Bunchy Carter
I'll Take The Money Over The Honey
Former Labor leader Mark Latham.
Opinion
White men are being blamed for everything
Mark Latham, The Daily Telegraph
August 29, 2016 7:00am
WE used to be known as Australian citizens. But now, in the age of identity politics, we have our own special category: the white male. This is the new trend at the ABC and Fairfax Media — to judge people, not by the quality of their character or their contribution to society, but by the colour of their skin
and the shape of their genitals.Unsurprisingly, in this world of reverse racism, white men are being blamed for the whole shebang.
According to the Left’s propaganda, we are good for nothing and responsible for everything.
We made the Islamic terrorists take up arms and slaughter innocent people (even though the radical preachers promoting the caliphate are Arabic and African Muslims).
We made Aboriginal men record the highest rates of family violence in Australia (even though it’s usually white policemen who have to sort out the mess). We made Australia’s female population suffer (even though women now receive 60 per cent of the nation’s university degrees, enjoying higher-than-male remuneration in start-up jobs). We made the country abandon its fair-go principles (even though Australia now has 100,000 more welfare-dependent men than women).
No wonder the political and media elites are up us for the rent.
We have disgraced our skin colour and our genitalia.
David Leyonhjelm as an “angry white male”.
Kenny thinks it is “quite laughable” that white men could “have any deep understanding of what entrenched discrimination looks like.”
Try telling that to the greyhound trainers arbitrarily turfed out of their jobs by the Baird government. Or the many thousands of white men living on welfare following the economic restructuring of the 1980s and ’90s.
Or the sons of those men who grew up in households without the self-esteem and dignified role models of paid work.
In worshipping at the altar of identity politics, Kenny and his colleagues are ignoring the true nature of inequality. They claim to believe in diversity — but it’s only diversity between identity groups.
They depict all white men as identical: as ruling-class toffs lording it over women and non-white Australians
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Incredibly, they make no allowance for diversity within various types of identity groups.
Thus in Kenny-land, a white heterosexual unemployed man living off welfare in rural NSW is said to have more power and social opportunity than someone like Penny Wong — a well-paid Asian lesbian leader of the Labor Party in the Senate.
It’s a ridiculous notion, peddled by commentators who themselves have little contact with our poorest neighbourhoods.
Take, for instance, a place like Airds in southwest Sydney — a public housing estate with an unemployment rate of 27 per cent.
It’s the kind of suburb thoroughly ignored by leftist “equality advocates” such as Australian of the Year David Morrison, who instead concentrate on the big issues, such as uttering the word “guys”.
Airds has a median household income of $540 per week — just $28,000 a year. White men make up around one-third of the estate.
For those with jobs, they mostly work as labourers, machine operators and drivers.
It’s a long way from the heady ambience of Kenny’s workplace, in the Fairfax bureau on the top floor of Canberra’s Parliament House.
Most of the white men in Airds would give years off their lives for an office job like that.
There was a time in Australian politics when people calling themselves “tolerant” were blind to questions of race, gender and sexuality. Mainly because poverty itself was blind to these factors. A poor individual was an individual in need, regardless of their personal characteristics.
Now the inner-city Left looks down its nose at disadvantaged white men, stereotyping them as aristocrats who don’t know what “entrenched discrimination looks like”.
In reality, Airds’ menfolk could write the book on discrimination — based on the number of times they have missed out on job interviews, not because of their skills or work ethic, but because of where they live.
This highlights the craziness of Kenny’s identity fundamentalism.
He pretends that every person in a so-called minority group is irretrievably oppressed.
Meanwhile, every person in the so-called majority group (white males) is sipping champagne on Sydney Harbour, mapping out a skiing holiday to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos.
If the issues at stake weren’t so serious, Kenny’s position would be … well, quite laughable.
In practice, identity politics causes more harm than good.
It’s a crude, ineffective way of understanding social injustice — overlooking the importance of class-based and socio-economic factors in each unique, individual circumstance.
Even worse, among the groups excluded from the identity framework, it causes lasting resentment. If only Kenny could comprehend the bitterness his approach generates in places like Airds — as white men are told that their legitimate needs in life count for nothing.
This is one of the factors driving Hansonism, with low-income earners welcoming One Nation’s promise to treat people as individuals rather than an amorphous part of identity groupings.
The goal of centre-left politics should be to build co-operation between people, adding to the common purpose of shared citizenship.
Only then will voters support the ideals of community and the taxpayer-funded collectivism of the welfare state.
Identity politics takes society in the opposite direction: subdividing the community on the basis of race, gender and sexuality; building resentment among groups ignored by the selective nature of identity favouritism.
Among the many own-goals kicked by the Left, Marxism was thought to be the worst — a hopelessly flawed interpretation of human nature.
But in recent years, as I’ve watched the corrosive impact of identity politics in Western Sydney, I’ve concluded that this doctrine is worse.
Activists like Kenny are setting back the cause of the good society by decades. And judging by international trends, things are likely to get worse.
In the United States, universities are offering courses on how to “Stop White People” — a disaster for social harmony. This is the path on which Australia is headed, unless we break the Leftist stranglehold on the university system, government schools, “human rights” agencies and large parts of the media.
Via: No Cookies | Daily Telegraph
Good. 
