Impatience

To my previous claim (that progress has been made), you could well reply, “Not Fast Enough!” You might say, “It’s easy for you to urge patience when you already have what I lack. Why should we be expected to wait for what is rightfully our own?” 

To which I’d reply (if, indeed you did say this, and I’m aware I’m putting words in your mouth) “Life isn’t fair.” This is true no matter how complacent the person who says it. That’s why it’s the duty of each of us to strive to make it, and society, fairer.  

This will take time, because fairness needs to be created not reclaimed. Egalitarianism isn’t the natural condition of the world; if you remove obstacles, society won’t automatically fall into a state of natural fairness. “Natural Rights” are a romantic fantasy. If, on a walk, you trip and fall over a cliff, you can’t appeal to fairness to swoop down and save you; if, in a storm, a tree crushes your car, you can’t demand a reprieve from your own mortality on the basis that this hasn’t happened to your peers; if you develop incurable cancer, you can’t organise a protest outside the Halls of Fate, to get your sentence revoked. As William Munny (Clint Eastwood) says at the end of Unforgiven(1992), “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

Equality is constructed by communities. It is agreed upon as a shared value by all its members. It is consensual. So, to defeat your enemies, through protest and confrontation, through an exercise of mass power, will not bring about a just society. It will replicate the natural divisions and inequalities we should be uniting against. To use your faculty for generalising-as-social-theory against generalising-as-prejudice is to do the very thing you condemn, to say, “The problem with white people is they always generalise about race.” 

And it is a feeble excuse to suggest that by “white” you simply mean the nexus of characteristics associated with power-broking elites. “Whiteness” is universally accepted as a set of inherited physical features of one group of humans and not another. The sins you identify, in the elites you identify, will be automatically attributed to anyone cursed with those physical features. 

It is an even feebler excuse to say that the white elite came up with the classification in the first place. If so, why are you still using the tools of your own oppression? If you don’t like typifying by skin colour, you should avoid those habits of thought altogether.