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:
1/
There's a story behind the squirrel story everyone's missing.
A man had his home searched for 5 hours until officials found his pet squirrel, which they took and then killed.
The problem isn't that government broke the law, the problem is that it *didn't* break the law
/🧵
2/ People analyze this story as an abuse of power or as government over-reach, but that's not the problem.
The problem is that everything the government did, including killing the mans pet, was LEGAL.
And that's what people find scary: the government is allowed to act that way
3/ The problem is not that the government broke the law, the problem is that the government terrorized a man and his family, disrupted his life, destroyed a source of his income, killed his pet, and left him heartbroken...and doing this was totally legal.
I've been documenting how American government institutions have been hijacked by woke activists, and I've put all my threads in one big thread so you can see how bad things are/🧵
1/ When lgbtq+ activists talk about 'queer' they don't mean "being different."
The lgbtq+ activists definition of "Queer" is about opposing and abolishing *ALL* social norms, and abolishing the idea that anything should ever be declared to be "normal"
2/ "Queer Theory" is an academic discipline which claims to study human sexuality, except that it does not use *science* to study secuality.
Queer Theory analyzes sex, gender, and human sexuality using a method of engagement created by neo-marxists called "Critical Theory."
3/ In 1937 Max Horkheimer wrote an essay called “Traditional and Critical Theory” which explains the difference between "traditional theory" and "Critical Theory."
According to Horkheimer, traditional theory is purely descriptive; its only goal is describe the world as it is...
1/ To show you how captured by wokeness Government institutions are, here's a list of insane things published by *JUST* the National Institutes for Health. /🧵
They hired a "fat activist" to write about "fatphobia, and say there's no evidence for safe weight loss.
2/ The NIH has an article about "Hari discrimination" and the prospect of living with "Black Hair in an Unjust Society"
3/ They have a 3 part series on "intersectionality," a term coined by Critical Race Theorist Kimberlee Crenshaw.
The entire series is about how institutions are systemically biased against women in various ways, and how employees ought to advance DEI as a way to fix this.
1/ The National Institutes of Health hired an activist who claims:
-obesity doesn't cause poor health
-safe weight loss isn't possible
-poor outcomes for obese people are caused by fatphobia, and anti-fat bais
America's largest Health organization is captured by activists/🧵
2/ These ideas come out of an academic field called "Fat Studies," which has it's own academic journals. The ideas from Fat Studies come almost entirely out of Critical theory and Postmodernism.
Those who work in Fat Studies call themselves "Fat Scholars" and "Fat Activists."
3/ Fat Studies is postmodern, and as such is accepts the postmodern idea objective absolute, universal truth does not exist.
Postmodernism says all truth claims are socially constructed, and are thus polluted by the biases, interests, and agenda's of the people who created them.
1/ Critical Social Justice (woke) activists don't see legitimacy as a product of competence, knowledge, merit, and and high standards rigorously and consistenly applied
They think legitimacy is a form of social capital that allows privileged people to accrue prestige and status
2/ According to wokeness, legitimacy is not given to institutions, ideas, or people because they have met the objective standards of merit, competence, knowledge, and truth
Rather, legitimacy is a social convention that gatekeeps access prestige, status, power, and resources.
3/ Woke activists accept the postmodern idea that there are no objective standards for knowledge, truth, merit, rationality, and competence.
They think all standards of judgement are socially constructed according to the interests amd values of the people who constructed them...