BC prof blames 'white heterosexual male privilege' for Trump win

A Boston College professor contends that Donald Trump’s election victory was predetermined by an electoral system designed to perpetuate “white heterosexual male privilege.”

“White heterosexual male privilege (WHMP) fought for and won the election of 2016,” professor Janet Helms of BC’s Lynch School of Education argues in an article posted on the school’s website. “White heterosexual men have won a rigged competition whose rules their white forefathers determined and passed on to subsequent generations to maintain and enhance.”

Helms explains heterosexual manhood as “a privileged status that men enjoy because they are born male rather than female,” adding that “the power to control society’s resources and determine the rules for competing for them is considered to be men’s birthright.”

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According to Helms, “President-elect Donald Trump is the privileged white male personified” whose “angry promises to ‘Make America Great Again,’ based on scapegoating of his political adversaries and longstanding victims of government policies, made white heterosexual men and the WHMP-benefiting women feel safe again.”

Accordingly, she asserts, various societal institutions threw their support behind the “WHMP revival movement,” including “white evangelical Christians,” whom she accuses of “[setting] aside their moral beliefs in family values, charity, and truth for their share of WHMP, subordination of women.”

Helms also laments the “WHMP protectionism” perpetrated by the media, asserting that “the national media failed in its responsibility to provide the public with equivalent examination of the two candidates, perhaps because the national media is dominated by white men purposefully committed to maintaining WHMP or unable to recognize when they are doing so.”

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Nonetheless, Helms concludes that Trump’s victory was not caused by individual racism, but rather by institutions put in place for the purpose of perpetuating WHMP.

“Racism did not cost Clinton the presidency,” she declares. “The Electoral College, founded to protect WHMP, did. Racism is a set of symptoms, but WHMP is the disease.”

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