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This right here has to be my biggest objection to Woke/Social Justice/Leftism/cultural marxism thought when applied to historical 'privilege' arguments.
Collective guilt is assumed. Guilt for your ancestors' bad behavior is mandatory. And of course you can be collectively lumped in with people you've never associated with and share no beliefs with if someone deems you to possess enough characteristics in common with them.
But credit or pride? No, silly, you can't be proud of things members of your group did! You can't take credit for advances that were achieved by your forefathers! Those were individual accomplishments that you had no role in! Why would we let you claim those in the present? But of course the fact that you benefited from them should make you feel MORE guilty over your privilege!
Nevermind that whatever the mechanism they claim allows guilt to propagate forward through time... should by definition also carry credit and accolades forward.
And they do that because a fair accounting would make it clear that in the grand scheme, the amount of suffering that Westerners have caused in history, while it is a staggering amount, is on net outweighed by the sheer magnitude of benefits they have achieved for all humans, everywhere, and continue to achieve. So if you want to hold modern Westerners accountable for sins of their fathers, don't be surprised if they start looking back and taking credit for and pride in the successes and victories of their fathers, too.
Obligatory Thomas Sowell banger.
I really must read one of his books, every time someone shares one of his quotes on Substack or quotes him in an essay he comes off as incredibly sharp and perceptive.
He's the rare intellectual that lives up to the hype, and balances sharp wit with incisive commentary, backed by actual research.
Shame he's so old, we won't have him for much longer.
Not to be a contrarian, and I don't mean to disrespect Thomas Sowell whom I know little about, but I don't think that's a revelationary quote. It's something obvious that any intelligent person would have observed, except that if you say it out loud, you will get accused of white supremacy and fired from your job.
Thomas Sowell has the benefits that he is a black man so the usual white supremacy accusations don't stick (I'm sure they'll call him an Uncle Tom, though) and
he has life tenure as a judge of the supreme court. That enables him to say what everyone is thinking without the usual blowback. I'm glad he's saying it, but I don't think it's a particularly insightful or original thought.He's done a lot of useful research and distills insights down to pithy sayings that even normies can comprehend.
Him being black is surely a factor, but his observational abilities are extremely keen by any reasonable measure.
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That's Clarence Thomas, not Thomas Sowell.
Oops, you're right. How embarrassing. Wikipedia tells me Thomas Sowell was a professor at UCLA between 1974 and 1980 and is now 95 years old, so clearly in a position to say whatever he wants. But the quote isn't necessarily recent; when did he say that?
If he was a tenured professor at ACLU that's still consistent with my point that he was in a unique position to say what was obvious to anyone with a brain. Kind of similar to Jordan Peterson who could say the things he said because he was a tenured professor who didn't have to worry about losing his job, not because he was the first person to ever think of them.
JK Rowling is another example. And many such cases.
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This isn't true, though. A common, but not major, "woke" talking point is that black people ought to be proud of all the things their ancestors did, often including rather historically questionable claims of inventions or identities, such as the claim that Shakespeare plagiarized from a black woman or that Cleopatra was black. Of course, this is often justified on the basis that this sort of pride is only to make up for the way oppressive society forces them to be shamed merely for existing or whatever, but also of course, the actual explanation doesn't matter. It's just who/whom, based on identities that educated people can convince themselves belong to whatever part of the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.
Perhaps, although I think they allow you to feel pride only in proportion to the amount of oppression that was heaped upon your people.
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If I was of a group that had barely any ancestors [particularly, of my gender] that did anything interesting, it's only natural I'd be tearing down the notion anyone should be proud of that too, least of all the people closest to me (i.e. men) whose ancestors actually did do anything interesting.
I would also be incredibly concerned about the fact that the technological developments that even allow me to feel this way in the first place were also nearly exclusively developed by those ancestors. I would claim that the reason why my ancestors have no achievements is out of malice, and make sure the dominant pretense in society is that my gender (in aggregate) is just as capable- because if those guys organized (in the way my gender does instinctively), they would shut me out again.
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