White privilege has become a major leftwing talking point and justification for a plethora of progressive initiatives that can best be described as reverse racial discrimination. White privilege is the mirror image of white supremacy. Both are evil ideas based upon race consciousness linked to a political ideology that denies the value of the individual. White supremacy is the outward working of racism where individuals of the favored group are rewarded because of blood relationship to the group. White privilege is the outward working of reverse racism where individuals of the targeted group are punished because of blood relationship to the targeted group. Both are a rejection of the individual, an embracing of a sense of inherited group responsibility, where the group is either rewarded (white supremacy) or punished (white privilege) for political purposes. Both concepts unwittingly share the “Volk” or blood linked population group-spirit of Alfred Rosenburg’s Nazi Germany[1] where the individual was nothing while the group was everything. In Nazi Germany all favored-group members served the state[2] while those individuals not a part of the favored group (the targeted group) were punished for their group’s alleged transgressions against society. The leftwing advocates of “white privilege” take the Nazi idea and turn it upside down making race a reason for the state (federal and state government) to punish a racial group—whites—for alleged actual or subconscious discrimination. Just like their Nazi predecessors, politically correct progressives accept the principle that all individuals belonging to the group are equally valuable if they are part of the favored group or equally culpable if part of the non-favored (targeted) group. Therefore, all members of the targeted non-favored group (whites) must pay for the group’s alleged evil conscious or subconscious acts. This “group” responsibility is displayed by the neo-Marxists politically correct mantra of “It takes a village.” Individuals living in the non-favored village are guilty of conscious or subconscious crimes against the favored village. Group (the Village) responsibility is substituted for individual responsibility. Individuals are of no consequence—groups are the only important factor. Self-hating white progressives readily admit that, “white privilege isn’t about me individually…White privilege is a systemic cultural reality.”[3] Whites, the non-favored group, are automatically guilty and therefore owe everlasting deference and restitution to the favored group(s).
According to our politically correct masters if you are white you have received special privileges because there exists, “a transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society…First, it provides white people with ‘perks’ that we do not earn and that people of color do not enjoy. Second, it creates real advantages for us. White people are immune to a lot of challenges. Finally, white privilege shapes the world in which we live.”[4] This broad net of “all whites” ignores individual variation within the group. Progressives look at the northeast corridor (running from Washington, D.C. through New York and into New England) and note that whites are the majority on Wall Street; whites are a majority on K Street in Washington, D.C.; whites are a majority in the student population of New England’s Ivy League schools; whites have a higher per capita income than non-whites; and, whites make up the majority of the top echelon of high per capita income earners in and around the Imperial capitol of Washington, D.C. Therefore, they argue, whites share an advantage that other groups do not enjoy.
The only problem with the prior liberal argument is that not all whites are equal! If you are a white Southerner you may wonder who stole your “white privilege?” Progressives, especially self-hating white progressives, ignore this reality. They claim that it does not matter how impoverished the individual white person may be, even impoverished whites enjoy white privilege—individuals don’t matter, the group is all that matters.[5] This convenient leftist tactic allows progressives to immediately write-off the white South—despite the fact that Southerners have the lowest per capita income in America.[6] White privilege is merely another tactic used by neo-Marxists engaging in their campaign of cultural genocide. As current headlines demonstrate, the conservative, tradition loving, Bible-Belt South is a major target for neo-Marxist cultural genocide.
The current slanderous, anti-South campaign of cultural genocide is but one part of a multiple front leftist assault against traditional America. The progressive enemies of traditional conservative political and Christian values view Confederate heritage as “easy targets” or “low hanging” fruit because, according to the Northern narrative, the Confederates were fighting “to keep their slaves.” Now that the stigma of slavery has become an accepted justification—a universal given and rationale—for destroying Confederate heritage, it is easy for progressives to move on to other traditional American heroes and values that are also contaminated or tainted with the sin of Southern slavery. All Southern Founding Fathers are therefore evil and must be removed from politically correct American society. All pre-War presidents from the South must also be removed beginning with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Eventually the Constitution must be rewritten because, according to the prevailing progressive narrative, it was a compromise with slaveholding Southerners—a compromise which they argue was forced upon virtuous Yankees. A constitutional compromise demanded by Southerners in order to protect their slave property—human chattel that Southerners viewed as worth no more than 3/5s of a human being or so the Yankee narrative is told. Therefore, the remnants of the old Constitution must ultimately be replaced with a neo-Marxist social contract that authorizes the Federal government and forces state governments to guarantee social, economic and political equality of outcome. The progressive narrative declares that the original Constitution was corrupted because it was a compromise with old, privileged, white, Southern slaveholders. As such, it represents America’s cornerstone of “White Privilege” indeed the original, especially pre-War, Constitution is viewed by neo-Marxist progressives as virtually the Magna Carter of American White Privilege.
