Government laws today routinely discriminate on the basis of income, source of income, line of business, race, drug use, age, health, sex and many other categories. This discrimination is so common that it’s taken for granted as being legitimate. Laws with discriminatory economic effects are not even thought of as discrimination.
American leftists hope to achieve political power and implement discriminatory programs against groups they term “privileged” and for groups they term “oppressed”. Their discrimination categories, derived from social/cultural/sexual characteristics, differ a great deal from those that governments have been implementing for decades.
Leftists identify at least 15 groups they wish to discriminate against:
men,
persons whose gender corresponds with their innate sex,
white people,
heterosexual people,
persons of age between 30 and 60,
middle class persons,
college graduates,
Christians,
U.S. born,
persons raised in non-abusive biological or adoptive families,
able-bodied persons,
persons of Western European extraction,
persons perceived as attractive,
persons who speak proper English, and
married persons.
This list appears in a document used in the indoctrination of freshmen at Cornell University. These groups are said to be “privileged”. Those falling outside these groups, their complements, are said to be “marginalized” or “oppressed”.
Every university and college of any size now has some sort of “office of diversity” or “office of institutional equity” or something similar. These offices promote identity politics under the guise of anti-discrimination while providing well-paid jobs for people in this unproductive occupation. Governments throughout the U.S. and well-meaning but ignorant donors provide funding to these institutions, portions of which find their way to these offices. These offices run useless programs to indoctrinate the unwary in their “privilege” or “oppression”, and possibly both at the same time, for example, white and unattractive, or female and Christian.
Is a person actually privileged or oppressed by virtue of these 15 characteristics and their opposite? How are privilege and oppression to be measured? By a person’s income? By what they might have earned had they had or lacked one of the 15 characteristics? There is an uncountable number of variables that go into a person’s life. How are the effects of privilege and oppression from one aspect to be measured? Typically, there are not clear causes of one’s income or accomplishments. The assertions being made about privilege and oppression cannot be proven. The discriminatory effects of certain laws, like drug prohibition, are easier to trace, but today’s leftists are pointing in very different directions.
If one is privileged or oppressed, does it mean one is automatically getting goodies when one shouldn’t (privileged) and not getting goodies when one should (oppressed)? It seems to mean little else. Does it then mean that the society through the state ought to rectify this social injustice? Does it imply transferring goodies from the privileged to the oppressed? Does it mean forcing the privileged to cater to the oppressed? It does seem to mean that the state must enforce social justice. The social justice warriors have an agenda they wish to see enacted against the groups that they regard as privileged.
This is identity politics, a political thing, not simply an effort to overcome prejudice. If the goal were actually to mitigate prejudices, we’d still have to ask: Is it the role of a college or university to overcome prejudices or biases by teaching students unproven and unprovable assertions about the supposedly negative properties of being white, or a male, or a Christian, or being raised in a non-abusive family or being of Irish or Italian or German extraction? Is it sensible to assume that prejudices ARE IN FACT present simply by the presence of DIFFERENT characteristics such as are listed here?
The terms “diversity”, “equity” and “inclusion” coming from the lips of the social justice warriors signal nothing more than judging people by their “color” (meaning the 15 categories or their like), as opposed to the content of their characters. It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. turned upside down.
2:57 pm on September 25, 2018
