Re: CV and mad panic behaviour
Reply #6605 –
Getting a little off topic but one of the classic examples of white male privilege is the Duke of York. Yes, he's a protestant but there is hardly a drop of Anglo-Saxon blood in his body. He comes from good German and Greek stock. His partner in crime, Jeffrey Epstein, was Jewish but still used his white male privilege to feed his sick desires. And then there's Ghislaine Maxwell, obviously female and the daughter of an orthodox Jew, but still guilty of exploiting her position of privilege at the expense of innocents; female but generally from relatively privileged backgrounds.
I'm not sure how relevant the concept of white male privilege is, rich folk do OK at the expense of poor folk regardless of ethnicity and religion. That brings me to the concept of WASP, a particularly American term used to describe the American political elite, generally of British descent. However, in recent times, it is applied to all Americans of Northern and North Western European heritage. The concepts of WASP and white male privilege (today it's generally white privilege without the emphasis on male, and I think that has marginally more relevance) aren't one and the same. It's also worth noting that "white" in the context of white privilege is defined as people with European ancestral origins.
As with most attempts to classify/categorise folk on the basis of their ethnicity and/or religion, WASP is a flawed concept. My heritage is mainly British with a dash of Irish and Scandinavian but I don't have any Anglo-Saxon ancestry. I don't believe in an imaginary being but my ancestors were equally protestant and catholic - more fool them! My British ancestors were yeoman farmers, so relatively privileged, but those who came to Australia were strictly working class labourers, until my generation.
Novax is privileged because he's worth a mint and he comes from a society where males are valued more than females. It's interesting that Serbian PM Ana Brnabić is more conciliatory in her comments about the Australian Government's actions than that lunatic Vučić (still, I wouldn't mind seeing Vučić duke it out with Scotty from marketing à la Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Two Tribes). Ana clearly sees that Novax is an arrogant prick with a dangerous, anti-social attitude.
Moving a little further off topic, in 1989 I attended the World Archaeological Congress on Archaeological Ethics and the Treatment of the Dead in South Dakota. The Indigenous representatives caucused and came up with a resolution that they presented to the congress. All was going well until the two Sami representatives objected because they hadn't been invited to the caucus. They tore strips off the other Indigenous representatives for excluding them on the basis of their skin colour. As a descendant of Indigenous Britons, I could probably have mounted an argument for inclusion too. However, being five generations removed from the home of my ancestors must reduce the veracity of any such claim.