You seem to have completely missed my point. I made it crystal-clear in what I wrote that the goal was not to erect another bogeyman — “black entitlement” — to mirror the bogeyman of “white privilege,” but rather, to deconstruct this entire absurd idea that we should be coming up with overbroad racialized epithets, such as “white privilege” or “black entitlement,” and using them to bully and belittle people based on their skin color.
Responses like yours don’t help. Most white people here today have absolutely nothing — nothing as in nada, ZERO — to do with the historical racial hierarchies in place in America in earlier centuries and earlier decades. We are struggling here ourselves, or else we are immigrants (like me) or children of immigrants, many of whom fled from various forms of oppression (like communism, in the case of my parents and me) in their own former countries. Many of us (like me) are people who came to the U.S. with hardly a dime in their or their parents’ pockets. We got to where we are, if we got anywhere, without familial connections or other advantages, but rather, through nothing other than hard work, even while certain other groups, like African-Americans, were enjoying a legalized leg up in the all-important college admissions process. And now, we are being told that we are the beneficiaries of “white privilege.” We are being told this by white elites who are more than likely to be the ones who are the actual beneficiaries of privilege, whether familial wealth or connections or legacy admissions or whatever. They feel guilty about their unearned status, but to deflect from the accusatory finger that would otherwise be pointed squarely at them, they try to broaden the diagnosis to make it look like one that is shared by a large segment of the population, viz., everyone who looks “white” or “white” enough. The result is that instead of focusing on the real underlying problems, such as income inequality and an unjust system that too easily allows wealth to be horded, accumulated and capitalized through many generations (i.e., the Thomas Piketty argument), they focus instead on the sideshow of race, which, of course, predictably and counterproductively results in alienating the white working class and sending those people fleeing to the right, bringing about political gridlock where nothing of substance can get accomplished because we are all too consumed in drawing bright lines around these superficial color wars to turn our attention to the real economic issues that would actually threaten the status quo and the interests of those same white elites. What you are doing is just drawing tighter that superficial racial veil concealing our real class divisions. You, therefore, are not part of the solution; you are part of the problem.
