by Cardigan
Progressive Privilege: Divide and Conquer by Race
9:30 am in Uncategorized by Cardigan
The United States today may be the most color-blind society in history. We’re a country that is led by a black President and has legal guarantees of equal rights for all. Racist groups are almost non-existent and are more likely to invite ridicule than attract recruits. Yet many who ought to celebrate our successes are instead striving to re-divide us along racial lines. Consider the University of Minnesota-Duluth’s new campaign to expose so-called “white privilege.”
The “Un-Fair” campaign aims to establish an “evolved community free of individual, systemic and institutionalized racism” by challenging “the white monoculture and its systems and institutions, and the privileges it creates for whites.”
In a campaign video, defaced “white” persons offer apologetic testimonials for the color of their skin. The campaign seeks to institutionalize its own kind of racism by dividing America into “colored” and “white,” while advancing the absurd claim that all white people enjoy “privileges that are unearned just because of the color oftheir skin.”
The Duluth campaign enjoys the support of the NAACP, the Lutheran Social Service, and the League of Women Voters. It’s part of a larger, national Progressive movement against “white privilege” that promotes socially engineered equality of outcomes—i.e. more statist solutions.
The campaign features Tim Wise, a race-fixated author and activist who advocates fundamentally reordering American society and replacing U.S. institutions of government.
Wise’s philosophy, explained in his book, is radically dangerous to our constitutional order and is gaining in momentum, media savvy, and political utility. At root, it is about rejecting the American founding. The flawed principles that define this movement are also, ironically, squarely at odds with the best of the civil rights movement of the last two centuries.
Whereas Wise draws inspiration from yesteryear’s black nationalists, such as Martin Delaney, who advocated for racially oriented government, the more principled and ultimately more successful model is Frederick Douglass.
Far from seeking to destroy America’s constitutional order, Douglass reminded Americans of their founding in 1852: “Your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately…and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep the corner-stone of the national superstructure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you.”
