“White Privilege”: Call it instead “The Privilege of the Ruling Elite”

Call Me Morfar

My grandson has begun to speak. I am the Morfar.

Morfar is Old Norse for maternal grandfather. And I chose to be called that rather than grandpa, first because it has certain Nordic fierceness, and second grandpa sounds too old to suit me.

With regard to reason the first, it seems to have had some effect. My daughter says I am the only one he listens to, but she says the same about her two somewhat unruly, medium large dogs. I kind of believe whatever sort of fierceness I’ve projected to my grandson is not because I am the Morfar, but rather he has noticed that the dogs listen and obey. In the child’s mind he has wondered what the dogs know that he should know too.  And it’s not that I’m some sort of grumpy ogre hovering over him. I sing songs to him. I read books to him (including dramatic readings of The Little Engine that Could). I crawl on the ground and play cars and trucks with him while making all the appropriate sound effects. Still if I say “don’t mess with that, or stay out of there, don’t do that or you'll break your neck kid,” he listens. My daughter is impressed.

With regard to reason the second, I’m not so sure. I have a two-year old grandson. That means my life has spanned two generations and has entered its third. Looking back to when I was still in my early twenties, I thought America had put race behind it. Now entering the third generation of my life time, I’ve found then I was terribly mistaken.

A Tale of Two Cultures

Milwaukee has become more racially divided, more economically divided and more violent. Per capita, the city of Milwaukee’s murder rate is higher than Chicago’s and the violence is spreading, so much so as to attract national attention. [Full Text]

Ugly scenes like the one that occurred a few weekends ago at Tosafest are too  common. Milwaukee is not alone. Writing in The American Thinker, Colin Flaherty describes the situation in Baltimore:

““Impressions matter. Crime stats do not,” lamented Peter Hermann, chief crime apologist for the Baltimore Sun.

 

Hermann was explaining life in the big city to a New Jersey yokel who wanted to know what happened to the large group of black people that was rampaging through downtown Baltimore, attacking people, destroying property, and creating mayhem. All beneath her hotel balcony window in the upscale Inner Harbor.

That really does not narrow it down much, because what seemed “scary” to her, Hermann said, was “normal and routine” to grizzled observers of the gritty Baltimore crime beat. Police “made no arrests, saw no crime, had no reason to make an announcement. There’s not even a report -- it’s just something that happens,” he said.”” [Full Text] 

It’s troubling, to the point where latest fashion in social theory – “white privilege” – seemed provocatively sensible.  But while I might be an agent in “white privilege” by no means does that implicitly make me an agent of racial oppression. As I see it, here’s how it goes:

My grandson will grow up in a stable and secure household. He will be surrounded with a regular cohort of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. These people will be mostly be from the educated middle class and upper middle class. By the time he enters the first grade: he will have been extensively read to; have listened to Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Hayden; possibly been to a motorcycle rally; allowed to run in the countryside; and maybe have caught a fine trout from a small stream with a cane pole. One day my grandson will survey the opportunities that are opening before him and the sort of work he likes. He will enter adulthood richly full of possibilities.

Another kid, living on the north side of Milwaukee, might grow up in an unsettled house hold, and whose siblings might not have the same father and maybe one or more of those are incarcerated. It could be a household where books are absent, as are personal computers other than “smart phones,” and parents who do not place their kid’s school achievement too high among their priorities, and a place where the sound of gun fire is not infrequent. Here a child too often arrives to teenage years, and surveys his prospects, and finds he is already defeated. His best prospects are gangs, drugs, strong arm robberies and theft.

White Privilege: A Mistaken Social Theory

The contrast between those social environments graphically define nature of what is now fashionably called “white privilege,” but somehow this is nothing new and it hasn’t much to do explicitly with race. Many black Americans enjoy productive middle class and upper middle class lives while too many others seem to be locked out.

