Educated,
“white,” males who were engaged in commerce of one sort or another, declared
independence of the American colonies from England and its monarch, King George
III. White males led the Revolutionary War using force to make those words of
independence a reality. The same stereotypical white males drafted what has
become one of the most important, impactful documents in human history: the
United States Constitution. Those pages were brought to life by white males in
executing the concepts of the Constitution bringing forth what today is arguably
one of the greatest nations in the history of the world. The United States of
America has shown to the world that a democratic, capitalist country can
peacefully agree to meaningful changes in leadership, even with bitter
philosophical differences of the parties. It is among the most free – in speech,
assembly, opportunity and employment, movement, religion, political rights,
ownership of property, enterprise and commerce, human rights of life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness, and equal rights under the law – and most
prosperous country in history.
Now,
let’s take it to an even higher level. Following is a made-up (by me) list of
among the greatest achievements during human existence (when the major
accomplisher is known). One of the very great ones, of course, is the forging of
the American political system, with the rule of written law, equality under the
law, private property, and a government of the people (“self government”).
Human rights and human prosperity have bloomed under
it.
Among
the greatest achievements during human
existence:
Harnessing of
Electricity. Electricity is a natural resource which
was something interesting but
mostly useless until the white male English scientist William
Gilbert (or Gilberd) published his seminal work of experiments on electricity and magnetism and
coined the very term electricus which later evolved into “electricity.”
His findings established the groundwork for the white male German, Johannes
Kepler’s laws of planetary motion which was a foundation for white male
Englishman, Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. Nearly two hundred years later
white male Benjamin Franklin showed that lightning and static electricity were
the same. Other white males invented batteries (Italian, Alessandro Volta), the
first effective arc lamp (Sir Humphry Davy, English) and other inspirations of
white male Frenchmen, Italians, Germans and Brits whose names are familiar:
André-Marie Ampère, Georg Ohm, Michael Faraday and in 1837 white male
American Thomas Davenport invented the direct current electric motor, the basis
of most electrical appliances today. Inventor of
an effective incandescent light bulb along with an entire integrated
system: white man Thomas Alva Edison, who is also responsible for moving
pictures and recorded music.
Transportation. Ships with sails have been used since
at least the fifth century B. C. and in all likelihood much earlier, so the
color and gender of those innovators are not known. About trains: The
first use of rails was in the 1767 by a company in Shropshire, England, owned by English Quakers.
The first reciprocating steam engine to power a wheel was invented by a Scottish
inventor, James Watt. He patented in 1784 the first design for a carriage
propelled by steam which an employee of his built later that year. The
automobile was invented in Germany by white male Karl Benz in
1885. The first of which was powered by a single-cylinder internal
combustion four-stroke
engine designed by white German Nikolaus
Otto. The first flying machines with controls were invented by
the American Wright (white) brothers.
Communications. Telegraph was suggested first
in Scots Magazine (1753) then German von Sommering, Spanish Campillo built
models until in 1823 Englishman Francis Ronalds first made a working
electrostatic telegraph over eight miles of wire; then Russians and Englishmen
made improvements until Samuel Morse invented and patented (1837) an electric
telegraph with his assistant, Alfred Vail, developing Morse Code to go with it.
Telephone. The first device to replicate the human voice over wire was
invented by American Alexander Graham Bell who patented it in 1876; his mother
and wife were deaf and he had long experimented with hearing devices. Bell was
Scottish but ended up in Boston via Canada. In 1864 Scot James Maxwell wrote
that electromagnetic waves could travel through air. Pouncing on that, white
male Italian, American, German and English inventors built working models, first
used with Morse code between ships and land, then one-way developed into
two-way, then telephony, tele-video (television), navigation (including by
satellite), radar, and the digital data transmission of today. Most if not all
conceived by white males, many American.
Development of computers. Wilhelm
Schickard, a white German polymath, designed a calculating machine in 1623 which
combined a mechanized form of Napier's rods with the world's first mechanical
adding machine built into the base. In 1642, while still a teenager, Blaise
Pascal (white Frenchman) started some pioneering work on calculating machines
and after three years of effort and myriad prototypes, invented
a mechanical
calculator. Gottfried Wilhelm
von Leibniz (white German) invented the Stepped
Reckoner calculating machine around
1672. However, Leibniz’s invention did not have a method to carry numbers.
Leibniz also conceived the binary numeral
system, key to all of today’s binary computers. Around 1830, Charles
Babbage, another English polymath, originated the concept of a programming a computer.
