The fevered rantings on these pages about Marxism and white privilege would have brought smiles to old Joe McCarthy's florid face. It appears that there are still some among us who see Marxists hiding under every bed and behind every tree. I'd call this quaint if it weren't for the fact that the red-baiting is being used to disparage social justice, multiculturalism and the white privilege movement that's designed to improve race relations. (I do wish the latter had a name that wasn't so taunting and "loaded" with words that can be threatening to some.)
Those so willing to fear the obliteration of the Constitution, capitalism and Judeo-Christian values by covert Marxists are oblivious to the slow erosion of these pillars of the American republic by more insidious forces. But that's for the next column.
For now, I note that every movement has its extremists who tend to ratchet discussions up to hyperbolic levels. We've heard the unfounded and slanderous statements made by tea partiers about former President Barack Obama, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that some proponents of the white privilege movement refer to whites as white supremacists, though this reveals a misunderstanding about the efforts of both groups.
The white privilege movement asks us all to appreciate the large hurdles facing people of color when it comes to hiring, income level, housing and its location, family structure, schooling, college admissions, policing and even something as seemingly mundane as access to fresh fruit and vegetables. If you are born white, you have an easier time navigating among and between these hallmarks of society. For people of color, there are barriers to slow or halt progress. Some of them can be ascribed to active racism and some to residual racism.
For those who "doth protest too much," consider what President John F. Kennedy asked in his 1963 civil rights address after listing a catalog of affronts regularly visited upon a black man: "Then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?"
The answer to this might be found by posing the following rhetorical questions: If you are white, have you ever been followed around a shop by sales staff worried about theft? How many times have you been pulled over by police for a traffic check, sometimes for questionable reasons like a burned-out tail light? How often do you worry that your hoodie-clad son might be indiscriminately shot by police thinking his cellphone looked like a gun? How often do empty cabs pass you by in big cities as you try to hail them down? How often do clerks ask to see your ID when you use credit cards? See the pattern here? It isn't pleasant to be judged by the color of your skin, and the white privilege movement simply attempts to sensitize whites to this, not make them feel guilty.
How any of this relates to Marxism is beyond me. The struggle for respect and tolerance is in no way a class struggle threatening capitalism. If anything, unbridled capitalism is complicit in damages to communities that include people of color. When corporations closed factories across the Northeast and Midwest, off-shored hundreds of thousands of jobs and hollowed-out our cities, it exacerbated the plight of the urban poor. When states conspired with corporations to crush unions and collective bargaining for a fair wage, this widened the income gap and destroyed the middle class. If there is class warfare in this country, it is being waged by the oligarchs, and capitalism is clearly winning.
There is not room enough on this page to counter all of the neurotic anxieties of those critical of the white privilege movement. Calling it racist and drawing parallels with Nazis and Kristallnacht are perversions of history and extremism at its worst.
While I'm at it, Obama never said, "You didn't build that [business]." That's a misquote. The words that should be in the brackets are "schools, workers, infrastructure, government research, the Internet, etc." Obama said business owners who want tax cuts must realize that they didn't succeed on their own. They had lots of help, so they should acknowledge this and give back to the community.
Lastly, no, Christ wasn't a communist, but his early followers were certainly communal. Read Acts 2:45 — "They sold their property and possessions and shared the money with those in need." Marx would have been pleased.
Frank Batavick writes from Westminster. His column appears Fridays. Email him at fjbatavick@gmail.com.