Contemporary politically correct America is one of the most leftwing race-conscious societies in world history. The American left views race as a valuable weapon to be used against traditional American values. The “intellectuals” in academia, the “talking heads” and “wordsmiths” in the media and the political elite are all consumed with the concept of race. Drexel University Professor George Ciccariello-Maher made news with his tweet, “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide,”[7] Race hustling or “playing the race card” is a key element in the neo-Marxist attack against traditional America. The left now owns the “tar-brush” [8] but it is now the new “tar-brush of racism” that they use to intimidate their opponents into silence. Race has become a liberal talisman or magic-wand. Liberals shake their racial talisman in the face of their conservative opponents and thereby silence timid conservatives. This leftist talisman is used to bully conservatives into adopting a form of self-censorship. It is the intentional chilling of free speech in order to replace traditional American values with neo-Marxist politically correct values. Since Appomattox the falsely accused “racist” South has been a prime target of big government, Yankee progressives. Today they use the talisman of “White Privilege” to attack all traditional American values, while reserving their greatest hatred for the defenders of the captive nation—the Confederate States of America. But in reality, what progressives or liberals call “White Privilege” is actually Yankee Privilege and therefore does not apply to the South.
Where is the Privilege for White Southerners?
Leading progressive “intellectuals” claim that “white power-holders” maintain a system of government that “grants privileges to white people and withholds them from others.”[9] These “intellectuals” represent America’s contemporary politically correct status quo. Moderate leftist “intellectuals” worship centralized federal power as a way to enforce their leftist political ideology. They give the appearance of being “moderates.” Yet, their ultimate objective is the same as their radical comrades. Moderate leftists desire to use the bureaucratic state to slowly morph “conservative” society into their ideal neo-Marxist socialist state. The radical leftist “intellectuals” are more aggressive. They worship a mythical utopian Marxist socialist society in which a new neo-Marxist social contract will be established to replace the Constitution. Neo-Marxists claim the Constitution is flawed and no longer relevant because it was established by a bunch of dead white men, most of whom were slaveholders. In their view this flawed Constitution must be replaced with their new social contract that will guarantee social and economic equality of outcome. This view of so-called “white privilege” has strong support among guilt-ridden upper income whites in the Northeast, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the area in and around the Yankee Empire’s imperial capitol of Washington, D.C.—places where the per capita income greatly exceeds the national average. But where is the privilege associated with being a white Southerner?
In politically correct America there is “privilege” available for white Southerners. It is available to all who will become “self-hating” Southerners and vehemently denounce the traditional, Bible-Belt, Constitution honoring, gun-loving, conservative South. There is always room in the circle of politically correct Yankeedom for a token Southerner provided he or she performs their duty of self-criticism and other anti-South tricks for their Yankee masters. As pointed out by one of the South’s homespun philosophers “kooks and Klan fascinates Yankees.”[10] But for the real South—there is no privilege in the politically correct Yankee Empire.
The South has been the poorest section in the United States since the War for Southern Independence. It has been routinely discriminated against politically, economically and culturally.[11] A Southern child (black, white, male or female) has approximately a 30% lower lifetime earning potential than he would have had if he had been born in the Northeast![12] The so-called white privilege seems to belong to economically successful Yankees. But according to liberals, progressives and other neo-Marxists, Southerners deserve to be impoverished because our ancestors were slaveholders—or so the Yankee narrative goes.
Even if the North’s arrogant claim that they fought the War to free the slaves—which they did not, but for the sake of discussion we will grant the North’s false claim—the harsh fact remains that the War did not end slavery! Four and a half million chattel slaves pre-War were exchanged for eight and a half million sharecropping slaves post-War continuing up to the early 1960s. This new form of slavery (debt peonage, landless peasants) included black and white Southerners—whites making up the vast majority.[13] Where is the so-called white privilege?
