Monopoly Money
Political activism is emotional graffiti.
Activists, as I seldom tire in saying, glue themselves to political causes to conceal their social and emotional shortcomings. Not so long ago, those burdensome types limited their grudges, their archive of self-pity, and the litany of their sorrows, to newspaper letter pages and gloomy lonely-hearts ads.
Enter the internet. The worldwide web, as optimists once called it, knitted together like-minded neurotics and grievance junkies eager to explain their inadequacies as the fault of someone or something else.
The current vogue projects those personal hang-ups on to the world at large, and, of course, white people. Spend five minutes online, you’ll learn that all worldly evils stem from the people of the sun cream.
Then again, perhaps you are what psychologists call well-adjusted. You avoid scrolling your life away, entranced and defiled by the therapeutic notes of strangers. Good for you.
But whatever you may do offline, reader, do not play the humble board game, Monopoly.
This week, several English councils warned parents about the implicit whiteness latent in that tried-and-trusted board game. From the neurotics, it appears, nothing is safe.
For those not currently whacked out on risperidone, whiteness causes all the world’s problems, much like evil spirits ruined countless crops of self-pitying medieval peasants.
If given to such delusions, whiteness can explain all of one’s problems. Try it at work. Next time you’re late, just tell Susan in HR that implicit whiteness inherent in traffic-bearing communities explains why you strolled in at half-past nine. Susan will explode in ecstasy.
According to these mental councils, white children playing Monopoly with their parents should start with more money and get less jail time. Apparently, this will solve racism.
In guidance on ‘raising anti-racist children,’ activists fire off a slew of helpful tips.
White children can forego youthful innocence in which they’re complicit racists to become anti-racist allies who acknowledge and understand white privilege.
Ironically, the document, Facilitating Change, Amplifying Other Voices almost acronymically spells out what such boring people should do with their tiresome selves. Seven letters. Vulgar slang. Rhymes with ‘buck toff.’
Not to be deterred, they suggest parents inculcate their children with cheerful notions such as white supremacy and why, on account of their skin colour, that such children are inherently evil and at fault for the activists’ laundry list of neurotic fixations.
Everything is the fault of white people. Pertaining to this crude fiction, when playing Monopoly, white children should get a head start by plonking hotels on Mayfair. This necessary lenitive teaches them that no white person lives outside of the upper-middle classes.
In the Lego Language of our times, the document chatters on. The authors love their sound of their own voices, even if nobody else does. By brainwashing their children, white parents can: “Fight for social justice and create a fairer, more equal world.” To achieve this, “white communities must commit to becoming anti-racist.”
Never mind that the British Social Attitudes survey shows that very few white people hold genuinely racist views.
Never mind, too, that we aren’t living in 1979, though the activists wish it were so. They’d have something to do.
Ironically, if it were 1979, they’d likely align with the majority’s racist tendencies. Studies show Western progressive activism burns hotter the less salient an issue becomes. In Plain English: Activism is emotional graffiti for people too boring, too aesthetically unpleasing, and too mediocre to do much beyond harangue others with their sterile, copy-and-paste opinions.
Anyway, the helpful advice continues ad nauseam. Parents nursing children between ages three and six should routinely disturb story time to ask: “Do you think this person/magic rabbit/talking pig is a racist?”
Once kids reach the age of nine, the fun really starts. This being the age in which they can learn to sign petitions, call out racism, dye their hair blue, and detect unconscious bias in their playmates.
Parents should also do the work. By that, activists mean to examine themselves for signs of implicit, undetectable racism, much like a crystal meth head scours his skin for the scuttling of imaginary bugs. One can never be too cautious.
Such, such are the joys of living in a neurotic dystopia in which an empty Tinder inbox represents the twin forces of white supremacy and the patriarchy. Perhaps projecting to potential suitors that you’re a tad mental is the actual issue? But what would I know?
Activists cannot afford to see the glaring flaws in their poxed, weeping worldview. After all, they are social profiteers. Victimhood pays the bills.
Troubling to this exotic philosophy of oppressors and the oppressed is nuance, empirical evidence, reason, and logic—those relics of the Enlightenment.
Let’s play along. Reader, if you wish to play Monopoly tinged with a realistic, sociological bent, then I am here to help.
First, white working-class boys must start at the very bottom and remain at the very bottom. Despite their white privilege, poor white boys are least likely of all ethnic groups to attend a decent university or to escape their lowly station of birth.
In Britain, British Africans do much better than British Caribbeans—their fellow ‘blacks’. British Indians do much better than British Pakistanis and British Bangladeshis—their fellow ‘Asians’. Indeed, British Indians are the most successful of all.
For some bizarre, unexplainable reason, white privilege holds back poor white boys, whilst rewarding or punishing blacks and Asians according to their ancestral roots. It’s all very sophisticated.
Americans can play along, too. Please ensure that Nigerian Americans, Korean Americans, Indian Americans, Filipino Americans, Taiwanese Americans, Sri Lankan Americans, Japanese Americans, and Ghanaian Americans do much better than privileged white Americans.
Oh, and remember to have fun. But not too much. Spontaneity inflames those who habitually mistake their problems for the world’s problems. It was ever so.
In every poor kid, regardless of race or political leanings, there's a closet Marxist...in the sense that we're all aware, sometimes painfully, of distinctions in class. Even if you don't buy the whole communism thing you understand class conflict.
I've much more in common with inner city poor people of color than I do with rich white kids from the suburbs. Always have. You don't shed where you come from so easily.
Poor is poor. Class > race.
Excellent as ever. The lunatics really are running the asylum, aren't they......council house kid here, we couldn't afford Monopoly. Branded board games were bloody expensive in the 70s. We got the Compendium of Games every Christmas, which had playing cards, draughts/chess, ludo, backgammon and games that were so obscure nobody knew a) wtf they were or b) how to play them ....Nine Mens Morris, anyone? No, me neither. We bought our youngest Cheats Monopoly a few Christmases ago - wonder what the critical race mob would make of that one? 🤣