A professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte is offering an academic rebuttal to the term “white privilege” in a journal article published to the Penn State University Press in a collection known as Critical Philosophy of Race.
Dr. Shannon Sullivan has strong disagreements with the term “white privilege” and hopes to, as she states, dispute “the false universalism built into the concept…” According to Sullivan’s book Revealing Whiteness, published by Indiana University Press, “white privilege operates as an unseen, invisible, and unquestioned norm in society today.”
Dr. Sullivan doesn’t hold the conservative notion that white privilege is a fraudulent science; instead, she wants to take things a step further.
“As a poor, struggling white person, I might not be financially privileged or very high up in social circles and many people might disparage me, but at least I’m not the lowest of the low. I come before someone else: people of color and black people in particular,” Sullivan wrote.
For this reason, the philosophy professor has coined a neologism she believes we should use instead: “white priority” — which she defines as “the sense of coming before another, of not being at “the bottom of the well.”
Like many liberal constituents in academia, solving real world problems in this country, like the 43.1 million people in poverty, are completely irrelevant. Instead Sullivan finds it more productive to sunder her students by racial lines and exacerbate an ongoing disunity in American society over racial tensions and animus by creating new words and terms which hardly address real-life issues.
According Sullivan, however, the notion of ‘white priority” is necessary “to help America grapple with race and class in a post-Obama era.”
In considering race and class in the post-Obama era, one should remember the shocking hate crime in which a white, mentally ill teenager was kidnapped and tortured by four black suspects (possibly due to his assumed white privilege.) The former president stated that “I think the overall trajectory of race relations in this country is actually very positive,” according to CBS Chicago.
Things couldn’t be further from the truth. Nothing in the past decade has done more of a disservice to race relations than the Obama presidency. According to a Rasmussen survey conducted last year, half of American adults say the country has gotten worse in regards to race relations.
As Sullivan states in the abstract of her article, “While racial advantages exist for poor and working class white people, the concept of white privilege does not capture them well.”
It is safe to say that Sullivan’s work has strong correlation to left-wing values found in American culture. According to her UNC Charlotte professor profile, Sullivan also “writes in the intersections of feminist philosophy.” She has authored numerous books on the white race as well as feminism. Some of these include Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (2006), Good White People: The Problem with Middle Class White Anti-Racism (2014) and The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression (2015).
The professor, who believe it or not is caucasian herself, is not in any way progressing American society by her writing and creation of new terminology. Instead, she’s made a career benefiting off of leftist nomenclature only designed to barricade debate, and gratify themselves after doing so. Declaring that over 223 million White Americans all have an innate priority is only exemplary of the thoughtless paranoia continuing to crumble race relations in this country.