John Ogbu is a former anthropologist at the University of California – Berkeley sociologist and immigrant from Nigeria. In The American, Jason L. Riley profiles Ogbu’s social theory on the racial gap in K-12 education:

“None of the versions of the class-inequality [argument] can explain why black students from similar social class backgrounds, residing in the same neighborhood, and attending the same school, don’t do as well as white students,” wrote Ogbu. “Within the black population, of course, middle-class children do better, on the average, than lower-class children, just as in the white population. However, when blacks and whites from similar socioeconomic backgrounds are compared, one sees that black students at every class level perform less well in school than their white counterparts.”

Ogbu and his team of researchers were given access to parents, teachers, principals, administrators, and students in the Shaker Heights school district, which was one of the country’s best. And he concluded that black culture, more than anything else, explained the academic achievement gap. The black kids readily admitted that they didn’t work as hard as whites, took easier classes, watched more TV, and read fewer books. “A kind of norm of minimum effort appeared to exist among black students,” wrote Ogbu. “The students themselves recognized this and used it to explain both their academic behaviors and their low academic achievement performance.” Due to peer pressure, some black students “didn’t work as hard as they should and could.” Among their black friends, “it was not cool to be successful” or “to work hard or to show you’re smart.” One female student said that some black students believed “it was cute to be dumb.” Asked why, “she said it was because they couldn’t do well and that they didn’t want anyone else to do well.” [Full Text]

According to Wikipedia Ogbu theorized that because the black American sub-culture has its roots in non-voluntary immigration -- of slavery, institutional discrimination -- Jim Crow, and cultural racism, the seeds were sown for an oppositional culture and an identity that rejects the dominant culture’s values, speech and behavior.

 I think that may be true. But to call it “white privilege” is to take an incredible leap in logic.

Cultural Opposition is Nothing New

 

Ogbu’s oppositional cultures are not a new idea after all. John Milton, in Paradise Lost, had Satan declare in long soliloquy after finding himself banished to hell:

“Infernal world, and thou, profoundest hell,

Receive thy new possessor: … Here at least

We shall be free …

To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:

Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n”

That’s kind of the point we’ve come to. The racial optimism I had in the early 1970s was misplaced. As has happened so often since the end of the Civil War, the hope for many black Americans to fully participate in the American economy had the rug pulled from beneath it. Much of the manufacturing economy that had supported working class/middle class families, at the time, in matter of a decade or so dissolved. Some parts of it moved to the distant suburban industrial parks. More of it was outsourced – to Taiwan, Korea, Mexico, the Caribbean and now more dominantly to China.

It’s the Economy, Stupid

In our central cities, a household supporting economy was replaced with a household destroying social welfare, food stamp economy. And suddenly Milwaukee’s and in other city’s urban centers the dormant seeds of an oppositional culture have violently bloomed.

So to answer that problem the educational establishment has embraced “white privilege,” a lame exercise in racial sensitivity training. It’s a label which both our educational and social welfare establishments raise as shield rather than confront decades of failure. It deflects blame elsewhere.

Meanwhile for the most part, our cities, our states and the federal government have done nothing to create an environment for economic growth and opportunity. Instead, we have created a regulatory labyrinth that challenges existing corporations and makes start-ups almost impossible. (Should you start a business and employ a few people, you will find you have become a full-time regulatory compliance manager, tax collector and increasingly a data collector.) We have combined corporate tax rates that are almost confiscatory and are noncompetitive in a world economy. And the economics of corporate cronyism, where government across the board and in an almost fascist manner, determines who in both the private and public sectors reap the economic rewards.

It seems that’s mostly how it is in most of America and more so in our urban neighborhoods, but I I wouldn’t put the “white privilege” racial label on it. Instead, I think I would rather call it the “privilege of the ruling elite.”

 

 

A Worthy Dressing for a Garden Tomato

The season of tomatoes is upon us. They’re locally grown, garden fresh and honestly vine ripened. The very best of course are heirloom tomatoes stealthfully poached from your neighbor’s garden in the dark of night.

The only thing these beauties have in common with those, stocked in our grocery store’s produce section for most of the year, is in appearance and even then almost not so much. The grocery store tomatoes are uniformly bright red. The tomatoes I stole from my neighbor’s garden are many colors and some variegated with yellow, orange purple or green. 

