‘White Privilege’ Essay Contest Stirs Up a Connecticut Town

A diversity committee in Westport, Conn., a wealthy coastal town that was 93 percent white as of 2010, asked high school students earlier this year to reflect on the role of “white privilege” in their lives.

The students were largely fine with the question, which was posed in an annual essay contest.

Some residents in the town of 26,000, which has a median household income north of $150,000 and voted by a margin of 2 to 1 for Hillary Clinton over Donald J. Trump, chafed at the idea that race was a factor in their success. And after the story attracted media attention recently, many outsiders weighed in by calling local officials and storming the township’s Facebook pages.

The essay contest, which has run for four years and typically attracts 10 to 30 entries, offers prizes of $1,000, $750 and $500 to the top three winners. It’s run by a volunteer committee that is not associated with the school district, and the prizes are funded by private donations.

“In 1,000 words or less, describe how you understand the term ‘white privilege’. To what extent do you think this privilege exists? What impact do you think it has had in your life — whatever your racial or ethnic identity — and in our society more broadly?”

Harold Bailey Jr., a retiree and the chairman of Team Westport, the town’s diversity committee, said in an interview on Thursday that the question — devised in September — was not intended to be leading.

“We are not implying anything about our town other than this town has an openness to exploring the topic and discussing it,” he said.

But merely mentioning white privilege seems to have struck a nerve, with much of the criticism coming from out of town.

The term is used, most often by those who lean left politically, to reflect what they identify as a wide range of societal advantages white people knowingly or unknowingly enjoy. The classic example of unequal treatment is the ability to easily hail a cab, but there are more serious ones, such as easier interactions with the police. The term tends to make some white people bristle because they interpret it to mean that their success is unearned or that they benefit from racism.

The national attention began this week with an Associated Press story that quotes one resident calling the question offensive, and one woman who said she “wouldn’t go there.”

Bari Reiner, 72, told The Associated Press that Westport welcomes anyone who can afford to live there.

“It’s an open town,” she said. “There are no barricades here. Nobody says if you’re black or whatever, you can’t move here.”

“This is nothing more than race baiting,” one commenter wrote on Team Westport’s page. “You are a joke.”

“Make no mistake, the idea of white privilege is just as racist as saying there is black privilege,” another commenter wrote.

Westport, which is about 50 miles from midtown Manhattan and about 13 miles east of Stamford, Conn., created the diversity committee in 2003 to “make Westport a more welcoming community on an ongoing basis,” Mr. Bailey said.

In an overwhelmingly white area, it’s all the more important to discuss race, he said. While the adults might commute into New York City or maybe once lived in more diverse areas, the students are less likely to have been exposed to people who aren’t like them, he said.

The committee, he added, is intended “to get folks to take a look at what’s not here demographically, and to think about it and talk about it and keep it in the forefront.”

For all of the hand-wringing among adults, the students appear to have greeted the essay contest and the resulting uproar with a shrug. Some students said the question wasn’t a big deal in the high school until the media spotlight arrived, and that they were comfortable discussing white privilege.

“It isn’t that much of a taboo subject,” said Fritz Schemel, a 17-year-old senior at Staples High School.

He said he had read several essays in English classes debating the term. At the very least, he found the essay question to be the start of a reasonable discussion. Students who disagreed with the concept were free to say so, he said.

Claire Dinshaw, also a 17-year-old senior at Staples, said the discussion was important “because on a daily basis, we really aren’t exposed to much diversity within our town.

“It’s important to learn about that and figure out how the nation as a whole works, because the whole nation isn’t going to be 93 percent white,” she said.

...”Yes, my white (male) privilege means:
1) I need higher GPA & SAT scores to get into college
2) There is significantly less scholarship $ for me to go to college
3) First one to be laid off at work
4) Much easier to be fired at work for poor or normal performance than minorities and other protective classes
5) For every dollar in government value I get, I have to send in two dollars
6) I’m the only target open for mockery in politics, entertainment, news, open discussion.
7) I’m likely to be passed up for jobs or promotions due to affirmative action and similar policies across government and corporate America
8) I’m told I’m racist, sexist, bigoted every 10 seconds
9) Despite the fact I grew up in a fairly poor household and didn’t receive any money for higher education from family, I’m told how easy I had to become successful.
I could go on all day and if I specifically went “male privilege” I could triple the size of list.”...

