Human Privilege

The violent disorder which is currently unfolding across America could eventually ruin the nation. The levels of violence are out of proportion. The looting, the arson and the attacks on people and their property are symptoms of a strain of politics which remains immune to reason.

This is apparent from the confusing rhetoric which is coming from the protests. The unchallenged belief that somehow all white people are to blame for the social problems faced by some black people. According to this logic a mere accident of birth (and indeed conception) immediately makes you responsible for racism, past and present.

There is a kind of fatalism to this ideology as it suggests that our entire destinies are controlled by our racial privilege or the perceived lack of it. Perhaps that is why violence is either encouraged or at least condoned because this nonsensical belief doesn`t stand up to any intellectual argument. The original complaint was against perceived police racism, but this original and specific complaint has descended into a rabbit hole world of “systemic racism”. This is repeated again and again despite the fact that there is no evidence. In fact the contrary is true the political system outlawed all structural and institutional racism with civil rights legislation some fifty years ago.

The notion of inherent racial privilege needs to be challenged. There is no scientific basis for this, the science clearly shows that we are all members of the human race and so we all share a common experience as members of the same species. Black and Asian people have approximately 99.5% of the same DNA as white people. The tiny fraction of difference accounts for skin colour and eye shape. We have the same physical potential and we have the same emotional and intellectual capacities. We all desire peaceful and dignified lives and we expect the same for each other. Privilege is a contrived phrase beloved of the Left, who with characteristic fashion subverted its original meaning as a gift or an honour. It is a negative view of the world which can never offer anything constructive.

The great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore said,

“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us”. Tagore was born into a wealthy Brahmin family but his “caste privilege” meant that he had the freedom and the means to travel throughout Bengal and write about the people that he met.

Some of the people that he encountered lived in poverty, but his poetry helped to illuminate their lives of struggle when they would otherwise be dehumanised by the oppressive and divisive system of the time. We should follow Tagore`s example and focus upon our shared humanity rather than nihilistic political ideologies.