I was having a chat with a longstanding friend about the election result. She is a Labour supporter who is enormously optimistic about the future and believes Labour will build thousands of houses and lift people out of poverty. This was not the time to mention words like Kiwibuild or point out that the poverty statistics are going in the wrong direction. It would have made no difference anyway.
Whether you agree with her politics or not (which I don’t), there is no doubt that this is a very smart, successful lady who votes as she does because she genuinely wants to help the downtrodden. I may disagree with her, but I also respect her for her views.
Which is why I was so surprised — even shocked — at the turn of the conversation a few moments later. We were talking about lockdown in Wellington, and she expressed an opinion that most of the people who worked from home were “privileged, white people” who happened also to be government servants.
I was taken aback by this, because this friend is a white, well-off person who is a government servant. I was equally taken aback because, in my experience of government servants, large numbers of these employees are not actually white at all. There is a deliberate policy in the government sector to try to employ people of non-European descent, and clearly it has been very effective over the last decade or so.
Also, my next-door neighbour, who is of Pacific Island descent, is a government servant who worked from home during lockdown. In fact, he does it quite a bit. So what is this ‘white privilege’ malarky?
Why exactly did she bring race into the discussion? Why are white people who worked from home ‘privileged’ while non-white people who worked from home are not?
I asked her that. Her response was: it is all very well to work from home if you have a nice house in Roseneath with a home office, but just imagine trying to do that in a state house in Rongotai with 5 kids all being home schooled!
Fair comment, I suppose, but white people live in Rongotai too, and non-white people live in Roseneath and the people we were talking about — mostly government servants – are all fairly well paid and so probably don’t live in places like Rongotai, even if they are non-white.
Let’s look at a few of the “privileged white people” in government. First, there is Jacinda. Then there is Grant Robertson, Chris Hipkins, David Parker, Andrew Little and Ginny Andersen, all white and privileged, and all politicians that she supports. It was Jacinda who forced us all to stay home in the first place, confining ourselves to our privileged houses in Roseneath or our hellholes in Rongotai. Jacinda didn’t differentiate, but somehow, that is okay because it is Jacinda.
Furthermore, she went on to criticise the National party for being almost entirely ‘white’ with its brown people all being pushed off the list by the likes of Chris Bishop and Gerry Brownlee. It is true that National lost a few people of colour, but surely they can blame the voters for that, and I’m not sure how Simon Bridges or Shane Reti might feel about that description. Shane Reti is one of the rising stars of the National party.
This is all beside the point, of course. What exactly is it that makes white people eat their own these days? Why do smart people like her, who are successful, well off and of European descent, decry people who are successful, well off and of European descent? Isn’t that like boarding a plane, hearing the pilot is a Trump supporter and hoping the plane crashes?
These generalisations really worry me. I live next door to people who break the stereotype mould, and yet I don’t think they are particularly unusual. Their expectations in life for themselves and for their children are much the same as mine yet I am ‘privileged’ and they are not.
This is the dogma of the left, championed by people like Jacinda, who repeat things over and over until they become truths: that white people are privileged and non-white people are not, even if they live in the same street, get paid the same amount and have the same aspirations as their white neighbours.
To call the family that lives next door to me downtrodden is so far from the truth, it is not funny, and yet that is the implication. All white people are privileged, while all non-white people are downtrodden. Say it over and over again and the truth doesn’t matter any more. It becomes the truth.
The biggest problem, of course, has yet to be faced by those parroting the mantras of the left, and they will be the last to see it. What will happen when the brown revolution comes? Do they think they will be treated differently from all those other privileged white people because they were the champions of the underprivileged? Take a quick look at South Africa or Zimbabwe to find the answer to that. Both countries, now failed states, once had a good structure, low unemployment and privileged white people, who ran the farms, the orchards, the factories, and made their countries successful. Take a look at those countries now, and weep.
I am not exactly sure what goes on in the heads of privileged white people who decry privileged white people, but one thing is for sure. Any race that allows itself to be vilified will not last long. People in the recent past, notably Stefan Molyneux and Jordan Peterson, have been condemned for discussing studies that claim that black people are less intelligent than white people, but that cannot be true. Black or brown people would never be stupid enough to eat their young like white people. This is a disaster waiting to happen for white people, and many of them just cannot see it.
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