In 1936 a white gay
British genius, Alan
Turing, presented a paper describing
a computer and thus became the father of computer science. Its commercialization
initially came from England with the Ferranti Mark I (parent company was
founded in 1882 by white Englishman, Sebastian Pietro Innocenzo Adhemar Ziani de
Ferranti) and the U. S. with UNIVAC I for the U. S. Census Bureau. Then IBM took
control with its 650 mainframe in 1954. Later came Digital Equipment (Ken
Olson, white male founder) making mini-computers. They were followed by
microcomputers based on Intel semiconductors (Intel, started by
three white males, was the inventor of silicon microprocessors), with IBM’s
hardware and Microsoft’s software (two white male founders); Apple Computer
(also two white male founders) began around then also. So called personal
computers in essence merged with smart cellular phones continuing to
miniaturize up to and including the Apple watch. Today, of course, computers and
computing devices permeate every aspect of life all over the world.
The concept for the Internet came from the United
States Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency’s (DARPA) white males: Tim Berners-Lee,
Bob Kahn, Vint Cerf. Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape, the
first major Web browser company which essentially launched the Internet (”dot
com”) industry and has revolutionized the world in countless ways was
white.
Cell phones as we know them started in the United States by engineers from Bell
Laboratories (where in 1956 John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain,
and William Shockley, all
white males, received the Nobel Prize in Physics for
inventing the first transistors, and home to
myriad ground-breaking technologies of radio
astronomy, lasers, charge-coupled
device (CCD) semiconductor sensors,
DNA prototyping machines, UNIX operating
system, the C and C++ programming
languages, TDMA and CDMA digital cellular telephone technologies ) then a
division of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company stemming all the way
back to Alexander Graham Bell. They were then attempting an
automobile-to-automobile communication system, with the first service commencing
in St. Louis, Missouri, June 1946, as AT&T’s Mobile Telephone Service. The
system used Motorola radiotelephones. Motorola was
started in 1928 when two white Catholic brothers bought a bankrupt battery
company in Chicago.
Capitalism
(and free enterprise) has been – very arguably – proven to be the most fair
allocator of capital, employer of workers, arbiter of taste in consumer products
of any economic system yet devised in the world; the United States was
implicitly a “capitalist country.” The American financial system
early on enabled vast amounts of excess capital to be deployed into starting new
companies, resulting in entirely new industries. This includes the early
“trusts” dreamed up by Samuel C. T. Dodd, of Standard Oil, a distributed banking
system, venture capital and private equity partnership models as well as hedge
funds. Like it or not, most U. S. companies have been
founded by white males, many of whom had invented products that formed the basis
for their companies. A few are: Thomas Alva Edison (General
Electric); Charles Goodyear (vulcanization); Alexander Graham Bell (AT & T);
Eli Whitney (the cotton engine – “gin”); Henry Ford’s assembly line; RCA (David
Sarnoff); Willis Carrier (air conditioning); More recently, to toss off a few
more white male names that have rewarded the world: Walt Disney, Bill Gates and
Steve Jobs, mentioned above, Larry Ellison (Oracle), Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D., then
students at Stanford University
(Google), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Jimmy Wales who, together with Larry Sanger, founded Wikipedia, from where
some of the general information in this essay emanated. A few white males who
didn’t necessarily invent products but who were simply entrepreneurial: The Big
Four of railroads, Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins, Crocker (Central Pacific
R.R.); John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil); J. P. Morgan (JPMorgan Chase, Morgan
Stanley), Sam Walton of Wal-Mart, and Howard Schultz (Starbucks). Inventions by
mistake of white male Americans were pacemakers and the lithium-iodide battery
to power them by Wilson Greatbatch; an
American pharmacist, John Stith
Pemberton, who invented Coca-Cola; Thomas Adams,
trying unsuccessfully to replace rubber for tires with a natural gum, chicle,
chewed it, later adding flavor and thence creating Chiclets and the chewing gum
industry.
The spread of capitalism and economic, political and social
freedoms, as exemplified by the United States, has enriched the world. From the
1981 to 2010, abject poverty – those living on just over dollar a day dropped
from half the citizens in the developing world to 21 percent in 2010 –
in part by dollars flowing from U. S. purchases from free trade, and free
enterprise in every remote area where allowed by their political systems. While
“poverty” is an arbitrary political term The World Bank recently reported on
October 9, 2015, that the share of the world population living in extreme
poverty had fallen to 14.5% in 2011 from 36% in 1990. The number of people in
the world living on less than $1.25 a day has fallen to 1,011 million in 2013
from 1,926 million in 1991.
