No, it isn’t the Onion, just an example of truth being stranger than fiction: Proving why it hired anti-white bigot Sarah Jeong, the New York Times has just published an advice column on curing white-skin privilege.
The “Style” piece was inspired by a letter from a reader going under the name “Whitey,” and, well, you can’t make this stuff up (or can you?). Here’s part of it:
Dear Sugars,
I’m riddled with shame. White shame. This isn’t helpful to me or to anyone, especially people of color. I feel like there is no “me” outside of my white/upper middle class/cisgender identity. I feel like my literal existence hurts people, like I’m always taking up space that should belong to someone else.
I consider myself an ally. I research proper etiquette, read writers of color, vote in a way that will not harm P.O.C. (and other vulnerable people). I engage in conversations about privilege with other white people. I take courses that will further educate me. I donated to Black Lives Matter. Yet I fear that nothing is enough. Part of my fear comes from the fact that privilege is invisible to itself. What if I’m doing or saying insensitive things without realizing it?
Another part of it is that I’m currently immersed in the whitest environment I’ve ever been in.
Whitey
The pained reader explained that while she’d grown up attending majority-non-white schools, her problems are now exacerbated because she’s currently at an elite, 75-percent white private college. She laments in closing, “Instead of harnessing my privilege for greater good, I’m curled up in a ball of shame. How can I be more than my heritage?”
Wow, Sacha Baron Cohen, is that you? Are you punking via print now? American Thinker’s Monica Showalter emphasizes that Whitey’s letter isn’t a joke, but I’m not so sure. Commenters under Showalter’s piece suspect the Times of concocting the letter itself as a rhetorical device. While this is unlikely, it wouldn’t surprise me if a reader is using parody to make the Times look foolish; it’s a bit like how a woman years ago tricked the art world into thinking her toddler’s tomato-ketchup paintings were great art.
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Yet it doesn’t matter. First, there actually are people who believe as Whitey does (examples in a moment). Second, the Times advice columnists’ responses illustrate why the paper hired bigoted Sarah Jeong — now infamous for disgorging vile, vulgar anti-white tweets — and why she’ll feel right at home at the birdcage-liner of record. Here’s a sampling of representative comments from the Times advice-column oracles:
• “What you really feel is trapped within an identity that marks you, inescapably, as an oppressor.… We do live in a culture steeped in white supremacy and class bigotry, as well as patriarchal values.”
• “You’re feeling the full force of what it means to be white in a white supremacist culture and it makes you feel uncomfortable because up until now, in some unconscious way, you’d exonerated yourself from it.”
• “It took me many years to begin to recognize these advantages [his own] as unearned, the product of corrupt systems stacked in my favor.”
• “Your race granted you privileges that were and are denied to people who are not white. This is true for all white people in America.”
Whether or not Whitey is serious, the two columnists rendering the above certainly are. And so was Oliver Friedfeld, a Georgetown University student who was mugged at gunpoint in 2014 but said he “can hardly blame” his assailants because of his “privilege” (hat tip: Breitbart).
In an op-ed for the GU newspaper, the Hoya, Friedfeld wrote, “Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege, surrounded by million-dollar homes and paying for a $60,000 education, to condemn these young men as ‘thugs?’ It’s precisely this kind of ‘otherization’ that fuels the problem.” Yeah, wouldn’t want to stigmatize criminals, now.
Friedfeld continued, “Not once did I consider [my] attackers to be ‘bad people.’ I trust that they weren’t trying to hurt me. In fact, if they knew me, I bet they’d think I was okay.” Really? ’Cause I don’t think this guy is okay.
Actually, if the thugs read his op-ed (highly unlikely), they no doubt laughed their rear ends off. Oh, and how much you want to bet this Friedfeld guy wasn’t majoring in the hard sciences?
Friedfeld has nothing, however, on the Swedish woman reluctant to report her Muslim migrant rapist because she “felt sorry” for him and feared he would be deported. There also was a male Norwegian politician who felt guilty because the Somali who raped him was sent packing. (Pro-tip: Next time get raped in Sweden, where 80 percent of foreign rapists are never deported.)
Next we have a July Washington Post “Dear Amy” column in which a college student worries that a black friend, who’d be visiting her in her adopted leftist New York county, would panic people and be unfairly targeted. She admits that she’s worrying about “racist behavior” she has “never witnessed,” but is “aware of incidents taking place in similar communities” (translation: she’s been brainwashed by the media).
Not one to disappoint, columnist Amy Dickinson replied that the reader “should start this process by notifying [her] friend that [her] neighbors are somewhat likely to ‘panic’ and call the police if he is bold enough to walk through the neighborhood while also being black.”
Talk about “racism”: Without any proof, the journalist is assuming the neighbors would react this way simply because they’re white.
For the record, I live in a wealthy, almost exclusively white New York town and years ago housed an African friend who needed a place to stay. It never occurred to me to ascribe uncharitable, bigoted motivations to my neighbors, and there never were any issues of any kind.
Of course, overlooked is that virtually no one in America is targeted merely for being black. You can be white, but you’ll raise eyebrows if you walk around looking like a skinhead. Likewise, if a young black man takes on a “gangsta’” appearance, he’ll bring suspicion on himself.
As for white privilege, as black professor Walter E. Williams said while on the Conservative Law and Politics show with me earlier this year, it should be called white “accomplishment.” Talk of “privilege” is just another neo-Marxist way of demonizing meritocracy and justifying the continued disadvantaging of whites via affirmative-action-oriented policies.
Returning to Whitey, she and the Times advice columnists are right about one thing: There is a problem with her identity. If she’d been raised with faith, Truth, and had been inculcated with actual virtue, she wouldn’t virtue-signal. She’d know right from wrong and who she is and should be. But raised in a secular, materialistic, relativistic culture, her empty-vessel self was an easy target for her teachers’ and professors’ leftist indoctrination.
Of course, Whitey, like most moderns, probably does have many things to feel guilty about — but mythical white privilege isn’t one of them.
Image: Koldunova_Anna via iStock / Getty Images Plus
