Let me repeat this quotation from a laudatory pre-election essay on Obama from The New Republic:

Obama understands the white liberal American distaste for power as a symptom of white privilege, and he is certainly right.

Note the ease with which the term “white privilege” has migrated from the discourse of a mostly oppositional university/activist identity politics into the neoconservative lexicon, where it becomes yet another militaristic synonym for limp-wristed, effete, pacifist, girly, not-ready-for-the-dangers-of-the-world, “Old Europe” etc.

American multicultural identity politics seems destined, like all identity politics that went before it, to have begun in a just defense against the threat of complete cultural or existential dissolution and to end in an imperial exercise of a power that justifies itself with reference to a no-longer operative powerlessness.

Previous examples include: American exceptionalism, begun in the Biblical universal history of the oppressed Puritans and ending in the genocide of Native Americans and the justification of slavery and American imperialism; German nationalism, which started out as a resistance against the twin Enlightenment pincers of the English market and the French state and ended in the Holocaust; and Zionism, birthed by resistance to the anti-semitism of Europe and now responsible for the ongoing Palestinian genocide.

The phrase “white privilege” already functions as a discursive power-play belying the theory that underwrites it. Typically an exchange goes like this: person A makes an claim, usually one linking a non-race-based form of oppression to a race-based one, or else asserting the non-determinate relation between race and culture; person B replies that person A could only make such a linkage or such a statement because he or she was blinded by his or her white privilege.

Now, if this argumentative move works, it’s because the protocols of discourse surrounding the conversation valorize the non-possession of white skin; in other words, the term only takes on its discursive function in an atmosphere of the privileging of the anti-white.

Person A could of course object again that his or her claim were universally or just trivially true and not conditioned by her privilege, but this would only activate the second mechanism which makes white privilege a powerful phrase: possession of it cannot be denied, because denial of it is the leading indicator of its possession. In other words, only someone with an excess of white privilege would deny possessing it.

The most amusing conversations happen when both interlocutors are persons of color, as often happens since no two people of any skin color or any “culture” (whatever that means) will agree on everything. Then one speaks of ethnic self-hatred, internalized white privilege and everything we’re primarily familiar with from the repertoire of the defender of Israel.

Aside: “People of color” is itself a mystificatory term, serving to obscure the class difference between, for instance, the right-wing racist upper-middle class non-white person and the impoverished excluded working- or underclass non-white person, to the benefit of the former. For instance, Oprah Winfrey gets to be seen as part of an internationally oppressed culture because she is a person of color, which allows her to legitimate her colonizing actions on an African continent to which identity politics grants her a proprietary claim that, from the point of view of political analysis and ordinary morality, is wholly indefensible.

“White privilege,” for all its proponents’ talk of “intersectionality,” also tends to de-legitimate or vitiate intra-cultural or pan-cultural forms of political resistance, such as feminism and gay liberation.

For instance, in the wake of the passage of Propostion 8, for which African-American voters in California cast a non-decisive but alarming 70% of their vote, defenders of the concept “white privilege” asserted that the LGBT movement was too driven by narrow middle-class white interests (true enough) and that it did not do enough to explain its cause to African-American citizens. This too would be fair enough, except that it’s identity-politics conventional wisdom that members of minority groups should not be expected to explain why their oppression is wrong or why their group does not pose a threat. Why this double-standard for people minoritzed for reasons other than race or culture? Largely, I suspect, because racial/cultural identity politics always serve to shore up conservative tendencies within a culture as a means of maintaining a cohesion that benefits the ruling class of the oppressed group. Certain strains of feminism, LGBT liberationism, Marxism and anarchism threaten to dissolve the cohesion of all cultures in favor of a more radical egalitarianism than that which can be established between stratified identity groups.

I began with a quote from The New Republic, that bastion of neoliberal imperial ideology; let me conclude with an ambivalent quotation from an essay in its slightly more moderate counterpart The Atlantic Monthly:

Zionism may actually be the most successful national liberation movement of the 20th century.

Whatever the achievements of Zionism—

(and they are real, just as American exceptionalism produced the humane culture of abolition and Transcendentalism, German nationalism gave us some of the greatest achievements in nineteenth-century European philosophy and literature, and U.S. multiculturalism built and codified a twentieth-century literary and musical canon surpassing in genius much of anything done in the white mainstream: “every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism”)

—its morally calamitous career, which I have the right to comment on since my tax dollars fund it, should warn us against any ideology which conceives of liberation in national, racial or creedal terms.

“White privilege” was a useful concept once, and in some circumstances it still is, but let us not overlook its oppressive underbelly, its capacity to provide rhetorical cover for those most intractable minoritarian privileges of class and empire.