People like Bill O'Reilly call upon people to raise themselves up while helping keep a foot on their necks.
Conservatives like O'Reilly do have some kernels of truth on their side. They rightly think people should develop good character, including virtues such as discipline and responsibility for oneself. And they are rightly concerned to assure that social policies don't discourage people from developing such virtues.
But after those kernels of truth, their map of the world is dominated by a river of denial.
(Hayes cited a poll conducted by researchers at Cornell University in 2008, asking people if they had ever used government social program. 57% said no, but the researchers established that 94% of those people were mistaken and had used at least one. On average, they'd benefited from four.)
In his effort to get Bill O'Reilly to acknowledge "white privilege," Jon Stewart focused on the advantages O'Reilly got from growing up in the new, post-war, middle-class community of Levittown. It was a community that supported O'Reilly's becoming the so-called "self-made man" that he is.
Those advantages amount to "white privilege, " Stewart argued, because the town was closed to black families (until a federal housing law passed in the late 1960s forced those gates open).
The right-wingers are eager to scold blacks for not developing a culture of responsibility. But if you want people to develop the virtues of discipline and responsibility, it is folly - or perhaps hypocrisy - not to be equally concerned that the society provides those people the opportunities to reap the rewards to which those virtues are supposed to lead.
O'Reilly seemed to think that the exclusion of blacks from Levittown - which he conceded was "unfair" - was ancient history. No longer relevant to today's world.
But no honest appraisal of American racism would support that conclusion. Jon Stewart referred to the "residues" of that discrimination,. But of course what's residual is far more than the lingering effects of that past era of legal, institutionalized racism.
The exclusion of blacks from Levittown was not the fault of particular individuals choosing to institute racist policies. It was a reflection of the broad American reality of whites' anti-black bigotry . At the time Levittown was built, FHA underwriters warned that "even the presence of one or two non-white families" could undermine property values. It seems that, anticipating the "white flight" seen in later decades," the exclusion of blacks was perhaps a requirement for the success of Levittown, and a reflection of the pervasive white rejection of living together with blacks on the same plane.
If that's so, it is hardly realistic to imagine - and we have plenty of evidence to know otherwise - that just because federal law broke open that particular barrier, that the reservoir of white bigotry automatically got drained from elsewhere on the American landscape. Racism has diminished, surely, but it is hardly ancient history.
Blacks simply do not have the same opportunities as whites in America. To deny that is, at best, folly.
It is likewise folly to point to particular individuals who do manage to succeed against the odds and declare this proves that all blacks do likewise if they just buckled. That makes as much sense as to say that all of us could match the time of the guy who wins the race.
This is not Lake Wobegon, and we cannot all be exceptional.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).