Post-War the conquered South became a colonial province[14] of Lincoln’s newly created Federal Empire.[15] Historian, Paul Conkin, noted that after the so-called Civil War the South was “impoverished, politically impotent, a dependent colony of the North.”[16] The South’s white privilege was the “privilege” of standing helplessly by as the Federal Empire’s Congress passed a post-War cotton tax that extracted approximately $68,000,000[17] from the war devastated and impoverished people of the South. An additional $34,000,000[18] of “Confederate” cotton was confiscated by United States Treasury agents plus an equal amount actually stolen by these Federal agents. As U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch admitted, “I am sure I sent some honest cotton agents South; but it sometimes seems doubtful whether any of them remained honest.”[19]
White and black Southerners were intentionally impoverished by the victorious North. Evidence of this intentional impoverishment can be demonstrated by comparing the pre-War (1860) and post-War (1900) property value of the Northern State of Ohio and the Southern State of Virginia. In 1860 Ohio’s property value stood at $1 billion and Virginia’s property value was approximately $793 million. In 1900, 35 years after the end of the War, Ohio’s property value had dramatically increased to $3 billion whereas Virginia’s property value had actually fallen to $707 million![20] Where’s the privilege? Both white and black Southerners were “privileged” with Yankee induced poverty. As one Harvard trained Unitarian minister boldly proclaimed, “Every secessionist risked his all upon secession and has received as the penalty of defeat only poverty. It is the mildest punishment ever inflicted after an unsuccessful civil war and it proves in this case a blessing in disguise.”[21] Receiving Yankee punishment for asserting the right to form a government based upon the American principle of “consent of the governed” can hardly be termed a “privilege.” Being denied the right of self-determination is not a “privilege” yet politically correct leftists conveniently ignore this embarrassing fact. America’s politically correct “intellectuals” insist upon including white Southerners as part of America’s privileged class. How can a people who have been violently denied the right of self-government[22] and intentionally punished with poverty be classified as being part of a “privileged” group? Logically it should not be done but politically it has been done because it benefits the leftist agenda.
Southern Political Privilege Denied
Progressive “intellectuals” claim that one of the benefits that “whites” enjoy is the privilege to write history in a manner that flatters whites and hides acts of white aggression. They claim that whites control the writing and teaching of history and thereby control “what others know …by presenting only parts of a story…our picture of the United States…is sanitized to leave out or downplay any atrocities…committed”[23] These progressive “intellectuals” ignore the fact that Southern history has been completely written and enforced by the victorious aggressors in the War for Southern Independence. Politically correct history is written to sanitize, leave out, or to downplay atrocities committed against Southern civilians by the Yankee invader[24] and to ignore the Yankee Empire’s intentional impoverishment of the conquered South.[25] Despite the cruel oppression against black and white Southerners during and after the War, progressives insist on lumping impoverished white Southerners in with the rich white descendants of New England as if there is no difference between whites of the North and South. They never acknowledge that the Southern version of “our” history has been denied, repressed, and censored (sanitized) while the Yankee’s version has been vigorously enforced by the Yankee Empire’s political and educational establishments. The Yankee narrative of the War is the universal “given.” This Yankee “given” has the same standing as the fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west—a fact that does not require proof—it need only to be stated. The Yankee narrative is that the virtuous North fought to free the slaves while the evil South fought to keep their slaves. Southerners who have not been pacified by generations of slanderous, anti-South propaganda, masquerading as history, understand the truth of Southern history: The South was fighting for freedom, while the North was fighting for empire. White privilege for the South means we have the privilege of being subjects of the Yankee Empire and citizens of a captive and intentionally impoverished nation—the Confederate States of America.
The South’s Sin of White Supremacy
According to progressive logic the white South should feel guilty and deserves to be punished—because of pre-War slavery and post-War white supremacy. Charges of white supremacy can be heard anytime a black or white Southerner makes a stand for maintaining a Confederate monument. The new tar brush of racism will be liberally applied to bold Southerners (regardless of their race) and the mainline media will do its best to censor “facts” that will not support their liberal, slanderous, anti-South bias.[26] Intellectuals of the politically correct school will gleefully point to the fact that whites sanctioned white supremacy with the 1898 Plessy vs Ferguson Supreme Court decision that gave legal sanction to Jim Crow, racial segregation laws, i.e., white supremacy. This “white supremacy” Supreme Court decision was made by the United States Supreme Court not the Confederate States Supreme Court. The decision was based on an 1840s Massachusetts (not Mississippi) law, the majority decision was written by the United States Supreme Court Chief Justice who was from Michigan (not Mississippi), and all Northern Supreme Court Justices save one voted in favor! One Northern Justice simply abstained from voting. Did the South have anything to do with this “white supremacy” decision? Well, yes. Justice John Marshall Harlan from Kentucky, whose family had owned slaves prior to the War, voted against the Yankee Justices and wrote a stinging dissenting opinion. Yet, thanks to the vigorous enforcement of Yankee history the white South is branded with the scarlet labels of racism and white supremacy. The truth is that had the South been able to maintain its independence, the peaceful abolition of slavery and the integration of the freed slaves into a prosperous and peaceful Southern society would have occurred.[27] The great post-War cultural distortion of the South’s natural multi-racial “kith and kin” society was the unnatural result of the Yankee Empire’s invasion, conquest, exploitation and continuing occupation of the South. This type of cultural distortion occurs within all societies that are forced to endure foreign occupation.[28]
Lincoln’s critics often point to his remarks branding blacks as being inferior to whites[29] as evidence of the North’s all-encompassing sense of racial hatred and white supremacy. An equally impressive bit of evidence is when he proudly announced to his Northern audience in Illinois that the newly acquired lands in the western territories would be provided to them by the Federal government as land for white people. He stated: “Our new territories being in such condition that white men may find a home…as an outlet for free white people.”[30] Lincoln received loud applause from his Yankee audience. According to Lincoln’s public promise the new lands taken from the Western Indians would be a “white-only” land free of Indians and blacks.
