CHICAGO – Sometimes, in the back of our minds, we wonder about the origins of nutty leftist academic theories, such as “white privilege.”
The concept – that capitalism unfairly favors white people – has taken root, not only in higher education, but also K-12 school districts.
The concept – that capitalism unfairly favors white people – has taken root, not only in higher education, but also K-12 school districts.
Approximately 2,000 educators attended the most recent “White Privilege Conference,” while more than 200 Wisconsin teachers and administrators lapped up the same theories in a taxpayer-funded program called “CREATE Wisconsin,” organized by the state Department of Public Instruction.
It has become the mainstream view of America’s education establishment.
But where does it come from?
According to a recent article on SocialistWorker.org, the originally named “white skin privilege,” was first floated in a pamphlet produced by the radical group Students for a Democratic Society in 1967.
That’s right – SDS is the same group that gave us Bill Ayers and a lot of other college malcontents running around bombing buildings while trying to overthrow our government and financial structures. They were largely and rightfully dismissed as being part of the lunatic fringe in the 1960s, but somehow their theories have become widely accepted by today’s educators.
“Fundamentally, the idea is that racism is inevitable under capitalism because all whites, no matter their class, benefit from the unequal distribution of social resources along racial lines. Because all whites gain from this arrangement, most are loathe to fight against it,” Bill Mullen writes at Socialist Worker.
The “’white skin privilege’ theory, as (Noel Ignatiev and Theodore Allen) developed it, argues that white radicals and activists did not put enough emphasis on racism in either assessing U.S. history or developing tactics to build revolutionary movements in the here and now,” Mullen states.
The original pamphlet was penned by a 27-year old Ignatiev, a former member of the Communist Party USA and proponent of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party.
