White Privilege or Black Fathers - Part 1

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
Martin Luther King Jr.

Patrick Hall

It seems to have no end.  It could have been a part of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) gathering I attended back in the late 1960s. Today, it would certainly be a central part of a CRT Webinar or any NAACP-sponsored discussion involving the inscrutable mysteries of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). But the charge of white privilege, (a Leninist/Gramsci adaptation) is alive and flourishing in many of the constituencies that make up the Democratic Party.  

At one time in our nation’s history, this was a palpable concern for many Negroes, a term that was conspicuous when I was a youth. Even in my short 72 years of life, as a child growing up in the1950-60s, I can still remember when we traveled passed the Mason-Dixon to visit relatives.  My family could not just stop at any motel or restaurant. It had to be a business that serviced Negroes, like the motel/restaurant owned and operated by a great aunt on my mother’s side. Many parts of the country were simply segregated. Also, as we traveled south, we seldom interacted with white people. Growing up in an integrated Roman Catholic parish in upstate New York, having Italian, Irish, German, Black, Polish, and Puerto Rican playmates was a given. During those summer vacations when the roles were reversed and my cousins came North on holiday, they were somewhat surprised that many of my friends were white. I specifically remember one of my in-laws, a boy around my age, who was “visibly” uncomfortable playing and hanging out with my Italian or German playmates. He quickly got used to the situation. But it was something, even as a 13-year-old kid, I recall as somewhat weird.

My older siblings whom I often referred to today as the 1930s/1940s “kids,” experienced similar cultural discordance. Race mattered in far too many ordinary human interactions.

But that was then. Let us fast forward to today. Despite the familiar rhetoric from race industry advocates, like Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and the Rev Al Sharpton, the latter served as President Obama’s chief advisor on matters considering race relations.  We reside in an entirely different America. For example, if you are black or a so-called African American, you are guaranteed a college education via a plethora of financial aid packages. In Post-Civils America, colleges have hired an army of faculty and support staff to promote diversity. Black student union groups have been a fixture for decades in many other institutions. Efforts in the area of affirmative action have changed the employment prospects of “some” minorities in both the private and public sectors. However, as pointed out by various public policy and economic experts, affirmative action efforts have unfortunately devolved into a “public policy windfall for middle-class blacks, college-educated women, and foreign nationals with the right skin tone.” Currently, the only exception to the latter is many Asian students are getting shortchanged in their acceptance rate at many of our top-rated colleges and universities. Their academic performance and flat-out hard work are being undercut, because the powers that be don’t consider them a part of the “officially oppressed”.

However, despite some of the administrative shortcomings of affirmative action, it was a haphazard step in the right direction within the broader minority communities.

In addition, since the advent of the 1960s Great Society Programs, trillions of dollars have been poured into black communities. If anything, a “most favored minority status” has been the norm in today’s America. But despite this cultural metanoia, you will hear many white and black public figures level the charge of white privilege. From Hillary Clinton, Rev Al Sharpton, and the recently elected Senator from the state of Georgia, Raphael Warnock. Their political faith statement and unquestioned racial hermeneutics are governed by secular heresy, the temporal dogma known as white privilege.