It's an awkward truth, but white people are doing best out of the fight against white privilege

The increasingly bitter racial tensions of our times exploded again at the beginning of the week, when the BBC thought it wise to give a platform to 2 idiotic white women to pontificate on how other white women could not be ‘karens.’

Karen, for those who don’t know, is an invention of American internet slang – an older, middle-class white woman with a sense of entitlement. So all social ills can now be placed at the feet of middle-aged, white women. Let’s see what feminists have to say!

Of course, if anything about the notion of white privilege made any sense, the social justice warriors would call out the irony of 2 silly young white women utilising a national platform to complain that white voices are too loud and fail to uplift black ones. They would ask why these women didn’t, indeed, “basically leave” as they insist that karens ought.

However, if they did that, they would have to face an uncomfortable truth – it’s whites who gain most from this new obsession with white privilege.

The white person is the one who emerges with the triumphant story of self-discovery and ultimate redemption.

Where once she walked in darkness, now the younger Karen has seen the light. She can expect praise for having done the right thing. She gets to say that she’s sorry to a sympathetic audience. She gets to assert her superiority over her fellow whites. She gets whatever gigs and prizes are for the taking – maybe even a spot on a BBC podcast.

She is so anti-racist that to call her out on the inconsistencies would be heresy. Indeed, since she has learned that much of her previously appalling behaviour was unconscious and the result of bias she didn’t even know that she has, she is spared further scrutiny. Some might even say that by leveraging the social capital of being a right-thinking white, Karen has become more privileged than before.

But Karen’s ethnic minority counterpart, I would suggest, does rather less well out of all this.

Whilst Karen’s star rises, nothing actually changes for her. Except of course that now Karen knows just how awful life has been for her and regards her slightest accomplishments against such an oppressive backdrop as nothing short of miraculous. Having fought and worked hard for all the things she has in life, she is now forced to listen to the ghastly spectacle of Karen telling her that, having got to where she is off the back of infinitely greater privilege, she will now seek to give it away.

This, of course, Karen will do in word only. Indeed, she now has to regard Karen as the victim because the privilege of her whiteness now confers guilt upon her. Poor Karen having to read all those books eh!

If Black Lives Matter could get over its ridiculous Marxist preoccupations with dismantling capitalism, defunding the police and attacking the nuclear family, it would undoubtedly find a real cause for protest in white privilege – a profitable business, if the $6000 an hour fee of the Whiteness Studies academic and author of ‘White Fragility’, Robin DiAngelo (herself white of course), is anything to go by.

If it stopped trying to destroy imperialism by ripping down statues of dead people we’d never even heard of, it might try and do something about the cultural colonisation of racial justice by white saviours.

The ugly truth is that there is a reason why the young women on the podcast spoke about white women getting out of the way, whilst doing the exact opposite. That is the fact that they don’t really believe that this privilege, if it does exist, will ever disappear. If it does, a lot of books and expensive training courses will be needed first.

The very idea of unbroken, systemic and structural oppression is a reaction of fundamentalist activism and academic expansionism to the relentless societal progress in the right direction on all the hot potato issues of our time, including racial equality.

In his must-read ‘The Madness of Crowds,’ Douglas Murray argues that the identitarian, intersectional thinking of our time has a tendency to create impossible propositions, for instance that you must understand me, but you can’t understand me.

The white privilege discourse, in my view, is another such impossible proposition, for privilege is not privilege without results. So if whites are supposed to recognise their privilege, that rallying call will only be heard by those who have already achieved a measure of success. That’s why there are few working-class, disabled, unemployed or impoverished whites crying crocodile tears over their good fortune.

White privilege is, sadly, nothing more than the public penance of the successful. Thankfully, when it’s such a money-spinner, it’s not hard to see that it’s actually a cynical exploitation of legitimate concerns about diversity and equal opportunities by those who can do the best job of appearing to shrink themselves down whilst in fact puffing themselves up.

It’s an awkward truth, but white people are doing best out of the fight against white privilege.