Progressives Need To Stop Lecturing White Voters About Their Privilege

"White privilege" is a dubious concept and lecturing people about it may be politically counterproductive. It's time to change the progressive approach to white voters.

Photo by Mike Von on Unsplash

“As white women we need to use our privilege to make positive changes,” kindergarten teacher-turned-social media influencer Arielle Fodor recently instructed the attendees of a now-infamous “White Women for Kamala Harris” Zoom fundraising call.

The clip quickly went viral and was blasted out across social and traditional media. While attendees were no-doubt overjoyed by the millions of dollars raised on the call, Fodor’s remarks quickly became fodder for all of the Democratic Party’s opponents.

They highlighted comments not only about the collective responsibility of America’s white women — a group over 100 million strong — but what she had to say about everyone else.

“If you find yourself talking over or speaking for BIPOC individuals, or God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat, and instead we can take our listening ears on,” she said, using language she no doubt adapted from her classroom. “So, do learn from and amplify the voices of those who have been historically marginalized and use the privilege you have in order to push for systemic change. As white people we have a lot to learn and unlearn, so do check your blind spots.”

Conservative media had a field day with the comments.

“Real people — men and women of all races and creeds — want intellectual rigor. We want to discuss ideas. We want to disagree like adults, not be shushed like kindergartners in segregated classrooms.” wrote New York Post columnist Kirsten Fleming. “If this is the campaign, it doesn’t bode well for a Harris presidency. Will debate and dissent only be allowed if the person is the right race and sex?”

Fleming is overstating her case. Vice President Harris was not on the call, nor would she probably argue in the same terms with the same logic as Fodor did. But it would be amiss for us to pretend that what Fodor said is rare in progressive circles.

Over the past decade, critical theory-inspired lectures on privilege and the construction of racial moral hierarchies — where privileged whites are at the bottom and a rainbow of minorities sit at the top — have become commonplace in progressive spaces.

It’s hard to sit and read progressive publications, attend progressive political conferences, or browse progressive-leaning social media accounts without encountering this idea that white people are the all-powerful movers and shakers of reality while people from racial minority groups are simply virtuous victims cast adrift in an ocean of white supremacy that risks drowning us.

I think a lot of well-meaning white progressives, like Fodor, think there is a moral imperative to support this narrative. Why shouldn’t the powerful take a knee for once and stand up for the powerless? The problem is, this theory of the world is far too simplistic and politically counterproductive.

“White privilege” is a dubious concept

Years ago, I attended a civil society conference in Washington, D.C. hosted by Weave: The Social Fabric Project. The project’s main goal was to rebuild connections between atomized Americans, but mostly what I saw at the 2019 event was various left-leaning speakers ruminating about Trump voters and warning about the dangers of white racism.

Eventually, a white woman from Ohio named Sarah Adkins took the stage and explained the story of how she came to be involved in community work that involves supporting at-risk women and children.

“I followed the perfect mold…I did all the things, I went to college, and I keep thinking of white privilege in my head so forgive me, that’s what’s in my head right now, very much white privilege,” she said, likely reflecting on the words of so many of the other speakers at the conference.

She went on to explain that her then-husband had killed both of her sons and then himself.

Adkins used this story to explain her own…privilege.

“I was wealthy, okay, I was a pharmacist, I made a lot of money, right? So after that happened, I really wanted to understand that for me there definitely was a lot of white privilege. I had money, I had health insurance, so people came in and cleaned up my house. I was able to pay for a funeral for my children,” she said.

I remember sitting there in shock in the audience. A woman had just told me that her entire family was wiped out in a murder-suicide and she considers herself privileged because she had the money to pay for a funeral?

And what does that have to do with her being white? Sure, it’s probably true that the percentage of white people who would have the savings to manage that cost is higher than the percentage of black people — but this is a massive generalization being made about groups that collectively include over 200 million people. There are white people who wouldn’t be able to afford funeral expenses, and there are black people who would.

But why was this even part of the story in the first place? The audience should have been filled with compassion for this woman, not waiting for her to tell us how good she has it.

Therein lies the problem with white privilege. It flattens the experiences of millions of people. If you’re white, you’re privileged. It doesn’t matter what else has happened to you — this is something you need to think about and acknowledge. And where should we stop?

Should I acknowledge that I have “Asian privilege” because the Census grouping I’m in has far lower suicide rates than white people? After all, it is far less statistically likely that someone from my group would be involved in murder-suicide than someone from Adkins’s group.

That also happens to be true for African Americans, who have a substantially lower suicide rate than white Americans. Psychologists even talk about a “Black-White Mental Health Paradox,” describing how African Americans tend to have much lower rates of mental illness than whites do, despite often ranking below whites in many other areas. Does that necessitate a conversation about “black privilege”?

It’s totally fine to talk about the role of race and racism in American society. It would be telling a blinkered story to ignore these factors in America’s past, present, and future.

But the problem with boiling it down these discussions to all-consuming racial “privilege” that every single person of a racial category shares is that it forces you to make generalizations about large groups of people.

Sometimes, it probably does hurt me to be a Pakistani-American. When there was a bomb threat called into my student center when I was in college at UGA, I high-tailed it out of there not because I was scared of the bomb. I was scared of the cops who were flooding into the building. I fail to shave one day and I look like I’m the next #2 in Al-Qaeda.

But other times, it’s been a huge benefit. It’s fun to tell people about my heritage, it makes me stand out. I’m grateful to be from a tight culture where family looks out for you.

Am I privileged, or not-privileged, as a result of being desi in the United States? I don’t know, and I don’t care, either. It’s just not right to try to boil down people’s experiences into black and white.

But that’s not the only reason progressives need to ditch this stuff.

