A friend of mine, who’s of Middle Eastern descent, has been traveling the country trying to play golf in all 50 states. The sub-story to his mission is that he’s writing a book about diversity and inclusion within the golf community. His premise is that courses are not as inclusive as they could be.
As we discussed this, we talked about the concept of “white privilege” and how the golfers he’s seen so far through his travels have been largely all white. His contention is that minorities don’t have as much access or are not welcomed the way whites are.
Golf gets a bad rap for being too expensive for everyone to play, even though I’ve always thought downhill skiing was much more cost-prohibitive and much less accessible to those who can’t afford the equipment and hill fees.
But flying around the country is also very expensive, and when I asked him about how much it has cost him so far to do this, he said he didn’t know. That he hadn’t put “pen to paper” to figure it out.
Then it hit me. I remembered that his wife is a flight attendant and that he gets free flights as a result. So the answer to the question is “zero.” It hasn’t cost him anything to fly to golf courses around the country.
It seems to me, this is a privilege afforded to him that most people don’t have. I guess some privileges are more of a privilege than others.
What people don’t consider about privilege is that we’re all privileged. We all have access to information or events or special perks as a result of our friends, family, or jobs. Everyone has something they can do or get easier than other people.
Which goes back to one of the fundamental reasons why grouping people is simply lazy thinking and wrong-headed. No two people’s experiences are alike, just as no two people’s points of view are alike. So there’s especially no way an entire group of people, just based on some demographic characteristic, are all monolithic in their thoughts and behaviors.
Assembling people into identity groups serves only one purpose: to make victims out of everyone who even loosely fits the demographic, regardless of their station. The more we can divide our country into groups of aggrieved people, and the more victimized groups we can create, the more division and chaos we can sow.
With everyone at each other’s throats, our country will be primed for a revolution that might mean the dissolution of our Constitution.
The sooner we can see this, the more equipped we’ll be to stop it.
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