The idea of "White Privilege" is everywhere...and it's NOT what you think.
So, let's talk about it:
A THREAD🧵
2/ The idea of white privilege has spread through society like wild fire since about 2013.
A lot of people think that the basic concept of white privilege is "white people face less racism then black people."
This is NOT what the term means
3/ The woke play a game with "white privilege" where they alternate between two positions: an extreme position they really believe and talk about openly when they won't be attacked, and a far more modest position they fall back on and defend when anyone questions them.
4/ This tactic is called a Motte and Bailey fallacy. It is named after a castle that has a motte (a small but easily defended fortress you can hide in when attacked), and a bailey (a large valley with lots of resources and treasure where all the fun takes place)
5/ In the case of white privilege, the motte is the idea that Black people face racism white people don't face, and the bailey is the idea that all white are racist and perpetuate an unjust system of racial hierarchy without knowing it:
6/ It's easy to see how this idea gains traction and how useful it is to the woke. They take a simple idea which seems right, and when everyone accepts that idea, they switch to an extreme position while using the same name.
7/ So, Lets take a look at the 'bailey' of white privilege, and show you what is actually going on.
First, you need to know that the woke carve up society according to the doctrines of "dominance" and "oppression." You could think if those as the yin and yang of wokeness.
8/ Dominance is when a group uses power to get to the top of the social pyramid, and then use that position to gain even more power to maintain their position at the top of the hierarchy. "Dominance" in woke-speak is always about taking, wielding and hoarding of social power.
9/ The social power that the dominant group has taken is then used by the dominant group rig society in their favor and oppress other groups in society. In other words, the powerful impose their ideas and interests on everyone. They do this by making sure that everything...
10/ in society is built so that in every situation the dominant group gets the maximum benefit at the expense of everyone else. This is done by making sure everything that exists in society is constructed so the ideology of the dominant group is embedded in literally everything.
11/ This means the woke think the way we think about and discuss art, law, science, math, sports, religion, architecture, and anything else in society you can think of, have had the ideology of the dominant group embedded in them. The result is that the "discourses" in society...
12/ or the way in which we talk about things and communicate, all take for granted and assume the ideology of the dominant group, and therefore preach, teach, and perpetuate the ideology of the dominant group even when the people discussing the ideas don't know it.
13/ The woke think the dominant group subtly control how everyone talks, thinks, and communicate. This "socializes" people into behaviors and ideas that benefit the dominant group. In other words, people are trained to think and act in way that benefit the people at the top...
14/ The woke think the dominant group (which the woke think is white males) use their control of how society communicates and thinks to tie the hands of other groups, and the result is anyone who isn't a white male is *oppressed* by the systems of power created by white men.
15/ Oppression is only experienced by non-dominant groups in society, not white men. White men may experience hardship or difficulty, but not oppression. Because oppression is to be disadvantaged by the systemic power of white men BECAUSE ONE IS NOT A WHITE MALE.
Read that again.
16/ According to wokeness, white men are never held down by society FOR BEING WHITE MEN. They might face prejudice, but that prejudice is never SYSTEMIC. That is, white men can only ever be victims of isolated instances of discrimination, never victims of oppression...
17/ because even when a white man is discriminated against by, for example, a woman of color, he is still discriminated against in the context of an entire society built for his benefit. So even when a white man faces prejudice, in the larger context he still has the upper hand.
18/ A good example of how the woke view privilege and oppression is a video game where white men play the game on easy mode, women play it on medium difficulty, and black disabled trans people play the game on the hardest difficulty there is.
This is how they view the world.
19/ The woke think 'white privilege' is the societal equivalent of white people are playing the game on an easier level then Black people, indigenous people, and brown people.
THAT is what the woke mean when they talk about 'white privilege.'
20/ I want you to notice how much intellectual machinery I had to first unpack just so I could then do a proper job of explaining 'white privilege.'
The reason I had to do that is that wokeness isn't just a set of ideas, it's a complete *worldview* that functions as a religion.
21/ White privilege, which we now can see is that being white grants one and unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements, benefits, and freedoms solely because they are white. In other words, white people are playing the game on easy mode. This means that...
22/ the woke think every situation a white person is in, no matter how difficult, hard, or painful, would be even more difficult, hard, and painful for Black, Indigenous, or Brown people. It doesn't even matter what the situation is, the woke think it's easier for white people.
