Race hustling in the Manichean World

Which of my ancestors is most to blame for my white privilege?

In about 1903, my great grandfather and great grandmother decided that the best option for their family was to move from Chicago and take up homesteads in central Saskatchewan. With six boys, they were able to claim on 7 quarter sections of land. Not all the sons were as daft as their parents and so some stayed in the US. Of the others, not all wanted to homestead. And for good reason. The first winters were spent in sod houses with dirt floors. (For an interesting insight into the glories of a Saskatchewan homestead watch Jordan Peterson’s interview with his father who grew up on such a homestead. www.m.youtube.com/watch?v=W7VfhuRHp2c )

My grandfather, in digging the water well on his quarter had the misfortune to fall into the well and break his back. By looping a rope onto his foot and pulling steadily skyward his friends were able to pull him back to surface and put him in bed to die or survive as fate would have it. Fortunately for me he survived but lived with pain and a crooked gait from thence forward. I once asked my father why he, as the eldest son, didn’t take over his father’s farm. He said that he determined to not be a farmer the day that he and his father walked out into their bumper crop in September 1937 to see that, for the tenth year in a row, the crop had failed. This time it was hail. He left home shortly afterwards to take a six-month bookkeeping course and find his fortune in a different province.

The small resource town of my youth had the two-fold distinction of being the highest community in Canada (in terms of elevation; hallucinogens were not yet a “thing”) and the highest per capita income of any community in Canada. It is not that the per capita income was particularly high, but it was very consistent - everyone made roughly the same wage. And if your wage was based on a willingness to go underground for eight hours a day and do very hard and, at times, dangerous work then you were well paid. My father was not a member of the union and did not work for “the company”. Instead, he sold houses, insurance, and travel tickets to the well-paid workers. Because he was a private business owner, all my friends assumed that we were rich. Their assumption was not my reality. My father often worked multiple jobs and his wealth rarely cascaded into my lap having been exhausted at the company grocery store each week.

I once worked for a multinational mining company in Colombia and was told each year that I was rated in the bottom third of the workforce and had to accept a zero percent raise. When asked where I had failed, each year I was told, “Oh no! We are happy with your work, but we need to leave room for the Colombians to get the raises.” Each year I said that I understood and each year I thought to myself, “That’s not fair.”

This recitation of woes is not unique to my family. It is the nature of life under the sun to suffer from circumstances beyond our control and it is the role of fathers to mitigate the effects of bad luck on their families. What Canadian immigrant parent doesn’t suffer for the bet made in coming to this country? Were the gains on the bet they made for themselves and their families a result of privilege or hard work?

A few years ago I was at a fundraising dinner for a group that was working on a local indigenous reserve. The stories of the privation of the children and the social problems that were rampant on reserve were enough to melt even my heart. Just before the “ask” the young woman doing the talking described the “white privilege” that was holding the indigenous people back and my heart immediately became stone, and the chequebook was closed. “What she said is not fair,” I said to myself, and my money went to a different group.

For which generation of the “tyrannical patriarchy” of my family should I feel guilty and who of my antecedents passed this mysterious privilege on to me? This young white woman knew nothing about me yet, because I was white, she could discard all the work I and my forebears had undertaken to protect our families and improve our situation and write it off as “privilege”. What privilege? For having a great grandfather who lived with his wife in a sod hut? For having a grandfather who broke his back digging a well and then saw ten consecutive harvests destroyed by forces beyond his control? For having a father who worked very hard to feed me and my siblings? Some patriarchy.

My preference is always to give thanks to God for the benefits, the blessings and even the suffering that I have in life. They are uniquely mine and are not racially or class derived. I also hold to the theory offered by Max Weber about the Protestant ethic and its positive correlation with the improved economic and emotional life trajectory of those who follow that ethic. Everyone’s life has its unique blend of luck and suffering guaranteeing that my outcome (financially, emotionally, physiologically etc.) will be different from yours. If you work harder than me and make better choices, given the circumstances you face, and eventually die with more toys and “happiness” than me then I am morally wrong to write off your success to “privilege”. I don’t write this to attack this particular woman, who was too young and foolish to understand that she was just parroting the woke, Marxist zeitgeist of the day, but it seems to me that we need to get a grip on this false narrative of “privilege”. Such loose talk is designed to destroy fatherhood, the family and hence society. Stopping this destruction is contingent upon our rejection of such talk.

However controversial, one of the best books on this topic, was written by Edward Banfield (The Moral Basis of a Backward Society) as a summary of his research and PhD dissertation. He lived in a small community in southern Italy after World War II, and he wanted to answer the question of why this and other, similar Italian communities were unable to move beyond the culture and lifestyle that had existed for several hundred years. What was in their worldview that prevented social and economic progress? His book is full of rich gems of insights into the question.

In short, he posited the notion of a worldview that he called amoral familism. He observed that each of the families would work with, share, and participate in life with other members of the family but not with friends or strangers from outside the extended family. For these Italians, the economic pie was of a fixed size and so the first to nibble on the crust was always to be the family. This inability to share more broadly and allow others the freedom to achieve caused a stunting of the economic and social development of their communities. As a result, the socializing little platoons of volunteer organizations described by Edmund Burke never formed.  In one memorable passage, he identified the similarities between two communities, in Nevada and Italy, in the mid 1800s and demonstrated how divergent the two communities were by the early 1950s. What caused the divergence? It is an important question, and he provides a fascinating answer. No spoiler alert here - buy the book! It is a quick, but important read.

Were the Nevadans just more privileged in the natural endowments of their state? Or were they more privileged in their understanding of the value of hard work? To ask the question is to answer it because it is a stupid question. I have a good friend from northern Labrador who, with an earned PhD, is retired at age 55 after a distinguished career as a research biologist. I have an earned PhD and I couldn’t retire until I was 68 so clearly he has more privilege than me, right? In fact, he is Inuk and not all his family find themselves in such salubrious circumstances. He wasn’t more privileged. He was smarter, made better choices and worked harder than me. It sucks to be me but my problem is not his privilege.

So, what is really behind this notion that white people are “privileged”?  It is ipso facto a horribly racist comment so the answer can’t be about combating racism. How does demeaning the hard work of one racial group help someone of a different racial group? Can people of different races enjoy a commodious relationship when such ugly and false divides are created?

Or could it be that there is money to be made in race hustling? Is it of interest that corporations are willing to pay such hustlers up to $40,000 for two-hour seminars on how racist the management team is? Who is going to abandon this ideological ship when the author of “White Fragility” made millions on its sale?

I think the Apostle Paul said it best, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” Greater the fool who accepts this outrageous lie than he or she who profits from it. I agree with Bill Maher; sometimes we are an unserious people.