Columnist taken to task for ‘white privlege’ comments
I trust you’ll forgive me for taking so long in responding to Mr. Owens’ comments on white privilege. I was kind of caught up in the “privilege” of working and paying taxes.
I read his comments with amusement and now am convinced that Mr. Owens is “identical twins.” No one can be that wrong by himself. There has to be at least two of him.
Every few years a new label is given to the same old parasitic whine or excuse justifying handouts, a helping hand up, or an attempt to justify the unjustifiable.
We started out with terms like “equal rights,” but that wasn’t good enough. So this “lobby of color” screamed for “unequal rights” through affirmative action and quotas. Of course they couldn’t call it for what it is, so they manipulated things to become even more unequal. Social engineering replaced ability and qualifications.
Then, we started hearing about “reparations” for past misdeeds. Now that dog won’t hunt, unless they’d be satisfied with our publicly stating that slaveowners were wrong, and their slaves were victims.
Well, that isn’t enough (but that’s all you’ll get from me). My great-grandparents and grandparents never owned anyone. They immigrated to this country around the turn of the last century and were stuck being relative indentured servants to the Carnegies and Fricks in the mines.
Essentially they were owned by those people. They labored in the mines, then gave the meager wages they earned back to the mining companies, via their company stores. I’m sure a lot of you can make the same claim.
I suppose that’s “white privilege,” but had there not been a civil war years earlier, you can bet the: Carnegies, Mellons and Fricks would literally have been slaveowners. Of course these 20th century paid reparations with libraries, parks and I suppose banks. They sure name a lot of things after these scoundrels.
After a while, people of my grandfather’s generation formed unions to try to get a fair wage, eight-hour workdays, a 40-hour week, the abolition of child labor and pay for working overtime.
The only weapons these union workers had against the industrialists was the strike. Ah, but the Carnegies, Fricks and Mellons weren’t going to capitulate that easy. They started bringing blacks up here from the South to try and break the strikes.
Is it so hard to understand why unions weren’t too willing to let blacks join? Granted both whites and blacks were being played as pawns by the captains of industry but nobody saw that. All they saw was that their efforts to negotiate a fair wage and humane working conditions were being thwarted by these strikebreakers.
Mr. Owens tell us about John Stewart and Bill O’Reilly debating “white privilege” on “The Daily Show.” Ah, but he gives a real biased view of how that debate panned out and I suspect a lot of that of that debate found itself on the editing room floor.
Mr. Owens never touches on the subject of high percentage of one-parent households in the black community. O’Reilly believes, as do most rational people, that the lack of a father-figure in the household greatly contributes to this “systemic systematized subjugation” and being “warehoused in less than ideal communities.”
Don’t the people who live in a community: create, maintain and advance their community? Is it my fault, that some don’t maintain their community? Is it my fault, that crime is so rampant in some communities that businesses won’t even locate there?
Homewood in Pittsburgh has no supermarkets. Why? Because the one’s they had kept getting robbed, so they stopped opening them there. Is that my fault, or do think maybe it’s the people who live in Homewood who are at fault?
If it takes a village to raise a child, the villages of Homewood and the Hill District are doing a terrible job. It takes parents and in some cases an exceptional parent to raise a child. If you can’t do that, then you have no business being a parent. There are ramifications to the bad decisions we make, and trying to mitigate them with the claim of “white privilege” is dishonest.
Surely having a two-parent household, or a household with an exceptional lone parent isn’t some “white privilege.” It’s the burden of being responsible, regardless of one’s color.
Mr. Owens’ example of the “white privilege” he had to deal with is pretty pathetic. His story of how a white girl sports editor for the Senior High News stole his byline is an example of theft not privlege. Basically this girl took his lunch money. She was a thug, and it was becoming obvious that he was a lop, a real pathetic nerd.
Now many years later, he whines about this as white privilege and it’s laughable. All he had to do, to remedy the situation, was after some “big” game, submit nothing to the Senior High News.
Everyone would have been held responsible, since she would put her byline on all of his pieces. She would have been exposed as the thief of his intellectual endeavors and he would have been named sports editor. Ability should trump quota every time.
Was he really writing about “white privilege,” or just the collective stupidity of Mr. Owens and his twin brother. Now if I could just figure out how to “aggressively ignore” the lame rhetoric they spew. Ah, but it’s so much fun to ask: “are you serious.”
John Lucas is a resident of Vanderbilt.