23/ So, the next time a woke person begins to push on you the idea that you have "white privilege" your goal should be to show people the *worldview* behind wokeness. Don't let them get away with saying "white privilege is just that white people don't face the racism others do."
24/ Force them to defend their entire worldview so that people can have the opportunity to see the postmodern intellectual yeast the woke use to bake their worldview.
Don't let them play their Motte and Bailey game: force them to be clear about EXACTLY what they are arguing.
25/ You empower people to forcefully reject wokeness when you help them understand how wrong it is, and exactly why it is dangerous.
Do that, it's how we win.
/fin
PS/
This is an excellent essay about the Motte and Bailey of Social Justice/Wokeness:
In the Trump/Elon dispute Elon represents fiscal reality, Trump represents Political reality.
Elon knows the Unite States is headed toward financial collapse caused by its debt, Trump knows voters will never accept the spending cuts and tax hikes needed to solve the debt crisis.
Elon is correct that the United States 36 TRILLION dollar debt will eventually crush the American economy and eat it's budget.
Trump is correct that voters will never accept the tax hikes or spending cuts (especially social security and medicare cuts) needed to pay off the debt.
Elon is saying "The financial crisis is coming. Either we deal with it now or we will deal with the financial collapse of the American economy."
Trump is saying "We can only do what is politically possible. Voters refuse to elect congressmen who will make large cuts to spending"
I think society is returning to the desert of the real.
The social narratives which animated people's lives have lost their power and are dying, and the counter-movements they spawned will (eventually) die alongside them.
We are now living in a decaying hyper-reality...
Baudrillard said we're so saturated in representations and images from mass media (T.V., Movies, books, social media, etc) that images become more salient to us and matter more then the real world, so artificial representations become more "real" to us then actual reality itself.
The result, says Baudrillard is that what feel real to us, what feel immediately important, salient, and meaningful to us is whatever emerges from the ecosystem of artificial, curated, simulated, and manufactured representations produced by the vehicles of mass communication.
1/ Woke activists bully people by using social pressure. They publicly shame and attack people to make them feel like all of society is rejecting them.
See the photo below? They want people feel like all of society is doing that to them.
2/ Call-Outs and Cancel Culture are related but different. Cancel culture tries to get people fired or de-platformed as a way to punish them economically and professionally in order to silence them.
It uses economic and professional punishment to make people fall in line.
3/ Call-outs operate using a very different set of mechanisms: social pressure, the sense of hyper-visibility we feel when we are publicly humiliated, and fear of social rejection.
Call-out leverage these Social Mechanisms in order to apply pressure and make people fall in line.
The woke left thinks what is true depends who says it and which side they are on. Only claims made by "COUNTER-HEGEMONIC" people are believed
The woke right thinks what is true depends on who says it and which side they are on. Only claims made by "DISSIDENT" people are believed
People keep saying the right can't be woke because wokeness denies objective reality, and the right doesn't deny science and biology the way the left does.
That's wrong.
Once the right adopts the belief that truth is matter of who says it and which side they are on....
then it is only a matter of time until they begin denying scientific and biological truths because they are being made by people with the wrong politics.
You can actually see this dynamic in the Glen Greenwald discourse that has shown up over the last several days...
1/ Leftists took over the culture so they could own and control the production and interpretation of *meaning*
They wanted to control culture in order to control meaning, and they wanted to control meaning in order to control thought...and that's the real goal: thought control.
2/ The idea is a pretty simple one, people interpret the world using the concepts, ideas, and frameworks of their culture, so whoever owns the apparatus which produces a societies culture decides which ideas, concepts and frameworks people use to understand the world.
3/ The left thought the reason people supported capitalism and hated communism and socialism was because evil capitalists controlled the culture, and used that control to embed capitalist ideology and ruling class values in the culture where they would be absorbed by the masses
Gen Z women leave the church for the same reason they polarize left.
Intersectional feminism says every belief is socially constructed, and anything claiming to be an absolute universal truth, including Christianity, must be exposed as a social construct through deconstruction,
The Critical Social Justice (AKA: "woke") worldview (ubiquitous among Gen Z college educated women) adopts the postmodern contention that all beliefs and truth claims are "socially constructed," and are thus contaminated by the interests and biases of those who constructed them.
As such, the typical Gen Z college educated woman sees Christianity's claims to being an absolute and universal truth as little more than a mask for what the feminists thing Christianity really is: an expression of the interests, biases, and political agenda of the patriarchy.