“I don’t think white privilege is a thing,” said journalist Sarah Hernandez last week. “I think Brown privilege is a thing because I get away with a lot of stuff.”
Making her comments on a Tucker Carlson Today episode that aired last Wednesday, Hernandez was explaining, among other things, why she could cover 2020’s Black Lives Matter riots and white reporters couldn’t. She related two incidents in which white men — one of whom was a colleague of hers, Elijah Schaffer — were assaulted during BLM mayhem solely because of their skin color.
Meanwhile, Hernandez told interviewer Tucker Carlson, “Me [sic] and Julio Rosas, you know, we’re Hispanic people; we walk right into the riot, and no one suspects us. But if you don’t look a certain way, you can’t go into these leftist events or go into a riot without being attacked.”
Carlson then asked Hernandez if this is all “on the basis of skin color,” to which she replied, “100 percent, Tucker.” The journalist then provided another brown privilege example, stating:
Okay, so since the beginning of the face masks, I’ve always been against it, and I do not wear face masks in the airport or an airline until somebody physically that comes in tells me to do it.
I have sat on planes with Elijah Schaffer right next to me, maskless. As soon as he puts his mask down, just a little bit, they get on him immediately. And I’ll be sitting there without a mask on; they won’t say anything to me…. It’s happened multiple times.
I’ve also gone to several riots and rallies and again on the basis of skin tone, these leftists think that I’m immediately a liberal because of the way that I look.
…And so that’s why I’m able to get all the footage that I’m able to get and the responses that I’m able to get; maybe not after this interview, but you know, it’s because people immediately look at me, and I really do have Brown privilege, Tucker. I don’t think white privilege is a thing. I think Brown privilege is a thing because I get away with a lot of stuff .
Of course, one would expect anti-white standards at a BLM rally, and some may slough off Hernandez’s face-mask story. In reality, though, many observers point out that “brown privilege” is longstanding and is our society’s real “systemic racism.” Just consider the 2013 pamphlet Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream by David Horowitz and John Perazzo. As blog The Big Answer writes in its review of the work, the authors
show that in fact the most insidious bias in our culture today is black skin privilege. Black skin privilege means the press will fail to report an epidemic of race riots targeting whites for beatings, shootings and other violence in major American cities over the last several years. Black skin privilege means that whites — as in the case of the Duke lacrosse players — will be presumed guilty of racial crimes when they are clearly innocent and then never accorded an apology by those who have stigmatized them. Black skin privilege has created an optical illusion in the liberal culture that white on black attacks are commonplace events when in fact there are five times as many black attacks on whites as the reverse. (As Horowitz and Perazzo note, in 2010, blacks committed more than 25 times as many acts of interracial violence as whites did.) Black skin privilege exists in the affirmative action programs of our system of higher education and in our culture, where a black racist like Al Sharpton could be regarded by the national media as a “civil rights leader” and then hired as a TV anchor by NBC.
A more recent example of such privilege was the 600-plus 2020 BLM riots themselves, where leaders gave miscreants nationwide who wished “to destroy space to do that,” to quote what ex-Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said in 2015 about unrest in her town; this resulted in billions in property damage and many deaths. Why, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy actually said in June 2020 that he “can’t imagine” stopping the BLM demonstrators — at the same time that he was prohibiting anti-lockdown protests.
This privileged treatment could also be contrasted with the abuse of the primarily white January 6 martyrs, who’ve been called “insurrectionists” and had their civil rights violated. Meanwhile, an actual insurrectionist — Raz Simone, black “warlord” of 2020’s CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) — who was witnessed handing out AR-15s to his comrades, doesn’t even appear to have been charged with a crime.
One more example: Politically correct hand-wringers were wondering during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential run if America would really “vote for a black man,” and, sure enough, a later poll found that Obama’s race did make six percent of Americans less likely to vote for him.
It also, however, made nine percent more likely to vote for him.
White privilege?
In reality, were there white privilege, there wouldn’t be so much talk about it because the truly powerful suppress discussion of their privilege. Was there, for example, incessant talk of white privilege a century ago, when some black-identified people would “pass as white” to gain advantage?
Speaking of which, what says it all is that blacks no longer masquerade as white. Instead, whites sometimes masquerade as black. So unless you think people such as Shaun King and Rachel Dolezal are masochists, it’s clear where the privilege lies.
