A professor at Singapore Management University said that white privilege is a “dangerous myth.”
Richard McDonough said the Left’s critique of “unearned” benefits is “fundamentally misguided and dangerous.”
The idea of white privilege “is an attempt to delegitimize tradition and culture.”
Writing at Chronicles, McDonough said that people can be privileged because their parents accumulated wealth, gained prestigious positions or encouraged higher education.
He said:
One can easily identify numerous groups of Americans born with unearned privilege. Consider children of the following groups: professional athletes, members of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government, celebrities, extremely attractive people and models, members of MENSA, famous artists, television “news” presenters, military officers, university professors and administrators, high-ranking union officials, among many others
McDonough gives an example of the privilege Vice President Kamala Harris had growing up — and how society should encourage it.
“Her father was a Stanford professor and her mother was a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley’s Zoology and Cancer Research Lab,” McDonough wrote. “Her family had connections with the University of Chicago, McGill University, the University of Illinois, the University of Wisconsin and the National Institute of Health. Yet there is no criticism from the left that Harris’s massive inherited unearned privilege makes her accomplishments somehow unjust.”
He does not begrudge Harris or her parents — instead he wants liberals to think about how critiquing privilege is harmful.
“My argument is not, however, that Harris’s massive unearned privilege makes her accomplishments unjust,” eh said. “Quite the contrary. Cultivating this kind of privilege is a necessary ingredient in the production of successful people and, therefore, successful societies.”
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