Howard MacKinnon

White privilege

Here’s a slightly edited conversation I’m participating in on Facebook on whether there is such a thing as white privilege.

Me: White privilege is a convenient fiction used by those who want to take what others have instead of earning it for themselves.

Anthony: Where’s your hood bud? Don’t you have a cross to burn somewhere? Y’all act like white privilege means we got everything handed to us when all it means is the colour of our skin in most cases doesn’t negatively affect the way we are viewed or treated in the world we live in. And would you mind explaining how anything having to do with white privilege has tried to take anything from anyone?

Me: I’m from a time when there were still a few real white racists – who thought they were entitled to jobs and favours because they were white. Sickening. Beyond stupid. I don’t know of anyone like that now. But there’s a new racist – the non white who thinks things that happened years before he was born entitle him to jobs and favours now because he’s not white.

In the past the hard working black or native kid could be justified in resenting a white kid who got things because he was white. Now some people, mostly white liberals, but also some others who see a way to cash in, want to keep discriminating on the basis of race. It just creates a violent, resentful culture where skin colour matters more than how hard you work and how well you treat others.

Which way is best? A society where you get stuff based on race or based on how what you do benefits other people? I don’t understand how anyone could think that continuing to divide people into races is better than treating everyone as an equal member of the human race – the only race that counts.

Anthony: If you don’t know of anyone like that now that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Ever lived in the Canadian midwest? They are everywhere I bet you know at least one person that is a self proclaimed non-racist that has no problem saying they just don’t want their child to marry a black person.

Affirmative action types of policies and non-discrimination laws were enacted for a reason not just pulled out of thin air to be some supposed cash cow for minorities. Give me one example of anything even remotely like someone “cashing in”

As for your “new racist”, well racist have always came in every colour. I haven’t met one yet the thinks he/she was entitled to a free ride based on the past and I bet you don’t either. I do know minority’s that are more than willing to use programs and systems put in place to help level the playing field. We still live in a society where people get over looked and mistreated based on the colour of their skin.

The problem here is there’s a bunch of you people that think they know something. But answer this: is your family very mixed? Was your school very mixed? Is or was your community very mixed? Have you ever lived in a black community or a predominantly black neighborhood?

Y’all seem to forget to walk a mile someone else’s shoes. And if you cant answer yes to some, if not most of those questions, how could you possibly know a thing about white privilege? Because once again white privilege doesn’t mean being white made your life easy. It just means the colour of your skin most likely has never made your life harder.

Me: I have had to sit down with a struggling, hard working, well-qualified white student and tell him he didn’t get the job because he wasn’t female, black or native – one of the requirements for the government grant that created the job. He was angry and resentful. He called it discrimination. He was right. It was sexist and racist.

At university I paid my own way, working 40 hours per week with a working wife and 4 kids and amassing student loans. Some of my classmates had their costs paid for, including a living stipend and were given free tutors – because of their race. That’s not only wrong, it’s stupid. Which do you think would impress a future employer more? Why would any capable person with self respect think s/he needs extra help to do as well as a white person? To do as well as a rich person? Sure! It’s hard to get good marks and work full time and look after a family. But I got into the program because I merited it so much that I got in and succeeded. Not because I was white, but despite the disadvantages I had because I was white.

The advocates for yesterday’s victims have become today’s oppressors. They are perpetuating the cycle of violence and disrespect. Don’t give me any of this white privilege garbage. It’s made up to justify new racism.

Who benefits? Let’s try people who don’t want to accept responsibility for their own lives so they want to blame others and justify their demand of something for nothing. Let’s try politicians and their supporters who see those people as voters they can easily buy with promises to give them something for nothing. Let’s try leaders of groups funded by government – who make careers out of perpetuating racism. Let’s try reporters who know that cars burning on the street get more views than roses and sunshine. Let’s try silly while liberals who really have had it easy and despise themselves (and their parents) for it and once again take the easy road by standing with the “victims” rather than doing the hard work of looking at how much harm those who pretend to represent these victims are actually doing.

Who benefits? Just about everyone except those with enough self-respect to accept responsibility for their own lives and who want to work for a peaceful, productive society where no one wins or loses based on race, gender, ethnicity, or any other irrelevant characteristic.

That law which cometh of evil

Here’s a couple of articles I don’t want to lose track of. Both by Connor Boyack. The first was written in 2013 entitled, “The Lord’s Leaders are Fallible — And That’s Okay”. The comment I left on that article was as follows:

Thank you for this article. It strikes me as thoroughly enlightened and reasonable. Like you I sustain the leadership of the Church even while acknowledging that they are all human and prone to error, though far less often than I. That they sometimes err gives me hope that I too may err and yet still, for the most part, obtain truth and find favour in God’s sight.

