Why I wince when I hear the words ‘white privilege’
Citing “press reports” of training sessions at which employees were allegedly told “virtually all white people contribute to racism,” Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, ordered the review and possible cancellations in a Sept. 4 letter to federal agencies.
Besides the memo, Trump went typically Trumpian with a series of tweets the next day, retweeting about 20 from conservative media and others praising his new blow against the PC elite.
Well, as with “white privilege,” I, too, have objected to some of the excesses of “PC," ”cancel culture" and “critical race theory” that I have encountered on campus and elsewhere. But we talked out the disputes. Efforts to resolve and learn from cultural differences should be discussed and debated, not muzzled.
But this is an election year, isn’t it? Not surprisingly Trump’s retweets express delight over the approval his supposed clampdown has received from conservative media as Election Day approaches. To a tweet that called “critical race theory the greatest threat to western civilization,” for example, Trump responded “Not any more.” All hail our hero.
Media guru Marshall McLuhan declared back in the 1960s, “Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.” Government should try to bring various groups together, not drive more wedges — and wedge issues — to tear us further apart.
You can’t have open educational dialogue if only one side gets to do all the talking. That’s the worst kind of privilege, regardless of color.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2020 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