Excellent. We have been living George Orwell’s 1984 for at least 10 years and political correctness and censorship of freedom of speech are two of the greatest offenders to what is normal and natural for human beings. What white kid is not going to ultimately figure out that he/she has been marked for abuse and mistreatment at the hands of government education, not to mention other dangers lurking out there simply for being white. They call it “white privilege” but the real reason is pathological envy connected to that white skin. We are headed back to the jungle at breakneck speed in this nation. Look at the Revolution taking place against our President. I have been very concerned for a long time, maybe 20 years as I have watched this nation coddle evil and criticize good. Now, I am beginning to wonder what the outcome is going to be for the civilized world.

In the 1980s I got a job at Flushing hospital New York city during a 1199 hospital workers union strike that went on for months. When it was over, they kept me on but with a new boss constantly abusing me. What was my crime? I was white while the majority of people in the union were black and Hispanic.

I went down to the union office to see if I could get into the union and was literally laughed at and told no way because I was white. Tell me again about white privilege.

I'm trying to decide what is more rare: Seeing Bigfoot or seeing a white traffic cop in NYC or a white 911 dispatcher. Tell me again about white privilege.

Oh and by the way: Do white firefighters get $98 million dollars for fake racism claims? Tell me again about white privilege

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140318/POLITICS/140319864/black-firefighters-announce-98m-settlement

The charge of "white privilege" is a hate-laced guilt-trip laid upon decent, hard-working, mainly middle class Americans by God and America hating Progressive Leftists. In David Kupelians' latest best-seller, "The Snapping of the American Mind: Healing a Nation Broken by a Lawless Government and Godless Culture," he chronicles the decline and fall of America and shows that it was deliberately orchestrated by progressives. Compared with the decent, morally ordered, child and family-friendly nation it once was, today's progressive dominated America is a different country altogether said Kupelian:

"(it is) deeply and angrily divided, unable to deal with crises foreign or domestic, the world's greatest debtor nation with 50 million people on food stamps, rampant divorce and family breakdown, unprecedented sexual anarchy with 110 million with STDs, almost 60 million abusing alcohol, and over 70 million taking mood-altering drugs. On so many levels, America is becoming ever more "bizarre"---diametrically opposed to logic and common sense. Although America's bizarro transformation has been in progress for decades, it burst into full bloom in the age of Obama. " (p. 10)

Here's how retired Marine Lt. Colonel Oliver North describes Progressive controlled, bizarro America, where according to the U.S. government North is a racist and an extremist because:

" I am a Christian and meet regularly with other Christians to study Gods word. My faith convinces me the prophecies in the Holy Bible are true. I believe in the sanctity of life, oppose abortion and want to preserve marriage as the union of a man and woman. I am a veteran with skills and knowledge from military training and combat. I own several firearms, frequently shoot them, buy ammunition and consider efforts to infringe on my Second Amendment rights to be wrong and unconstitutional. I frequently support the sovereignty of the United States, am deeply concerned about our economy, increasingly higher taxes, illegal immigration, soaring unemployment and actions by our government that will bury my children beneath a mountain of debt. Apparently, all this makes me a 'right-wing extremist.' At least that's what it says in the April 7, 2009 'assessment' issued by the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security." (ibid, pp. 14-15)

So just what is progressivism and/or liberalism and leftism? In a succinct definition actor Jon Voight said

, "Progressive' is Very Devious Term--Created as Substitute for 'Communist"

Having rejected the Holy Trinity, their souls and the religious heritage of our civilization, progressives embrace instead a new order of beliefs of which Communism and Socialism are logical expressions. A new world order is what they seek, but in order that it can emerge, the existing culture must be completely destroyed.

And what is Communism? Using the former Soviet Union as an example, early Conservative intellectual Frank Meyers describes it as, "The state form taken by a materialist faith determined to rule the world." Communism or scientific pagan materialism is "the final synthesis of all heretical tendencies that have pervaded Western civilization for many centuries." It is materialist scientism, of which,

"Communism is the culminating hubris of the Promethean man who reaches out for the world and means to remake creation. It is scientism gone political." (The Conservative Intellectual Movement, pp. 251-252)

Progressivism is therefore a pagan and pantheist religion. Its cosmogony, or origins account, is evolutionary scientism. Progressivism zealously promotes evolutionary scientism as a sacred secular (atheist) religion, as Michael Ruse, professor of philosophy and zoology at the University of Guelph, Canada makes clear:

"(Evolutionary scientism is a) full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint – and Mr [sic] Gish is but one of many to make it – the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.... Evolution therefore came into being as a kind of secular ideology, an explicit substitute for Christianity." ( Michael Ruse, creation.com)

When Nietzsche declared the death of God he well knew that His 'death' meant the death of Western and American civilization because the Holy Triune God is the very foundation or root of our civilization. This being true, if we want to tear down and destroy Progressive Leftism we must tear it out by its roots, meaning its deified evolutionary origin account.

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