The more recent one is entitled, “Why Does My Church Oppose Medical Marijuana?“. I agree with the author in that I believe the position taken by the Church leadership is wrong. I could couch that in many and varied ways but it would all amount to a cowardly way to state this unpleasant truth. Unpleasant but only unpleasant and I refer myself back to Boyack’s earlier article for the reason why “that’s ok”.

I am not as enamored with the beneficial properties of marijuana as Boyack seems to be but I am not nearly as well read on the issue. My position is that basic individual rights are being eroded by the state and this is contrary to the will of God as clearly recorded in scripture. It is not in man that we should place our trust and certainly not in that evil institution, the state. The state was not ordained of God. Government was, but only such government as protects individual rights. No modern state is governed according to that principle, if indeed there ever was one. Perhaps Israel in the time of the judges or the Nephite theocracies. Today our duty is to live the law of God and forsake evil.

Boyack states, “Church scripture holds that anything ‘more or less’ than the Constitution ‘cometh of evil.'” Not quite. In Doctrine and Covenants 98, to which Boyack is referring, the Lord is speaking of the ‘law of the land’ (v.4). He does also qualify it by saying He is talking about the law ‘which is constitutional’ (v.5) but he expands on that. It is not whether it is constitutional per se that matters but whether it ‘supports that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges’ that makes it ‘justifiable before me’ (v.5). Further, such law as this ‘belongs to all mankind’ (v.5), a phrase which I believe puts to rest the Americocentric fixation on their constitution as a uniquely inspired document. It may very well have been inspired, but only insofar as it ‘supports that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges’ and not a hair’s breath more. Neither is it any more inspired than any other document expressing as strong or stronger support for individual rights.

It is any law which does ‘more or less’ than support our rights and freedoms that ‘cometh of evil’. Regarding such the Lord commands that we ‘forsake all evil’ (v.11) and thus forsake all law that fails to uphold our rights and freedoms regardless of what infernal state claims sovereignty over us.

To forsake is to disengage insofar as is consistent with preserving such freedom as we can. It is NOT to engage in civil disobedience, let alone violence of any kind because violence is the realm of the state. Civil disobedience is a useless means of begging for scraps from the table of your acknowledged master’s table. Voting is even more useless but I can see it if only meant to show your utmost respect for someone who agrees with your principles though still harbours a naive belief that the state will ever allow itself to be dismantled from within. The virtue of person like that morally obligates you to vote for him. DC 98:10 sets the bar high for such an individual requiring that he be: 1) honest, 2) wise, and 3) good. One would be inclined to laugh through one’s tears contemplating how the only two candidates that America’s much-vaunted constitutional electoral process permitted any actual chance of winning their last Presidential election stacked up against those criteria. Rather they both more closely epitomized the dishonest, unwise and evil. It was a sin for anyone professing belief that DC 98 is the word of God to have voted for either of them. On the other hand, the virtue of a man like Ron Paul, running in the previous campaign, though hopelessly destined to fail, made voting for him nearly a moral requirement. Otherwise peaceful disengagement ought to be the norm for the faithful, freedom-loving individual.

Peaceful disengagement is entirely inconsistent with lobbying the state to employ force against someone based on which plants they consume.

Hitler did it – – – so what?

It has become fashionable to make fun of anyone who uses Hitler references in debate. The suggestion seems to be that such historical references were somehow made illegitimate merely due to the rarely paralleled depths of depravity to which Hitler’s “ethics” sank.

The fact that Hitler did something, anything, should make that thing suspect. He, and other tyrants, past and present, have forced kids to march in support of their causes. The state education system is now forcing kids to march in support of gun control. Any reasonable person would find that similarity worrying – certainly worrying enough to consider the implications within their historical context.

There’s a pattern here with this fashionable anti-anti-Hitler non-argument. Intelligence has been described in terms of pattern recognition. Higher intelligence not only recognizes a pattern but can extrapolate from that pattern to predict future behaviour – more cause for concern.

Entire books have been written on the things Hitler did, comparing them with things that states are doing now. Are these cautionary historical analysis somehow illegitimate because Hitler was such an archetypal tyrant? If he had been just a little evil then it would be ok to study his past in order to avoid making similar mistakes but because he was so evil we are to be castigated for drawing comparisons? Isn’t the study of history intended to be a means of avoiding past mistakes and repeating past success? By what principle would one then exclude history’s most egregious villains from among the mistakes to be avoided – unless of course one secretly admired much of what they did?

Talk about being stupid, simple, and intellectually lazy! I can’t think of a worse example of intellectual sloth than to NOT consider things done by evil people in the past and where those things lead. If you see a fire in a building we’re in, tell me, I want to know. If you see people acting like Hitler, tell me, I want to know that even more.