While certainly not every
innovation since Adam has been by white males, by far the vast majority have
been conceived and implemented by white males and since the establishment of the United States of America,
American companies have been conceived, established, financed, managed and
innovated mostly by white males. In many cases, the white males started with
little, faced great odds, and kept going in spite of obstacles, and succeeded.
While tens of thousands of others took the same path, they failed, many losing
everything they owned, and were never heard of again.
Hewlett-Packard)
Of course the original demographic of the United States was predominantly white (and Christian). In 2013 it was: White (non Hispanic) 62.6%; Hispanic or Latino 17.1%; African-American 13.2%; Asian 5.3%; American Indian & Alaska Native 1.2%; Native Hawaiian & Other Pacific Islander 0.2%. With the Civilian Labor Force being 79.4% white, according to government statistics. Given the superiority in numbers, it should be no surprise that white people have accomplished so much. Foreigners have always flooded our country: From the British Isles (including the Scots and Irish), Germany, Africa, Netherlands, Mexico, Spain, Italy, France, Poland. Generally each group faced bitter denunciation and rejection, with many brought over in captivity from Africa as slaves and others as near slave indentured servants. More recently Asian country immigrants including China, India, South Korea, Viet Nam, Philippines have been legally allowed in. The United States was – is truly – a melting pot, with opportunity offered to all.
Now
I’ve argued that white male Americans have been responsible for much of the
innovation and prosperity since the formation of the United States, raising all
boats (most all of the poorest in the United States and many of the poorest in
most countries have reaped advantages of white achievement and have cell phones,
electricity and bicycles – the first verified claim to making one was by white,
German civil servant Baron Karl von Drais); has causing assimilation of most
immigrants into the U. S. who began as loathed minorities greeted with
discrimination. They assimilated and choose to fit in as they choose. (“Pursuit
of happiness.”)
There should now be little doubt
about the vast amount achievement by white males, but would it all have taken
place anyway without white males who were in power? Is white
advantage/privilege (WAP) implicitly “unfair” and would the world would be a
better, more moral place without it? If not, if WAP has been beneficial to the
world, why are there blatant attempts to debase it? No doubt “diversity” feels
good, but which is better for humanity? And are the two, white achievement and
WAP mutually exclusive? So given all this, what actually is the new notion of
WAP?”
There is argument
that whites have more freedom to move around, speak freely, buy stuff, work
wherever they want. These seems to beg the question that non-whites cannot do
all this, which is untrue, or that minorities can’t do them as much, which is
impossible to measure, “enough” being subjective. WAP includes a high, “unwarranted” opinion of one's
own worth, greater social status; and freedom to
move, buy, work, play, and speak
freely at home, work and school. According to Samantha Vice ("How Do I Live in This Strange
Place?" Journal of Social Philosophy, September 7, 2010), The concept of white privilege also implies the
privileged right to assume the universality of one's own experiences, marking
others as different or exceptional while perceiving oneself as normal.
American, in other words, being in the white majority. Turns out that in
being the majority means the assumption of normality, usual, and average.
Others are not normal, usual or average. Lawrence Blum in 2008 argued in "'White Privilege': A
Mild Critique," Theory and Research in Education, that many social privileges
are interconnected with being white, requiring a complex and careful analysis to
identify whiteness' contributions to privilege. This means that the notion of
whiteness is not inclusive of all white people. Critics of white privilege also
note that there is a problem with the interpretation of people of color. That
is, it fails to acknowledge the diversity of people of color and ethnicity
within these groups, but apparently white is white. Or something. All this
seems to presume that having privilege is bad, that diversity is good and other
such unprovable pablum. Or simply that none of this makes
sense.
I think the concept of WAP
encourages certain non-whites not to assimilate, deciding that the white
majority has to change to satisfy and incorporate the religion, nationality,
mores and dress of minority groups. The federal government has passed labor laws
to label as discrimination the desire to hire persons reflecting the majority.
In applying for jobs, a person might not get an offer if he or she speaks “African American Vernacular English” or perhaps
“Indian English” that are sometimes difficult to easily understand, or
wears baggy, saggy trousers or a burqa. If the candidate is black, Indian or
Muslim he or she can sue. If the job seeker is white, that is that. White
privilege?
