The Eyes of privilege

I never learned the words to my alma mater's school song. I'm not sure they exist.

OK, so they do, but I never got past "Ball State, Ball State Baaaalll State." After that it's 
"we must something, something." Or whatever.

Point being, this is a damn silly thing over which to get one's shorts in a twist, unless of course you're some rich white goober in Texas who loves him some Longhorns football. Then "The Eyes of Texas" is practically a religious artifact.

And never mind that it's rooted in the good old days of slavery and the Confederacy.

On those grounds, the band refused to play it last fall, and a number of black players refused to stay on the field after games for the traditional postgame singalong. This doesn't seem unreasonable given the aforementioned interpretation.

Well. Unless you're one of the aforementioned rich white goobers.

They've gotten their backs up about it, those who are Texas alums, and they're threatening to shut off the money tap by yanking their donations. Over a song.

This suggests none of them really care a fig for good old UT, no matter how much burnt orange they wear. What they care about is the privilege they enjoy as rich white goobers. That song belongs to them, just as their university always has, and by God no one had better mess it with it. The band better play it, and those players better stay on the field and sing it, no matter how offensive they find it.

More rational people would acknowledge that it's hurtful to some, and seek out some middle ground. But privilege, and the power that comes with it, has a way of blinding the people who possess it, and triggering all their worst instincts. So instead some of them have sent letters and emails to the administration saying if the black players and students who've protested the song don't like it, they can just go to some other school.

And there you go. No matter how far we've come as a nation in wrestling with the issue of race, it seems, we haven't come nearly as far as we like to think we have.

 "Love it or leave it," after all, is a hearty perennial in America, and in this case it comes straight from the 1950s or '60s or even 1970, when Julius Whittier finally became the first black player to suit up for the Longhorns. A year prior, Texas became the last all-white team to win a national title.

So there's your context for the current caterwauling. 

It's the sort of wannabe victimhood popular now with the privileged, whose new catechism is "cancel culture." It's what they deem any correction to the historical record that doesn't embrace the narrative with which they grew up -- and never mind big chunks of that narrative sprang from the Lost Cause revisionism of the post-Reconstruction period.

Which of course means some of those who most loudly condemn "cancel culture" have canceled their share of culture, too. But of course they don't see it that way.

More blindness.