Telling people about “white privilege” achieves little and racial messaging is often counterproductive

Around the same time I attended that Weave conference in D.C., I had the opportunity to review a very interesting social psychology experiment by the Colgate University academic Erin Cooley.

She set up a study where she had people first rate themselves on a liberal-to-conservative scale using various issues.

Then these people either read a short passage about white privilege if they were in an experiment group while the control group did not do the reading.

Both groups were told about a hypothetical man named Kevin who was down on his luck and living in New York City. Kevin was raised by a single mother on welfare and had also been in jail.

One group was told that Kevin was white and others were told that he was black.

What effect do you think the white privilege reading had on how participants viewed Kevin?

”What we found is that when liberals read about white privilege . . . it didn’t significantly change how they empathized with a poor black person—but it did significantly bump down their sympathy for a poor white person,” Cooley told me at the time. (Conservatives displayed no change at all.)

It’s worth bearing in mind that this is just one study. But it’s not like there is a mountain of research showing the opposite — that teaching people about white privilege makes them particularly sympathetic to minorities rather than just less sympathetic to white people.

In fact, it’s not clear what making race such a heavy part of progressive messaging achieves at all.

A 2021 study by a pair of Yale researchers studied different types of political messaging as part of an experiment. They found that emphasizing the racial impact of a policy like forgiving student debt or establishing Medicare for All was much less effective than promising that the policy would promote economic justice.

Is it really that hard to understand why? Why would white people want to support policies they percieve as disproportionately helping minorities? That may appeal to a small sliver of white liberals — like the ones who would jump on that Kamala Harris fundraising call — but it doesn’t appeal to people more broadly.

In fact, all of these race appeals from progressives may be playing right into Republican hands.

Playing into the Southern Strategy

GOP political consultant Lee Atwater famously crafted what has been referred to as the “Southern Strategy,” where he wanted the Republican Party to frame the Democratic Party as the party of African Americans and other racial minorities.

From casting the GOP as the party of Law and Order to railing against welfare queens, a series of Republican leaders successfully racialized a range of policy topics that were on their face racially neutral.

For years, progressives realized the potency of this attack. They knew that if the Republicans convinced Americans that Democrats wanted to drain the nation’s coffers to support minorities while forgetting about law-abiding, taxpaying white workers, it could be politically lethal to their agenda.

Progressives like Jesse Jackson made a point to push back on this narrative. During his speech to the Democratic National Convention in 1988, Jackson thundered:

Most poor people are not lazy. They are not black. They are not brown. They are mostly White and female and young.

Jackson wanted white Americans to know that they were among the ranks of the nation’s poor, too. It wasn’t just the inner city black mother they saw a television — an image that not only denigrated African Americans but minimized the suffering of millions of white poor people.

And he spoke in a manner that is alien to many of today’s race-focused progressives, telling us that skin color does not dictate someone’s suffering:

But whether White, Black or Brown, a hungry baby's belly turned inside out is the same color -- color it pain; color it hurt; color it agony.

While Jackson could not succeed in a time as conservative as the 1980’s, he was right to fear the racialization of poverty. Another study by the aforementioned Cooley found that participants were more likely to associate poverty with African Americans than with whites. These feelings helped predict opposition towards economic redistribution, likely because people believe that these policies benefit blacks over whites.

And yet today we are awash with progressives running head-first into the Southern strategy rather than counteracting it. The Brookings Institute tells us that forgiving student debt is essential to address the racial wealth gap; during a pandemic when Americans should have been united, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) told us that COVID relief “COVID relief should be drafted with a lens of reparations” because of spiking deaths in “Black + Brown communities.”

Why is any of this necessary? A sick person is a sick person. Someone with debt is someone with debt.

Treating white people as people

It often feels like progressives have to reach back nearly a century to talk about their ideal policy regime. But they’re unlikely to build the kind of social and political consensus that enabled legislative progress like that found in the New Deal and Great Society.

One of the biggest reasons why is how few white votes the Democrats are able to get. In 1992, believe it or not, Democrats were able to win the votes of 50 percent of white voters who never attended college. By 2020, that had dropped to about a third.

No one factor can explain something as complex as the voting patterns of tens of millions of people, but one thing’s clear to me watching progressive culture lately: it just isn’t a fun place for your average white person.

You’re told that your whiteness makes you privileged, and that means that you’re Arielle Fodor standing at the front of the kindergarten class ready to do whatever you need to comfort the assorted children (the entirety of America’s non-white population) in front of you.

A better way to approach white people is to just treat them like people. Tell them what you’ll do for them just as you would people from any other group. Put all the privilege stuff out to pasture — it was created by people in obscure corners of academia who had zero experience in serious political organizing or public policy.

Instead, Democrats can aggressively highlight how their policies benefit people of all group, including, yes, white people. It should be made clear over and over, just as Jesse that Democratic policies are not geared towards helping minorities. They’re geared at helping everyone. Beating the Southern Strategy and its modern cousins is all about dispelling the myth that white people don’t benefit from some Democratic policies.

So what if a higher percentage of black people are poor than white people? If you help all poor people, then all poor people are helped, whether they’re black, white, brown, or blue. The distribution doesn’t really matter if your policy is ambitious enough — just as we wouldn’t aim anti-suicide interventions at white people in particular just because the rate of suicidal ideation happens to be higher among them than other people for coincidental reasons.

I’m sure there are also a lot of progressives who feel like it’s a betrayal to not instruct a white person about all the benefits they go through life with. But isn’t it a greater betrayal to narrow your political coalition so you can do even less to help those minorities?

Progressives will never build the sustainable majorities they need across America’s legislatures and society unless they can convince more white people that they’re not here to lecture them — they’re here to help them just as much as they want to help anyone else.

Critical theory has been a loser for progressives. So it’s time to dump it. They have nothing to lose but their privilege walks.