Under White Privilege Theory, Progressives Won’t Be Happy Until You Hate Your Kids

You're probably perpetuating racism. How? Because you love our kids and want them to do well in life. Which is just the worst, right?
Under the “Family” heading, The Atlantic recently carried a cheerful little article titled, “How Well-Intentioned White Families Can Perpetuate Racism.” How are we doing this horrible thing? The problem, it seems, is that we love our kids and want them to do well in life. Which is just the worst, right?

From a rational perspective, of course, this is a deeply silly argument. Yet it perfectly represents some fundamental things that have gone wrong in our culture’s thinking about race, human nature, and morality. It also demonstrates why those ideas are dangerous, because it seems that so-called “progressives” won’t be happy until you hate your kids.

The article is an interview with Margaret Hagerman, a sociologist who set out to “recruit white affluent families as subjects for the research she was doing on race.” (Here’s a little tip for living in contemporary America: if anybody says she’d like to use your kids for research on race, just say “no.”) The result was a book titled “White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America.” Amazing, isn’t it, how some people will allegedly do exhaustive research just to come up with the same old clichés about “white privilege”?

What’s instructive here is what this “privilege” consists of.

One of the things I talk about in the book is what I call this ‘conundrum of privilege,’ which is that these parents have a lot of resources economically as well as status as white people. They can then use those resources to set up their own child’s life in ways that give them the best education, the best health care, all the best things. And we have this collectively agreed-upon idea in our society that being a ‘good parent’ means exactly that—providing the best opportunities you can for your own child.

But then some of these parents are also people who believe strongly in the importance of diversity and multiculturalism and who want to resist racial inequality. And these two things are sort of at odds with one another. These affluent white parents are in a position where they can set up their kids’ lives so that they’re better than other kids’ lives. So the dark side is that, ultimately, people are thinking about their own kids, and that can come at the expense of other people’s kids.

The idea that the good of your own kids necessarily has to come at the expense of other people’s kids is a dubious assumption, to say the least, but it’s there to make you feel guilty enough that you will agree to sacrifice your kids on the altar of equality. And what would that mean?

Some of the parents in my book, they rejected the idea that their child needed to be in all the AP classes. They valued other elements of their children’s personalities, such as their concerns about ethics or fairness or social justice. There were a handful of parents in my study who resisted having a...

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