Link back to commentThanks Andrew for raising those two important issues.
On the point about Pauline Hanson and ‘It’s OK to be white’, you are quite right to say that the main reason cited by those who said it should be voted down was its provenance as a ‘meme’ from the rightist message board 4Chan, subsequently spread about US campuses by anonymous postering campaigns.
In judging how we should respond, however, it is important to ask why those who came up with the meme chose a statement so innocuous. Why not something like ‘It’s great to be white’, or ‘Whites are best’, or whatever, that would presumably better reflect their real views?
The reason is that the message that the memers wanted to send depends totally on the nature of the response to this innocent statement. It’s very innocuousness is the point! To those with minds outside the identity politics bubble, to vote down something like this seems to say that there is something wrong and deeply shameful about being white.
This is precisely the message that those who want to inculcate a sense of ‘white identity’ and rebuild genuinely white supremacist movements want to send. And, as they anticipated, the guardians of ‘progressive’ orthodoxy walked right into it. For a very interesting explanation of this strategy I recommend you read this article ‘The Asymmetric Meme Warfare of It’s OK to be White’ https://jacobitemag.com/2017/11/17/the-asymmetric-meme-warfare-of-its-ok-to-be-white/
The other thing to note is that while sane progressives like yourself (please forgive the presumption) would not argue that it is not OK to be white, there is a significant element within the critical race studies and whiteness studies academic industry that definitely does argue that and actually maintains that whiteness is worse than a pathology, but in the words of the ABC compere I cited in the article views it as a ‘radical sin’.
On the matter of privilege, I would say that whether someone should be regarded as privileged depends on a multitude of factors, not just the amount of melanin in the person’s skin. A black woman like Oprah Winfrey, a multi-billionaire with a huge media empire, is extremely privileged on any reasonable reckoning, yet I cited in the article some race theorists who insist that, in some unspecified respect, they are still in an inferior position to white people of vastly lesser means. The problem with statements like Di Natale’s is that it implies, absurdly, that white skin is a guarantee of a good and prosperous life.
On the matter of institutional, or systemic racism, there is no denying that historically non-white people suffered greatly from this. Nowadays, when we have laws in most Western countries that prohibit racial discrimination, and have race-based affirmative action programs, to attribute ongoing disadvantage of some communities to this is misplaced. As to the claimed ‘unconscious’ or ‘implicit’ bias’, the Behavioural Economics Unit in the department of Prime Minister and Cabinet released a major study of public sector hiring practices last year that showed there is bias, but not in the expected direction. They found that: ‘overall, APS officers discriminated in favour of female and minority candidates’ (https://www.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/foi-log/FOI-2017-111.pdf)
Those who claim that all the prizes are reserved for ‘white people’ have to contend with the reality that the highest income cohorts by race here, in the US, and in Britain are Asians, not whites. What ‘privilege’ do they get? The only privilege they have is that of being born into cultures that instil a strong work ethic and attach a very high value to educational attainment. But anyone who suggests that addressing cultural norms might be more productive than going on about white privilege is likely to be pilloried, as the example of Professor Amy Wax I cited in the article shows.
The same point applies to the continuing parlous state of many indigenous Australians, a situation that in my view is probably this nation’s most serious moral failing. But what is the remedy? On this, I refer you to the devastating analysis set out in book ‘The Politics of Suffering’ by Peter Sutton, a linguist and anthropologist who worked closely with aboriginal communities for over 30 years, among other things being their main expert adviser during the Wik native title case (https://www.mup.com.au/books/the-politics-of-suffering-paperback-softback)
He concludes that the shift in policy over the past 30 years grounded in identity politics has not just been useless, but disastrously counter-productive, especially for remote communities that have seen living conditions deteriorate drastically over this period.
To be a bit philosophical, I think policy in this and other areas would benefit greatly from a consequentialist turn – judging policy by results for those it is supposed to help, rather than whether it conforms to some ideological agenda.