In the February 1861 issue of the Atlantic Monthly an abolitionist demonstrated the general Northern feeling of racial hatred when he wrote advocating Federal policies toward freed slaves that would result in an effort to “Hem him in. Coop him up.”[31] The meaning being to do whatever was necessary to keep freed blacks in the South and out of the North. Northern racism and a desire for commercial empire was the driving force of the North’s war of aggression against the democratically elected, peaceful nation—the Confederate States of America. If there is such a thing as white privilege, it belongs to the Yankee victors in the War for Southern Independence. We the people of our Southern captive nation have no part with “those people.”[32] Our consent was denied at the point of bloody bayonets and replaced with military and political coercion. The mere passage of time does not convert coercion into consent.
Contemporary politically correct leftist “intellectuals” lump all whites into the same group and declare that whites enjoy “unearned benefits”[33] because of our “whiteness.” They assume that Southern whites are just as privileged as the folks on Wall Street, K Street, and New England’s prestigious Ivy League graduates who populate the highest positions in the Yankee Empire’s politically correct ruling establishment. White privilege for white Southerners? No! White Privilege is actually Yankee Privilege! We the people of the South are subjects of the Yankee Empire and citizens of a captive nation. We have the privilege of obeying our politically correct masters. Southerners have the same privilege as the French people living under the rule of the Nazi imposed Vichy French government or the Lithuanians[34] under the rule of the Soviet Union—the privilege of obeying.
White Privilege a Smoke-Screen
White privilege is a smoke-screen, a technique used by the politically correct neo-Marxists to hide their true intentions—the destruction of traditional conservative values. Wealthy, guilt-ridden, Yankees living in The Hamptons, working on Wall Street, K Street, in the Empire’s bureaucratic state (Deep State), in Hollywood or Silicon Valley are quick to adopt the mantra of white privilege as a means of assuaging their self-imposed guilt. The Yankee Empire belongs to “those people,” it is their country and if that is the way they want to run it, then I for one have no problem with their decision—provided they first release their captive nation—the Confederate States of America.
[1] Rosenberg, Alfred, Race and Race History and Other Essays, Robert Pois, Ed., (Harper & Row, New York: 1970), 17.
[2] Rosenberg, 37; “Today, however, an entire race is beginning to suspect that values will be created and preserved only where blood-law determines the Idea and activities of man, be they conscious or unconscious. Man fulfils the command of the blood, in cult and in life, in the realm of the subconscious, ‘true nature’ as that happy phrase describes this harmony between nature and civilization.” Reverse racism of the left uses “blood-law” to punish and silence white middle-class enemies of their utopian neo-Marxist new order.
[3] White Privilege Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristen-howerton/white-privilege-doesnt-me_b_5296914.html accessed 12/2017. [Italics in original]
[4] On Racism and White Privilege https://www.tolerance.org/professional-development/on-racism-and-white-privilege accessed 12/5/2017.
[5] Explaining White Privilege To A Broke White Person https://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-crosleycorcoran/explaining-white-privilege-to-a-broke-white-person_b_5269255.html accessed 12/5/2017.
[6] Kennedy & Kennedy, Punished With Poverty-the Suffering South, (Shotwell Publishing, Columbia, SC: 2016), 103, 159, 175.
[7] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/10/11/washpo-conservatives-are-the-real-campus-thought-police/ accessed 10/12/2017.