 

Tasteless Imposters

The supermarket tomatoes are tasteless imposters whose only redeeming value is that are in fact edible, but then so is cardboard.

If the truth be told for most of the year I avoid tasteless “fresh” tomatoes, grown in Mexico, bred to ship well and not spoil too quickly. But during the tomato season, which in Wisconsin generally runs from early August until sometime in October when we are hit with our first hard frost, I cannot get my fill of fresh tomatoes.

This is the season of bacon-lettuce-and tomato sandwiches, of when a slice of tomato can so beautifully top a hamburger or a delicious turkey sandwich. It’s the season of luscious sauces from fresh ripe tomatoes, both pasta sauces and curries. It is when they absolutely beam in a salad and in fact can define a simple salad in a way to make it magnificent. But if going in that direction, a thoughtful dressing is in order.

A Simple Vinaigrette

In my supermarket after you pass by the mounded bins of industrial grown faux tomatoes there is a one-hundred foot isle of shelves, stacked as high as you can reach, and abundantly, with various commercial “salad dressings.” These are there of course to give those tasteless tomatoes a facsimile of flavor. 

I guess those concoctions are fine after the joy of the harvest has had its Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year death rattle. They are fine as we suffer through the lethargy of January, February and March and from time to time assemble a mostly tasteless salad of greens. Those sad salads are a hopeful look forward to the spring to come. They aren’t the real thing but a facsimile of things remembered and those hoped for.

Annatto Extract?

Here’s what’s in the Wish Bone Balsamic Vinaigrette dressing: water, balsamic vinegar, soybean oil and extra virgin olive oil, sugar, salt, spices, caramel color, xanthan gum, sodium benzoate and sorbic acid calcium disodium EDTA, citric acid, natural flavor, sulfur dioxide, annatto extract.

You can see why dressing a garden fresh tomato, or any other in-season produce and fruit, with a commercial dressing is almost sinful. It disgraces the goodness of God’s seasonal bounty. And worse, those commercial dressings are built with inferior ingredients than those on our cupboard shelves and in our refrigerators. The one-hundred foot isle in my grocery store of salad dressings is largely stocked with a-half-dozen or so ingredients that already on my shelves – variously combining vinegar, oil, eggs, tomato paste, sour cream, sugar and spices.

They are mixed with many of the same things, but with things of inferior quality – soybean oil – and other mystery ingredients – annatto extract. Better cooking with chemistry after all.

Of all the things in the Wish Bone dressing, none of these are in my pantry: caramel color, xanthan gum, sodium benzoate and sorbic acid calcium disodium EDTA, citric acid, sulfur dioxide, and annatto extract. I have never eaten an annatto and for all I know “natural flavor” is, in fact, the flavorful juice from pressed pig’s ears.

Blue Cheese isn't a Sin

Eating in season means a sliced peach dressed with heavy cream and a few toast triangles for dunking is a beautiful breakfast. It also means beautiful ripe tomato wedges should be properly dressed. It’s a thoughtful thing, not here’s your choice of Ranch, French, or Italian. For a beautiful salad of tomato wedges the sauce is the key – complementary and not overpowering. This one is simple oil vinaigrette. And garnishing it with some crumbled Blue cheese wouldn’t be a sin.

Here's how it goes to serve two to four.

1 or 2 tomatoes sliced into wedges

¼ cup olive oil.

¼ cup balsamic vinegar

1 tsp. dried basil

1 Tbs. minced garlic

½ medium onion very thinly sliced

1 tsp. prepared Dejon mustard

Thoroughly mix the dressing then add the tomatoes and onions, marinate at room temperature for about two hours. Serve the tomatoes and onions over a bed of Iceberg lettuce torn into bite sized pieces. Drizzle additional dressing as desired over salad when serving. Garnish with crumbled Blue cheese or chopped fresh basil.

Parting Thoughts for Consideration

Because of its crunch and because this salad is intended to highlight tomatoes, iceberg lettuce is a perfect complement. The dressing, unlike its Wish Bone facsimile, contains no water balsamic vinegar is very mild, there is no sugar the basil serves as a sweetener, the oil is all olive oil rather than a blend. Better cooking with real food.