Actually, Dragnet, I think white privilege is very real. I was the beneficiary of it while in China. White Mexicans do very well for themselves. A mediocre white female teacher in DC makes a whole hell of a lot more than most of her neighbors. When I was in Latvia I met some Americans who, although not privileged for their skin color, were definitely privileged by virtue of their nationality. There’s no way some of the mediocrities I met there could have had such high positions here. So perhaps “white” privilege is an inaccurate term, but elite privilege has always been a feature of civilization.

However, this privilege is conditional. And it’s predicated on a particular lifestyle and social system that is better suited to colonial Latin America than the dynamic democracy we have here. In some cases, privileged minorities can exist in a mutually beneficial relationship with their hosts, as in Sephardic Jews in early modern Holland, who invented modern finance with their Dutch colleagues and paved the way for the industrial revolution. However, what we have in the US is a privileged white minority that seeks first and foremost to be a parasite on other, non-privileged whites, and is trying (but failing) to do so through moral appeals.

Instead of trying to find a working solution, they are increasingly turning to divisive, confrontational politics, much as the white elite of the antebellum South forced the issue prior to the US Civil War. As much as it may cause cognitive dissonance to modern readers, I definitely see the white elite in this country as the modern incarnation of the Southern slaver culture. With a good grasp of history, it isn’t much of a stretch, but they’ve succeeded in casting themselves as champions of everyone but themselves even while they are perhaps the most tenacious parasites this nation has seen in ages.