There’s a scene in one of the funniest movies ever written, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, when a Jewish insurgent leader poses the question, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” [1]
Cognoscenti know the response from his fellow insurgents are things like “the aqueduct, sanitation, the roads…” etc. Point taken. The same thing can be said for the modern leftist bugaboo of the white male patriarchy.
I guess we should define terms. By white I mean your standard white male of European heritage. Others may genetically qualify, but they’re not in our brief today.
What have they ever done for us, meaning just about everybody? Well, there’s Magna Carta, the British Empire, the US Constitution, rescuing the world from fascism and communism (granted, also the products of white males) and most of our modern technology. Not a shabby list. I’m leaving out a lot of shining endeavors for the sake of brevity. I would have put Judaism and Christianity on that list as well, but technically they were started by Asian lads. Honorable mention.
This is not to say that others haven’t done a superb job in many areas. But if you look at the big picture white males have not exactly sat on the sidelines. Far from it. They’ve been in the game scoring the big points. True, there have been fumbles, very unfortunate fumbles. Prohibition and roller disco immediately come to mind. Though to be fair, both of those sound female in inception and predominate execution.
What is amusingly ironic about those whose racism and sexism focuses on white males is that the democracies they live in and the tech they use are mostly the innovations of many white males. It’s like a vegan at a barbecue. The hypocrisy is staggering.
You may think I’m feathering my own demographic bed here. Nope. Given notions commonly held I am not white. I’m Latin with some South American Indian and West African thrown in for flavor. 23 and Me tells me in the mists of time my Ibero-Celt ancestors were O’Neills who hailed from Donegal. Kinda cool.
Must say though, and sorry to break this to the Latin ethnic hustler industry, we Latins are in actuality quite white given the aforementioned Celtic ancestry. However, that seems to be lost on modernity. Thus my regard and respect for the white male patriarchy stems from my first intellectual passion, history.
For when we trash any specific group solely based on gender or race we kick history in the teeth and substitute an avaricious ideology based on envy and bitterness. That’s why things like reparations are so blatantly unfair and ridiculous.
One, everybody could play the reparations game going back to the start of mankind. Two, the perps who committed the heinous acts aren’t around anymore to pay for it. So the answer is steal from their descendants? Hardly.
The answer is ignore race and gender and concentrate on merit and achievement. Make it as level as a playing field as is fair to all then have at it. Some will succeed and some will fail. But it will be based on their individual talents, not on some arbitrary judgment based on matters they had no choice in and thus should not be judged on one way or the other.