WHITE PRIVELEGE IN AMERICA

White Privilege: America’s Weapon of Mass Democracy Destruction

But New Yorkers will unleash their countermeasures when attacked

Photo by Andrae Ricketts on Unsplash

The phenomena of white privilege — such as banning literature by Black authors and suppressing discussions of Black history — are amplified by social media. The publishers of banned books about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks know this well.

And those free-speech assaults on diverse perspectives are advancing across the American landscape — in blitzkrieg fashion like the Nazi Panzer divisions of WW2.

Social media have become the MAGA armaments of our modern culture wars.

But they are also weapons of mass destruction that can backfire in the hands of the perpetrators of white privilege — or be deployed against them.

We saw this recently when a New York attorney became a social media phenomenon. Anthony P. Orlich was captured on video allegedly assaulting a Black woman, singer Lizzy Ashliegh. He was accused of ripping her colorful green wig from her head — a confrontation the victim uploaded to TikTok. Within a day, Orlich was fired from his law firm. The TYT network clip below reports the incident.

TYT network video clip of NYC wig-snatching incident

A historical connection: Nearly three years prior to that late-May day, Amy Cooper confronted a Black man in NYC’s Central Park. That Wall Street Karen threatened to unleash the police on him — for politely informing her that her dog should be leashed. As irony would have it, that was the same day that George Floyd took his last breath — beneath the knees of rogue cops. Both confrontations that day were recorded and went viral.

Amy Cooper was subsequently fired by her employer.

Thus, the Cooper and Orlich incidents are illustrative of how deploying white privilege can blow up in the faces of perpetrators. But how can we assume the wig-snatching affair was demonstrable of white privilege?

The commentator on the TYT clip attributed it to hate. That, I believe, is too simplistic. When I shared this incident with several attorney friends (the same day the clip went viral), I noted the following:

1. He’s a lawyer. So his sense of entitlement was so intense, so prevailing, that it compelled him to forget that lawyers would be expected to be held to one of the highest standards of social behavior.
2. His nonchalant attitude. Granted — he seems inebriated. But note that he is smirking during the entire time — even when his friends are trying to intervene to apparently have him apologize. So alcohol is not a shield: It’s a window. As the poet Maya Angelou noted, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”
3. His victim. Ms. Ashliegh displayed remarkable restraint by addressing him as “sir” and engaging in a somewhat Socratic dialectic by asking him why he would do such a thing. But that did not elicit a redemptive response. Had he processed those questions — in the moment — he might have recognized the arc of his own sense of entitlement that led him from law school, to his employer, and later to that incident.
4. His location. Note this encounter happened — not in DeSantis Florida, not in Jim Crow Mississippi — but in NYC: perhaps the most diverse city in America. And a city that has a public culture embracing the artistic class — inclusive of Lizzy Ashliegh who is featured in the clip below.

Lizzy Ashliegh music video

My attorney friends were likewise incensed by this debasement of the ethics of their profession. Yet, advocates of human dignity everywhere can salute Lizzy Ashliegh for challenging white male privilege. Personally, I believe she would have been entitled to deliver more expletives — in addition to the social media barrage she unleashed.

To be clear, I have no desire to see America become a Communist China fishbowl — where an individual’s every indiscretion is monitored by video cameras and artificial intelligence. America does not need an Orwellian Big Brother to match the autocratic vision of a Ron DeSantis.

But in an era infected by the neo-Confederate assertion of white privilege, we must deploy our smartphones, our social media countermeasures, to defend basic human rights.

Lizzy Ashliegh, I hope you are not suffering any ailments from your assault. And I hope you will not be hindered in your future right of self-expression by the macro-aggressions of the Amy Coopers and Anthony Orlichs of society.

Creatives of all colors (and their wigs) deserve to feel safe in their space.

Thanks for your attention and past claps, and I welcome your responses. I write about multiculturalism, philosophy, and history. To follow future posts, you can press the button on the screen. — Geronimo Redstone