries of unfair advantages. This phrase originated in elite academia, where many white people do, in fact, come from privileged backgrounds. But the vast majority of white people in America are working class or lower-middle class, working hard just to pay their bills. To accuse such people of benefitting from “privilege” is an insult, but this rhetoric is necessary to the “social justice” calculus of the Left who, in search of a scapegoat to blame for hardships experienced by racial minorities, stigmatize white people — all white people — as malevolent perpetrators of oppression.

J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was an effort to correct this record, to make clear that minorities do not have a monopoly on poverty, and to portray lower-class whites as deserving of sympathy.

Thinking of people as collective groups, and then presenting group averages (income, etc.) as evidence of injustice, is a dishonest endeavor, but whatever lies are necessary to help elect Democrats, their media allies will enthusiastically promote. Don’t expect anyone at CNN or the New York Times to point out how deceptive group averages can be, when discussing complex social phenomena. The fact that both Bill Gates and I are white males — members of the same group — illustrates what’s wrong with this group average way of talking about “social justice.” If you combined my annual income with Bill Gates’s annual income, then divided by 2, our “average” income is pretty high, but I don’t actually have any access to Gates’s wealth, so being part of the same identity-politics category doesn’t benefit me at all.

Glenn Reynolds calls attention to a local news story in Knoxville:

East Tennessee Children’s Hospital nurse Paige Clark is one of the hardest workers that WATE’s Lori Tucker says she has ever met. At one point during undergrad studies at the University of Tennessee, Clark was working 60 hours a week clogging at Pigeon Forge musical theaters just to help keep her grandmother from losing her home.
And she’s also Miss Knoxville.
Clark has been clogging for most of her young life. She turned her talent into a full-time job at the Comedy Barn and The Hatfield and McCoy show just a few years ago at the age of 19. It was a gift of love for her grandmother.
“She was no longer able to afford her mortgage,” Clark said. “No one else in my family could get a loan to help her out. My parents, they have their own bills. My aunts and uncles also do, too.
“So I took it upon myself, and I actually signed my name to a mortgage just after I turned 19 years old and I currently still own the house.”
Paige admitted she had no idea what she was getting into, but she took it upon herself to do whatever she could to help her grandmother.
“Some days, I would be doing one to two shows and some days I’d be doing four shows,” Paige said. “There were weeks where I’d put in sixty-plus hours into performing while also going to school and doing clinicals.
“So I lived out of my car. All my clothes were in my car, and I was just driving back and forth from Knoxville to Pigeon Forge; barely saw my parents, but I just knew that in the end, I had the strength to make it work.”

The key point I’ve highlighted here is that no one else in Miss Clark’s family — her parents, her aunts and uncles — had sufficient income, assets or credit to be able to help her grandmother. What does that tell you about the socioeconomic strata to which Miss Clark belongs?

As far as the national media or the Democratic Party are concerned, however, Paige Clark represents a non-existent category.

There is no such thing, according to the liberal elite, as a white person whose life is not defined by unearned “privilege.” There are no white people working 60-hour weeks just trying to get by as best they can. No, according to our media overlords, white people are oppressors — guilty beneficiaries of “systemic racism,” endowed from birth with unfair “white privilege” — and therefore deserve to be insulted.

And, of course, if any white person dares object to being routinely insulted this way, well, that just proves how racist they are.




 

Category: Racism

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