Fr. Bryan Massingale: Politically Correct Race Hustler

From Daniel Suhr of GOP3.COM, a thorough deconstruction of a fellow who appears to be Dan Maguire’s successor as the high-profile leftist in Marquette’s Theology Department.

It has been reported to me that during his homily celebrating the opening of Mission Week, Fr. Bryan Massingale, associate professor of theology, said that when you fight for justice, “People may write about you on blogs, or call you liberal or politically correct.”

But as Shur makes quite clear, Massingale is liberal (or leftist) and is politically correct.

Anybody who wants to dispute that might find any statement of his that contradicts the standard orthodoxy of secular liberals.

A key element of Massingale’s rhetoric is the idea of “white privilege:” the idea that if you are white you have it better than most black people, and should feel guilty about that.

Well, you do have it better and you should not feel guilty about that.

If black people are worse off on average than white people, the causes are complex, but blathering about “white privilege” gets you nowhere in understanding them.

Black people, for example, are worse off because they are much more likely to have been born out of wedlock, or to have grown up in a single parent family. Is it the fault of white people that black guys knock up black girls and women and then run off? The hard core politically correct types say “yes,” but that’s because they hold the idea, profoundly demeaning to black people, that the latter can’t be expected to make moral decisions.

The generation of black people that marched with Martin Luther King was able to make moral decisions. Today’s generation could too, but are less likely to if people like Massingale tell them they are not expected to.

Black people are much more likely to be victimized by crime than whites. But it’s not Klansmen doing the victimizing. It’s other blacks. Again, trying to blame whites is not convincing.

Where whites are to blame, they are mostly long dead. Of course, in the world of the politically correct, just being white taints one with the sins of the slaveowners. But this is no better than the old racist canard that blacks bear the Mark of Cain.

For the politically correct, it doesn’t matter if an ancestor of yours died fighting on the Union side in the Civil War. You are still tainted.

The blather about white privilege is simply a strategy for manipulating people. As Massingale put it: “The reality of one’s white privilege does not make him or her an evil individual; what a person does with that privilege is the acid-test of his or her personal morality.” Translation: adopt our political agenda, or you are an evil person.

A common theme among the victim mongers is the notion that whites are well off because they exploited blacks. As Massingale’s document asks rhetorically: “‘Why should I give up a social status that benefits me?’ We answer: ‘Because the privileges of some are obtained at the expense of others.’”

This, quite simply, is nonsense.

If it were true the South, where slavery was widespread after it had withered away in the North, would have been richer and more prosperous than the North. In fact, the South ended the Civil War poor and remained crushingly poor up until only a couple of generations ago. While the slave owners may have benefited the region did not.

Slavery and segregation did not make whites any better off, with the arguable exception of the slave owners. Probably the people who benefited most were slave traders.

But a lot of those were blacks in Africa.

In the narrow little zero-sum world of the politically correct, nobody gets better off unless they make somebody worse off. This belief is why they tend to be socialists. John Paul the Great, in Centesimus Annus, preached the gospel of economic growth, opportunity, entrepreneurship and free markets. Clerical leftists like Massingale essentially blew this off, and continued to take their cues from secular leftists.