#JewishPrivilege, #WhitePrivilege, etc., etc.

by George Rojas

A minor furor erupted last week over the trending of the hashtag “#JewishPrivilege” on Twitter. Created by ‘white supremacist bots’, according to Haaretz, Jewish Twitter-users were, of course, aghast at the development, many of whom responded by appealing to the Holocaust and past experiences with antisemitism (which Sarah Silverman did) as a way to push back. Eventually, the hashtag “flipped” and became almost completely populated with stories of personal and historic suffering.

Jews’ collective rebuttal was noteworthy. Gentile whites, of course, have long watched their own #WhitePrivilege campaign trend highly on Twitter, and if appealing to historical, group-based traumas is enough to dispel it, they are certainly not lacking in this department. They haven’t, of course, had their own fiery, racial holocaust, but episodes of whites being targeted as whites certainly aren’t few and white history generally is replete with miseries of all sorts.

Since the beginning of black rule in South Africa, for instance, thousands of whites, mostly farmers, have been slaughtered (and I mean slaughtered) in race-based attacks—I grew up among many white South African transplants and heard all kinds of gruesome stories; one involving a white neighbor’s head being found in a flower garden. In 2017, when the issue was raised in the ANC-dominated parliament for the first time ever, ANC member Duduzile Promise Manana interrupted a white opposition leader pleading for the government to do something, by shouting “Bury them alive!” Sure sounds like systemic racism to me.

Whites in Zimbabwe, South Africa’s northern neighbor, have arguably had it worse. That country’s quarter-million white population dwindled down to the hundreds as Robert Mugabe’s dictatorship progressed; much of it in response to his mid-nineties campaign of state violence against whites.

As for being enslaved—a central reason, of course, for BLM’s existence—few traditionally white nations have been untouched. In his 2004 book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, history professor Robert Davis estimates up that up to 1.25 million whites from all over Europe were enslaved by north Africans and Turks between 1530 and 1780. Much of the Moroccan kingdom was built by enslaved whites. Focusing on English slaves in particular, Giles Milton in his book White Gold writes that the British Crown barely moved an inch to rescue its subjects who were captured on the seas and even kidnapped on the English coasts by roving Barbary pirates.

Muslim armies, mostly the Ottomans, invaded Europe dozens of times over an 800-year stretch. Many regions were colonized, sometimes for centuries. In the 1345 Siege of Caffa, Crimean Christians managed to beat back an invading Mongol Muslim force, but not without catching the black plague after the exiting forces catapulted dead infected soldiers over the city’s gates. It eventually spread to the rest of Europe, wiping out half of all whites on Earth.  

Religion-based genocides were a regular feature in pre-Holocaust Europe, including ones committed against Protestants, Catholics and especially pagans who died by the hundreds of thousands in the Baltic and Albigensian Crusades.

In Russia, that great bastion of mass white suffering, the Soviets targeted all sorts of white “hostile” ethnicities within and without the empire, including Poles, Cossacks and Germans (the latter whose women endured the biggest mass rape in history.

Uncle Joe Stalin’s orchestrated famines against stubbornly proud Ukraine also deserves a dishonorable mention. At 7 million deaths, they collectively earned the second biggest entry in Stephane Courtois’s Black Book of Communism.

No one did serfdom quite like the Soviet’s predecessors. When emancipation came to most places in Russia, four years before the end of US black slavery, over 20 million were unshackled. It’s said that a single Russian serf-holding family, the Sheremetevs, whose name today graces Moscow’s international airport, just by themselves owned around 300,000 of them.

How downright discourteous would it be for those Americans with ties to any of above-mentioned cases (likely in the tens of millions) to be forced to pay reparations to black descendants of US slavery? Especially, for those descendants of white American slavery. Among the dozens and dozens of inconvenient historical snippets kept out of the New York Times’s “1619 Project” is the white slaves who were also brought over that year. According to Don Jordan and Michael Walsh’s White Cargo, unlike servants in the UK, those spirited away to places like Virginia (mostly children, convicts and, later, the normal dirt-poor) were legally treated as chattels whose “autonomy and freedom existed only at the discretion of the master.” Of the 300,000 who arrived in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, most died still in bondage or ended up just as landless and poor as when they arrived.

For recent history, one might point to the D.C. Sniper shootings, the New York Subway shootings, or San Francisco’s “Zebra Killings” in which 73 whites were shot by Nation of Islam-members in the early seventies. Although perhaps the worst collective hate crime ever to take place in the US, professor and Wall Street Journal contributor Wilfred Reilly points out that just a single, slim book was ever written about it (Clark Howard’s Zebra) while, “had a group of Klansmen killed dozens of Black Americans in a major world city during the modern era, the level and tone of the coverage might have been a wee bit different.”

Then there’s black-on-white violence generally. Reilly notes that almost 85 percent of interracial crime involving blacks and whites is black-on-white crime. That’s around 340,000 unanswered crimes committed against whites per year, he says. If this is white privilege, what will white disprivilege look like?