The Resurrection of Privilege Under Law
Paul Craig Roberts
As my long-time readers know, I have emphasized for decades that in the United States race and gender privileges later extended to sexual perverts have replaced equality under the law ever since Alfred Blumrosen, a federal bureaucrat who was compliance chief for the EEOC, established a quota regime for university admissions, employment, and promotion 60 years ago. This was not merely an attack on white heterosexual males. It was also an attack on equality under law, on a merit-based society and on the traditional roles of men and women in society. No other decision has had more adverse effect on American Society.
The statutory language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act explicitly prohibits any race and gender quotas. However, Blumrosen reasoned that the federal judiciary in keeping with its tradition of deferring to regulatory agencies’ interpretations of laws would overlook his rewrite of the law should anyone have standing to challenge his ruling. Thanks to Alfred Blumrosen, white heterosexual American males have been second-class citizens without equal rights and equal protection of law for six decades. Yet they are alleged to have “white privilege.”
Among the US liberal-left, university and media crowd, “white privilege” is not merely an article of faith but also a proven undeniable fact, thereby turning lies into facts, something that we now take for granted as we do when Trump’s lies are treated as facts. This is another cost of Blumrosen.
In his article in the Unz Review, “Exposing Black Privilege: A Cursory Outline of Racial Prostration in American Life,” Richard Parker writes that there is no “white privilege” to examine and turns instead to innumerable examples of black privilege. I have written for years about these multiplying privileges and how they are being institutionalized in law, practice, consciousness, and society, resulting in a two-tiered legal system in which white heterosexual males are grouped together in the bottom tier.
Democrat cities such as San Francisco went so far as to decriminalize theft by blacks as long as it was limited to no more than $950 per store per day, thereby giving blacks the privilege to steal.
As the liberal-left does not regard the fictitious reporting of “white privilege” to be anti-white, just the truth, they have no basis to denounce the truthful reporting of black privilege as anti-black and racist, but they do and in this way raise the cost of reporting the loss of the Constitution’s protection of equality under law. It is paradoxical that a civil rights movement that set out to achieve equality under law in practice has destroyed it in law.
It is Blumrosen and white American liberals, not American blacks, who are responsible for the destruction of equality under the law. Some white Americans miffed about their second-class citizenship take their anger out on blacks. It is an easy mindset to fall into, and it has worsened race relations.
For a person of my generation, the description of Americans of African origin as black is puzzling as few are black. People of my generation will remember that their own preferred name was “colored people” or “negro,” the names of their own organizations. I don’t remember when the designation “black” appeared or whether it was their own doing or imposed on them by white liberals. Moreover, why is a person who is 50% or more white said to be black, such as President Obama. He is half white and declared to be America’s “First Black President.” Why does the 50% qualify Obama as black instead of white?
Most American “blacks” are the color of milk chocolate or lighter. I have seen some suntanned American white women with darker skin than some “blacks.” Many have more European blood than African. Why are these people black and not white? The Third Reich faced this problem with the mixed ancestry of Jews and Germans. What percentage of Jewish ancestry did a German have to have to be considered a Jew with second-tier rights? In David Irving’s heavily documented histories of World War II, he reports that there were 150,000 Germans of Jewish ancestry serving in the German army, many as officers even in the S.S. Clearly, being as much or more German than Jew cleared the person of the Jewish designation.
In the US “white racism” was created by white liberals who did not know, or chose to ignore, reasons for separate water foundations, schools, bus seating. Separate public water fountains and rest rooms were associated with fear of infectious diseases which were associated with the poor which many blacks were. Separate bus seating was due to the soiled clothing of “blacks” who did heavy manual labor and shared public transportation with well-dressed women in nice clean clothes. Schools were neighborhood schools to which kids arrived on their own. If you lived in a middle class neighborhood, you went to school with middle class kids. If you lived in a poor neighborhood, you went to school with kids from poor families. If you lived in a rich neighborhood, you went to school with rich kids. That is why to achieve school integration kids had to be expensively bussed across town. Clearly, if you went to school with rich kids, you made better contacts to make advancement in your life, but it was class-based, not race-based. It just so happened that Lincoln’s destruction of the Confederate States of America was so thorough that it set back the economic prospects of both “blacks” and whites for decades.
A couple of readers asked me if my opposition to immigrant-invaders is race-based. No. My opposition is based on the fact that a multicultural country is a Tower of Babel, not a nation. There is disunity, because people stir it up for political advantage and because there are not common mores, values, and behavior. The disunity means the people cannot come together to hold government accountable. Government elites protect their lack of accountability by turning the multicultural elements against one another. We have all been witnessing this for some time.
Actually, I prefer the immigrant-invaders to the white liberals and have suggested that Trump accept the immigrant-invaders and deport the white liberals and woke left. The white liberals have given us as much, if not more, disunity than results from immigrant-invaders. I use the word “immigrant-invaders” to emphasize that the US or a large part of it has no opposition to being overrun if the invaders are unarmed.
Equality under law was an historical achievement. Aristocrats had rights that commoners did not have. This was brought to an end over time in the British Parliament between the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Equality under law is protected in the US Constitution by the 14th Amendment.
This great achievement was overturned in the mid-1960s by EEOC bureaucrat Alfred Blumrosen. Congress and the federal judiciary have done nothing about it. The law schools, bar associations, corporations, and media are quiet as Privilege Under Law is re-established in the US and throughout the Western World.
You can read Richard Parker’s discussion of black privilege here: https://www.unz.com/article/exposing-black-privilege-a-cursory-outline-of-racial-prostration-in-american-life/
You can read my account of how black privilege was created here: Paul Craig Roberts and Larry Stratton, The New Color Line, Regnery, 1995.
The New Color Line was endorsed across the spectrum from Irving Kristol to Judge Robert H. Bork to Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz and was favorably reviewed by the New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Nevertheless, the destruction of the 14th Amendment has remained unaddressed by Congress, presidents, and the federal judiciary. Indeed, law schools today seem to believe that the Constitution is a racist document in the way of woke progress and should be dispensed with. The US Constitution does seem to be close to a dead document.