American history abounds with tragic irony. One particularly relevant example of such irony can be observed in the origins of the trendiest epithet of the twenty-first century; "privilege." Privilege, once known as advantages, is the favored cudgel in the identity politics bloodletting of our time, as is to be expected. Excavate the creation myth of any nation, and one will unearth triumphant groups amassing advantages for their tribe at the expense of the vanquished and luckless competitor tribes, then dressing it up in self-congratulatory virtue. The United States is not fundamentally different from its compatriots on the planet in this regard. Nobody should take history personally. Whatever happened back then, YOU didn't do it. However, you might well benefit from it today. That said, the privilege that has so many in either a defensive crouch or finger-pointing righteousness today was principally authored by the ideological ancestors of the same faction that so excoriates that systematic privilege today; The Left. This is not an editorial opinion. This is unassailable scholarly truth. Richard Rothstein, a man of The Left, produced his brief for the culpability of FDR's New Deal and Truman's Fair Deal in our current racial and economic predicament with his masterpiece, "The Color of Law." Every American should read this towering triumph of intellectual honesty and historical scholarship. It proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the institutional racism that warps and afflicts our society today in the form of residential segregation was no accident, but the deliberate product of relentless government policy. Author Rothstein lays the lion's share of the guilt for that Jim Crow housing policy and the river of ills that flowed from it at the feet of the Democratic Party and multiple generations of The Left and progressivism. So when The Left of today expounds upon the evils of privilege and insists upon the immediate construction of a new utopia to remedy these past sins, remember that this mess was of their making.
