In yesterday’s Corner post, George Leef plugs an interesting Washington Examiner piece by John Ellis, a distinguished professor emeritus at UC Santa Cruz. Ellis argues that the “privilege” enjoyed by people of European descent is actually the result of technological and economic advances — what Deirdre McCloskey called “The Great Enrichment”:

This series of changes had to begin somewhere, and that was mainly among Western Europeans and their North American cousins. Individual strands that fed into it came from other times and places, but this was where everything suddenly came together to set in motion the most profound changes in human life ever seen. Because the changes started with Europeans, they obviously enjoyed its benefits first, and their economic and political development surged ahead of that of other peoples. Some of that initial advantage lingers today, both in European societies and in people of European descent, because the improved circumstances of earlier generations inevitably affected succeeding ones.

Leef takes this argument to mean that yes, white privilege does exist — “but not in the way the Left thinks.” Pointing to “an array of policies . . . such as minimum-wage laws, occupational licensing, welfare, and public education,” he indicts progressivism as the true cause of white privilege and racial hierarchy.

I don’t think that’s quite the right interpretation of Ellis’s argument, which makes the more nuanced point that disparities between European and non-European peoples persist because modernity’s technological, economic, and political innovations began in Europe (true) while also maintaining that those disparities have “nothing to do with illegitimate, stolen ‘white privilege.’” (Also true). But Ellis does argue that the Left is an “oppressor” of African Americans. “African Americans do suffer from one serious disadvantage,” he writes. “For them, there is indeed now an oppressor class. No, not whites: Their oppressor class is the radical Left.”

This is an assertion that one hears from time to time in conservative circles. It’s understandable, as far as it goes: One can point to any number of progressive policies and ideas that do, in fact, have a disparate impact on nonwhite communities. But to proceed from that insight to appropriate the Left’s political framework of “oppressor” and “oppressed” is to go too far.

I took issue with a similar argument made by Mario Loyola in NR back in November. Loyola, echoing Leef and Ellis, wrote that “there is systemic racism in America, but it has little to do with police procedures or practice. What drives disproportionate encounters with police is the same as what drives urban blight, low educational attainment, and low labor-force participation. It is the systemic racism of social-welfare and minimum-wage laws that have grossly disparate impacts on social mobility for blacks and Hispanics.”

In response, I pointed out that, while “badly designed welfare programs from the Great Society, burdensome job-killing regulatory policies, and a failing public-school system propped up by overpowerful teachers’ unions all are powerful examples of how progressive policies hurt nonwhite Americans . . . that does not mean that such policies are examples of systemic racism, and to argue this is to actually accept the racialized outcome-oriented framework offered by Ibram X. Kendi and other critical race theorists.” I continued:

Bad policies are bad policies, and most — perhaps all — bad policies are worse for some groups than they are for others. But the disparate impact of bad policies does not make them guilty of “systemic racism,” unless one is a Kendi-ist and believes that all policies with disparate impacts are systemically racist. And in that case, Kendi is right about all of the policies that he decries as racist, too. We don’t get to pick and choose here: Either disparate racial impact proves systemic racism, or it doesn’t. Loyola may be attempting to hoist the Left on its own petard, but his argument is actually acquiescing to an incredibly poisonous broader left-wing framework.

The same is true of the argument advanced by Leef and Ellis. The latter writes that “in disparaging modernity as whiteness, radicals promote their own destructive political agenda, not the interests of African Americans.” That’s undeniably true. But is a policy that disproportionately harms the interests of a particular group evidence of oppression?

Not necessarily. It could just be bad policy. Disparate impact alone is not the basis for allegations of “white privilege.” And using that framework to criticize progressive policy implicitly cedes important ground to the critical-race theorists.

There are more than enough damning arguments against progressive policy as it is. Conservatives need not embrace the Left’s broader obsession with categorizing everything in terms of racial oppression to make their point.