[8] The original meaning of “tar brush” has changed. It now represents an effort by the left to stain the character of their opponents by painting or labeling their opponents as “racists,” or “white supremacists.” The effect of the new tar brush in the hands of the left is to chill free speech by intimidating their opponents into silence and self-censorship.
[9] Francis E. Kendall, Ph.D., Understanding White Privilege, https://www.cpt.org/files/Undoing%20Racism%20-%20Understanding%20White%20Privilege%20-%20Kendall.pdf accessed 12/5/2017.
[10] Grizzard, Lewis, On The South, (Longstreet Press, Inc., Atlanta, GA:1996), 38.
[11] See, Dixie’s Unwelcomed Presence in Rosie O’Donnell’s America, in Kennedy & Kennedy, Nullifying Tyranny, (Pelican Publishing Co., Gretna, LA: 2010), 187-99.
[12] From data in table in, Kennedy, James Ronald, Reclaiming Liberty, (Pelican Publishing Co., Gretna, LA: 2005), 84.
[13] Kennedy & Kennedy, Punished With Poverty-the Suffering South, (Shotwell Publishing, Columbia, SC: 2016), 105-19, 173-95.
[14] Clark & Kirwan, The South Since Appomattox, (Oxford University Press, New York: 1967), 91.
[15] Lincoln’s Federal Empire would quickly morph into a regional and eventually worldwide, Globalist, Yankee Empire; as explained in forth-coming book by Kennedy & Kennedy, Yankee Empire: A Captive Nation’s Plea for Freedom, release date Summer 2018.
[16] Conkin, Paul K., The Southern Agrarians, (The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, TN: 1988), 85.
[17] That would be equal to $1,130,000,000 in 2017 dollars; http://www.in2013dollars.com/1868-dollars-in-2017?amount=1 accessed 12/22/2017.
[18] That would be equal to $565,000,000 in 2017 dollars; http://www.in2013dollars.com/1868-dollars-in-2017?amount=1 accessed 12/22/2017.
[19] Fleming, Walter Lynwood, The Sequel of Appomattox, (Glasgow, Brook & Co., New York: 1970), 9.
[20] Kennedy & Kennedy, Punished With Poverty-the Suffering South, 189.
[21] Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson as cited in, Punished With Poverty-the Suffering South, 139.
[22] The Yankee Empire used aggressive war to deny we the people of the South the right of forming a government based upon our free and unfetter consent.
[23] Francis E. Kendall, Ph.D., Understanding White Privilege, https://www.cpt.org/files/Undoing%20Racism%20-%20Understanding%20White%20Privilege%20-%20Kendall.pdf accessed 12/5/2017.
[24] See, Cisco, Walter Brian, War Crimes Against Southern Civilians, (Pelican Publishing Co., Gretna, LA: 2008); Allen, Henry W., The Conduct of Federal Troops in Louisiana, David Edmonds, ed., (1865, The Acadiana Press, Lafayette, LA: 1988); or Keys, Thomas Bland, The Uncivil War: Union Army and Navy Excesses in the Official Records, (Beauvoir Press, Biloxi, MS: 1991).
[25] Kennedy & Kennedy, Punished With Poverty-the Suffering South, 147-54.
[26] See, The Ad Too Hot to Print—Progressive Censorship in Action https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/the-ad-too-hot-to-print-progressive-censorship-in-action/ accessed 12/21/2017.
[27] See, Donald W. Livingston, Confederate Emancipation Without War, To Live And Die In Dixie, Frank Powell, III, Ed., (Sons of Confederate Veterans, Columbia, TN: 2014), 455-89.
[28] Kennedy & Kennedy, Punished With Poverty-the Suffering South, 122, 127-32.
[29] DiLorenzo, Thomas J., The Real Lincoln, (Three Rivers Press, New York: 2002), 11.
[30] As cited, Kennedy & Kennedy, Punished With Poverty-the Suffering South, (Shotwell Publishing, Columbia, SC: 2016), 96, footnote, 299.
[31] Shepherd Pike as cited in Kennedy & Kennedy, Punished With Poverty-the Suffering South, 140.
[32] “Those people” was the polite term often used by General Robert E. Lee to describe the Yankee invaders.
[33] Francis E. Kendall, Ph.D., Understanding White Privilege, https://www.cpt.org/files/Undoing%20Racism%20-%20Understanding%20White%20Privilege%20-%20Kendall.pdf accessed 12/5/2017.
[34] Kennedy, James Ronald, Dixie Rising—Rules for Rebels, (Shotwell Publishing, Columbia, SC: 2017), 127-30.
