On Failing to Rewrite My "Three Peoples" in the Light of Lefty "Privilege" Notions

Yesterday I picked up a used copy of Tom Wolfe's The Kingdom of Speech. Oh what a naughty boy! He is playing his "Radical Chic" game with Darwin and Chomsky, suggesting ever so gently that there is a lot of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories in the work of Darwin. In other words Darwin in The Origin of Species was writing a "cosmogony," a creation story. That doesn't have much to do with science.

Of course, all these creation stories have a point to make: how we got here, and how God -- or History -- favored us in his grand plan because we are so cool, not to mention how we struggled for ages against the Pharaohs or the Romans or the Mongol hordes or the slave-owners or the patriarchy.

And that got me to thinking. How would I write my reductive Three Peoples theory, which is an attempt to show how cool and noble is the responsible middle class and how unjust and deluded are our liberal masters, if I were a liberal?

Big Problem.

So I started by Googling "white privilege" and "male privilege." These terms, I discovered, were coined by Peggy McIntosh, née Margaret Vance Means, in a 1988 piece: "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies."

McIntosh's idea is that males and whites are running around in a world that was built for them and theirs. In other words all the cultural assumptions, the "taken for granteds" all assume that white males are the default model for life in the public sphere. You can see that this is a natural reaction of a lefty to the post-civil-rights era. The world is not immediately leveled by a laser-controlled so that the road ahead as a feminist lefty college teacher is faces a bunch of bumps and berms.

Cue George Simmel who wrote a century ago that the public sphere was created by men for men, and that the emergence of women into the public square would necessarily result in its transformation to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

Or to use my Culture of Complaint model, women like Peggy McIntosh are running around writing that "I can't believe the way the culture assumes the white male cultural norms!"

In other words, the removal of legal barriers to women and minorities doesn't immediately change the world to suit women and minority sensibilities.

Or, more to the point, the Civil Rights Acts don't clear the road for the Peggy McIntoshs of the world  to immediately cruise through an academic career like an unconcerned seagull.

So the trouble for me is that it would be hard to put the superficial discovery by Peggy McIntosh in 1988 that live is hard into a Just So Story.

But I tell you. If white privilege and male privilege are unearned cultural advantages from being white and male, like:

My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.

Then what about the cultural advantages of "liberal privilege."

1. I am much less likely to be suspended on Twitter.
2. I can confidently complain about Trump when encountering a neighbor in the street.
3. I can have an academic career.
4. I am less likely to get fired for a drug-fueled bigoted remark.
5. I am confident that my choice of an electric car advertises my virtue to the world.
6. I am less likely to get fired from Google.
7. I get to live in a yeasty gentrifying neighborhood and everyone at the artisanal coffee shop agrees with me.

Yes. What a privileged world it is for liberals.

Actually, as a newly turbocharged -- I wonder why -- Kevin D. Williamson writes, politics, media, comedy is all about status, "status-jockeying and status monkeying."

[Tyler] Cowen: “I have a simple hypothesis. No matter what the media tells you their job is, the feature of media that actually draws viewer interest is how media stories either raise or lower particular individuals in status. . . . The status ranking of individuals implied by a particular media source is never the same as yours, and often not even close. . . . Indeed that is why other people enjoy those media sources, because they take pleasure in your status, and the status of your allies, being lowered.” [my bold]

So that is the game of Peggy McIntosh and all the intersectional feminists and racists. It is not enough to have civil rights in law. What is needed is to lower non-feminist non-minority status. And serve 'em right!

Of course, you might say that this is pretty harmless in unmediated person-to-person games of status. And I would agree.

But that is not what the liberals are doing. Instead they are weaponizing the law to enforce their cultural agenda on "whites" and "males."

There is a word for using the government to enforce your cultural supremacy. It is called "injustice." Hello President Trump.