The SNP are going to encourage Scottish teachers to
take a white privilege test. It will no doubt be a rather odd sort of test,
because no matter what you answer it will turn out that you do indeed have
white privilege. There will be no set of answers that you can give that
demonstrate that you don’t. It therefore won’t be a test at all, such as an
exam which it is possible to pass or fail. There will only be the option to
fail, after which you will be expected to feel guilty for existing.
White privilege is the idea not so much that all white
people are materially privileged. Clearly some black people are financially
better off or have other advantages than some white people. Rather white privilege
is the idea that even a down and out drug addict living on the street has white
privilege over a black millionaire because in our society he does not face racism.
He may have all sorts of disadvantages and may face all sorts of other
prejudices, but it is not because of his skin colour.
White privilege therefore is inherent in being white
in a society where there are black people. The SNP’s goal is to “eradicate
racism in wider society”. But there is a problem here. If Scottish teachers and
the Scottish public in general denied that they had white privilege, this would
constitute evidence of their racism. But then if it is impossible to eliminate
white privilege the goal of eradicating racism becomes impossible and
self-defeating. A Scotland without racism would also be without white
privilege, but if any Scot claimed not to have white privilege, he would
precisely thereby demonstrate his racism.
The SNP also thinks that racism is a social construct “invented
to justify the murder, exploitation and brutalisation of the peoples, lands and
resources of the Global South for centuries”. If this means anything it must
mean that racism in some way does not exist in reality, but rather is
constructed or invented by human minds. This must mean that when white people
first went to say Africa, they initially thought the people living there were
just the same as us. We didn’t notice any inherent difference, but in order to murder
exploit and colonise them we invented the concept of race and with it racism.
But there is a problem for the SNP not merely to do
with the implausibility of this story. If racism was invented so that white
people could invent a distinction that is not real between them and people living
in Africa, then clearly Scottishness must have been invented too in order to
create a distinction between people living here and people living in for
example England. If there is no real distinction between black people and white
people, then still less can there be a real distinction between English people
and Scottish people. Why then does the SNP wish to make these people
independent from those people when they are really the same?
If race is a social construct, then so too must the concept
of one people being distinct from another people one nation being distinct from
another. But this fatally undermines the whole SNP project. It would mean that
there wasn’t really a Scottish nation or a Scottish people. But this would make
it entirely arbitrary to set as your goal the creation of an independent
country full of Scots.
But perhaps worse than this, imagine if two of the
heroes of Scottish history were asked to take the white privilege test. Robert
the Bruce and William Wallace would have to pass it. There were few if any
black people living in Scotland at that time. If you disagree with this, we
could go back further. Logically Bruce and Wallace could only have white
privilege if there were black people, they could exercise their privilege over.
But this has the unfortunate consequence of making
white privilege a matter of the presence or absence of black people in society.
For centuries Scottish people had no white privilege or very little, until the
time when black people arrived here. But this makes white privilege a
consequence of black immigration. The easiest way to eradicate it would be if we
did not have multiculturalism, but instead lived in a monocultural society similar
to that in which Bruce and Wallace lived.
I can think of no organisation that has more white
privilege than the SNP. Every leader of the SNP has been white. Every one was
born in Scotland and had Scottish parents. SNP voters are overwhelmingly white
as are SNP MPs and MSPs. When Scottish nationalists march all under one banner,
they are all white. The SNP looks back to a time when Scotland was independent.
But at that point the whole population of Scotland was white. Every important
Scottish historical figure, battle or declaration involved exclusively white people.
The languages that the SNP wishes to protect, Gaelic and Scottish, are spoken by
white people almost exclusively. The SNP discriminates between immigrant
languages such as Polish and Urdu and indigenous Scottish languages that were
spoken when only white people lived here. To privilege the indigenous over the
immigrant is racist. But what is Scottish nationalism other than to celebrate
and attempt to recreate the sense of nationhood that historically was created
by indigenous Scots. If any organisation in Scotland has white privilege it is
the SNP.
I didn’t realise quite how extreme the SNP has become
while pretending to be moderate and reasonable. First it wants little boys to
be able to declare that they are little girls without informing their parents.
Now it wants to import the whole apparatus of critical race theory, which was
invented by American academics into Scotland.
The problem with this perspective on race is
fundamentally its divisiveness. While maintaining that racism is social
construct it creates a system where white people are guilty of racism merely
because they exist. It doesn’t matter what you have done, how kind you have
been to other people, every white person is guilty of murder and genocide because
we were born with white skin. If we try to deny our racism, this is taken as
evidence that we are indeed racists.
It creates two classes of person. White people have original
sin imported from their ancestors being colonisers and slavers. Black people on
the other hand are born without sin, incapable of error, but victims of white
oppression. This is a caricature of both races. Worse it puts a gulf between us
that is impossible to overcome. We barely share the same humanity.
If racism is something that white people are born with
and their white privilege something they cannot eradicate, then quite soon white
people might respond to charges of racism with indifference. After all, if I
cannot help my white privilege why should I be concerned about it anymore than
I am concerned about the colour of my eyes. Critical race theory thus becomes
an obstacle to tackling racism.
The SNP is no doubt simply ticking woke boxes, without understanding the logical consequences, but a party that depends wholly on a Scottish identity that was created exclusively by indigenous white people, needs to check the coherence of its own ideas as well as its own privilege.
