"We swim in a sea of whiteness, it's the norm," Ellen O'Neill, one of
the campaign organizers, said.
"If we're white we don't have to think about it, we don't see it.
"If we're white we don't have to think about it, we don't see it.
So the first step is getting white people to
see it."
Headlines you may have seen recently:
Let us step into another mental world: that of the Blank-slatist.
In his universe, all human beings are interchangeable, their differences only skin-deep. If the U.S. population is 64% white, 16% Hispanic, 13% black, and 5% Asian, these same break-downs must apply in every area of human endeavor: Standardized testing, educational accomplishment, politics, the arts, the sciences, the military, criminal justice, sports, etc. Anywhere a group is under-represented (or in the case of prison, over-represented), this reflects an attack on them by...

...well, by whom?
'Institutional racism,' some have said, and have spilled much ink over it since the late 1960s (h/t Audacious Epigone) :
But as we have seen, in a country where de facto quotas routinely push out qualified Euros in favor of less qualified Afros and Hispanics in both the public and private sectors, this argument has become a tough sell.
So the Blank-slatist has settled on a new culprit: 'white privilege.'
'What is it?,' we ask him.
'It is systematic, institutional exclusion of non-Whites,' he says.
'But we have looked at the facts and figures, and found the opposite is true--today institutional racism favors Blacks and Hispanics,' we reply.
'We swim in a sea of whiteness. White is the "default setting." Minority groups suffer simply from being the minority.'
'But Whites are the minority in many places--Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Houston; even entire states like California or New Mexico, or countries like South Africa--and yet still show superior life outcomes to Blacks and Hispanics.'
'None of that matters. The very fact of being white gives them an unfair advantage. Check your privilege.'
Taking him at his word, that this nebulous White Privilege beams out its rays twenty-four hours a day and forces Afros, Hispanics, and Asians to under-perform their Euro subjugators, let's fire up our privilege radar and see if his argument holds up.


















