MTV’s “White People” show hasn’t even aired yet but white-people’s champion Megyn Kelly has already gone on pre-emptive offense against what her guest called the “odious lie” about white privilege.
Kelly held her two-on-one-against-the-show debate based only on the trailer. She introduced the discussion by saying, “So far we have only seen the trailer but there is outrage from some corners over a new MTV documentary that the network says takes a look at white people and their struggles of living with white privilege." She never said just who is outraged.
After playing the trailer, Kelly turned to conservative guest Rich Lowry, who showed his true colors on race after Baltimore. Kelly sarcastically quoted the trailer by asking, “How might your life be different if you weren’t white?”
Lowry noted no one has seen this program but bashed it anyway. “I think we’re pretty safe in assuming that it will be as stupid and exploitative as you’d expect from a network that gave us Jersey Shore and Teem Mom 2,” he said.
Kelly sneered sarcastically, “Don’t be misled. They genuinely care about American society and its improvement.”
Lowry complained that white privilege is “based, really, on an odious lie about our society.” He did admit “There’s no doubt that we have a hideous history with racism in this country,” but, he declared, “That doesn’t determine anyone’s future right now.”
Kelly took another swipe by noting the show was produced by Jose Antonio Vargas, “an illegal immigrant, a Pulitzer Prize winning illegal immigrant.”
With open contempt, she read a quote from the show, “This is what it’s like to be white. You get this feeling that things belong to you.” Then, with joking theatrics, Kelly cried, “Who died and made her the spokesperson for white people?”
The other guest, liberal Leslie Marshall quickly said that person doesn’t speak for her. However, Marshall did say her favorite class in college was called The Sociology of Prejudice and that the trailer reminded her of how much she learned about other religions and colors in that class.
Kelly asked Lowry, “Are we adult enough in this society to have that conversation and (cue the Vargas bashing) do we trust that conversation to be in the hands of this particular filmmaker who has come out and talked about, ‘We can’t talk about racism until we face white privilege in this country,' and about how a new America is being created right now and talking about the growing presence of non-white people as a good thing, and so on, and that’s fine but is this the shepherd we want?”
Remember, this is the woman who hosted an infomercial for Dinesh D’Souza’s nativist “America: Imagine the World Without Her.”
Lowry added, “We’re overly obsessed with race, especially the left. When they look at people they don’t see individuals they see skin color.”
He then offered Appalachia as “proof” that white privilege doesn’t exist. It’s “some of the whitest counties in America,” Lowry noted, “and if race were determinative of success in this country, those would be one of the best counties to live in, in this entire country, and of course, they’re some of the poorest counties in this country.” He went on to say that the top colleges “almost all discriminate in some form or another against Asian applicants because they’re such successful students. So is there Asian privilege in this country as well?"
Kelly complained that “fancy private schools” in New York City (like the ones her kids undoubtedly attend) have “Got privilege? Check it!” posters on the walls. They “teach that America is bad… because of what the white people did to the American Indians,” she claimed, and "devote entire years of school, teaching the kids about that fact. People think that it is white shaming as opposed to just getting a dialogue started on race issues.”
Marshall smacked down Lowry’s example (which “straight news anchor” Kelly didn’t do) by pointing out that “you don’t see a lot of color” in “hoity-toity schools.”
But Kelly was ready to object now. “That is not true in New York City,” she said. “That is not true here.” As if she is upset that her own kids have too many kids of color in the class.
Kelly ended the discussion with a joke, using the false stereotype that African Americans don’t need protection from the sun.
“How would your life be different if you weren’t white?” Kelly asked. “I would be darker, hopefully not have to lather on the SFP 80 the entire time and stay underneath the umbrella.”
She was kidding but it was yet another example of Fox suggesting that whites are the oppressed ones.
Watch it below, from The Kelly File on July 9.
Also, many of the “white privilege” arguments only hold water if we assume all or most whites to hate non-whites or at the very least to harbor significant prejudices about them. For example, arguments like “whites have the privilege of being able to shop without the store owner looking at them with suspicion”.
First of all, this is a classic hasty generalization fallacy, and again it is predicated on a shameless stereotyping of all white storeowners as racists.
Second, and this gets back to my point about how the “white privilege” argument dubiously conflates all non-whites into a single “PoC” category who are all equally ‘marginalized’. But let’s be honest, folks. In cases where white shopkeepers do conform to steretype, they aren’t worried about Asians, and they probably couldn’t distinguish an ‘Hispanic’ with a European phenotype from any other white kid. They’re sudpicious of blacks, particularly young black males.
So what is the racist shopkeeper doing? Profiling of course. Steretyping. The problem is, the ‘white privilege’ narrative rarely rises above the level of profiling whites.
I might add, it is not only white shopkeepers that sometimes keep a wary eye on their black customers. Asian, Latino, and other non-blacks are at least as likely to.
Other ‘white privilege’ arguments tend to center around the assertion that simply being in the majority is itself a ‘privilege’. While it’s true people in the majority population may often fail to recognize that certain things they take to be universal may not be seen the same way by people not in the majority, it seems rather polemical to characterize this as a ‘privilege’; more often than not it’s an innocuous and inevitable oversight.
If I were to go to France, and characterize the French to be ‘privileged’ over me because their street signs are in French, and I don’t speak French, I would be a fool. Much of the ‘white privilege’ narrative strikes me as being substantially similar.
So if a black person or mestizo of Latin-American origin wants to talk about ‘white privilege’, I might listen, but when an affluent Asian-American or white Hispanic pipes in I will just laugh.
That is why they should have been on that show, to show that their white lives are a struggle, not only because of the criticism for them being white, successful, fair and balanced. They struggle because they are being impeded by the supreme court who give blacks and hispanics rights that should have been preserved only for them. They struggle because of this being the 21st century and white privilege is being tampered with and being limited, that is the true struggle.
So it’s not that they are against the MTV show whites, they are against it because it is not about them and how whites struggle due to their rights and privileges being tampered with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7iQbBbMAFE
Opening lyrics:
Prejudice. Wrote a song about it. Like to hear it? Here it goes:
(This is my all-time favorite En Vogue song. And one particular line seems like it could be particularly directed at the
I mean, girl, look around your network. Just how many NON-Caucasians have REGULAR, ON-AIR shows on FoxNoise? Sure, a privileged (Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas) few get to come on for guest appearances and an even luckier few get to sit in as hosts (about as often as the entire US experiences total solar eclipses) but FoxNoise, in general, is about as white as a Klan rally. (There may be dozens of Black faces roaming around the FoxNoise halls but I’d be willing to bet they don’t get to hang around with the on-air talent any longer than they’re needed.)
The very fact that you don’t seem to have a real clue about how your life might/would be different if you were African-American is proof positive of your white privilege.
