瓦解全球白人特权：后西方世界的公平

作者：钱德兰·奈尔  贝瑞特-科勒出版社/2022

https://www.policymagazine.ca/dismantling-global-white-privilege-a-roadmap-for-change/ 

评论人：罗宾·V·西尔斯

2022年7月7日

过去十年中为数不多的令人振奋的政治趋势之一是性别平等运动的日益壮大，更令人惊讶的是，种族正义的呼声也日益高涨。然而，种族主义和性别歧视背后存在着更高层次的歧视结构：白人权力精英在全球几乎所有人类活动领域都占据主导地位。

钱德兰·奈尔是亚洲最受尊敬的公共知识分子之一，在他的新书《瓦解全球白人特权：后西方世界的公平》中，他有力地论证了一条白人主导的纽带将体育、金融等七个截然不同的领域联系起来。奈尔的著作于六月被《金融时报》评为当季最佳书籍之一。书中，他以无可辩驳的论证，揭示了麦肯锡、德勤、NBA以及全球媒体如何通过欧美领导力和西方价值观的主导地位紧密相连。

奈尔接受过工程师的专业训练，因此他对系统的敏锐分析并不令人意外。此外，他还是亚洲最成功的环境顾问之一，从业超过三十年。如今，他是亚洲智库“明日全球研究院”（Global Institute for Tomorrow）的首席执行官。他曾为世界各国政府提供咨询，并作为罗马俱乐部的高级董事会成员，与全球白人高管圈子有着密切的联系。

在书中，他逐一指出西方白人主导的组织在各个领域的统治地位，从世界银行到四大会计师事务所，从常春藤盟校到时尚和出版业，无一例外。他挑战了我们现行治理体系的自由民主叙事——认为它不仅是世界上最好的，而且是唯一可行的。

从我与他的交谈中可以看出，他拒绝在中美之间选边站队。他承认中美两国存在种族主义和其他弊端，只是指出西方仍然主导世界，而中国不再主导，而且可能永远也不会。奈尔并不提倡接受中国或其他任何威权模式。他关注西方，是因为当今的权力和问题都集中在西方。

他抨击西方自由派人士在种族主义问题上态度强硬，却未能提拔非白人候选人担任首席执行官等要职。

他的论点之所以如此引人入胜，是因为他不仅从行业和地域，而且从历史的角度，将支撑全球白人特权的要素联系起来。他清晰地指出，从早期欧洲在亚洲的贸易往来，到殖民主义，再到今天，白人特权始终存在。他认为，非殖民化的遗产是表面上的独立和自治，但实际上白人特权仍然控制着经济、联盟和贸易关系。他还将当今美国以军事优势为基础的地缘政治战略，与维护西方商业利益（其中最著名的当然是石油利益）联系起来。

他还指出，此类干预行动中对非白人死亡的漠视，并引用了美国前国务卿马德琳·奥尔布赖特在1996年接受《60分钟》节目采访时令人震惊的回答。当时，奥尔布赖特被问及海湾战争后对伊拉克实施制裁导致50万平民死亡，她回答说：“我们认为这个代价是值得的。”

作为一名偶尔从事学术研究并经常在大学论坛上发表演讲的人，他质疑为何美国常春藤盟校以及牛津和剑桥大学至今仍在全球学术界的权力、财富和排名中占据主导地位。他指出，这些排名是由受西方白人特权支配的群体评定的，他们使用的评估标准也只适用于这些老牌名校。

奈尔的论述或许不可避免地不如其批判性描述那样细致入微，尤其是在提出具体方案方面。他承认，许多领域——或许金融业首当其冲——会强烈抵制他提出的为非白人争取更大公平待遇的要求。

奈尔在马来西亚长大，他以自身经历为例：青少年时期沉迷于英美摇滚乐，长大后却意识到，即便滚石乐队标榜“革命性”，也只不过是西方白人青年生活的另一种写照。他成长为一名音乐爱好者和音乐家，如今专注于亚洲、非洲和中东的音乐巨匠。他不禁疑惑，为何这些音乐人即便在自己的国家，也无法获得与英美巨星同等的关注。

青少年时期，他曾质疑，为何一位印度裔马来西亚人会选择学习莎士比亚，而忽略了奥马尔·海亚姆、老子或《奥义书》等亚洲文学巨匠。他认为，这反映出太多亚洲学生的思想仍然被西方白人主导的文学和历史叙事所殖民。他非常合理地呼吁，非白人学生不应该为了进入西方大学并在大学取得成功而被迫接受这些观念。

鉴于奈尔在环境领域拥有30年的经验，他在此提出的批评尤为尖锐。他称之为“粉饰太平的环保运动”的种种弊端，阻碍了人们真正走向可持续发展的道路。他质疑那些被公众视为环保明星的群体——一个完全由白人组成的全球领导层——并质问为何会出现这种情况。他认为唯一的解释是，西方人认为非白人社区和组织并不真正关心环境，或者认为他们没有能力和资源做出真正的改变，又或者认为通过排除非白人的批评声音，就能确保白人特权带来的气候罪责得以转移。

无论你是否接受这种尖锐的批评，他对富裕社会在环境美德问题上玩弄数字游戏的论述都是无可辩驳的。他承认印度和中国都存在持续的污染和排放问题，但他指出，中国仍然是全球太阳能装机容量的领头羊，2019年装机容量达到20.5万兆瓦，是排名第二的美国（6.2万兆瓦）的三倍多。

奈尔在提出具体方案时，或许不可避免地不如其批判性描述那样细致。他承认，许多行业——金融业或许首当其冲——会强烈抵制他提出的为非白人争取更大公平待遇的要求。他也承认，他所呼吁的变革可能需要数十年，甚至几代人的时间。

然而，支撑他整个论点的并非是天真地认为掌权者会慷慨地放弃权力。除非他们意识到拒绝放弃权力将面临暴力抵抗，并有可能失去更大的权力，否则这种情况永远不会发生。历史为这种做法提供了佐证。毕竟，富兰克林·罗斯福曾私下向美国资本传达这样的信息：接受我的社会正义改革，否则就等着共产主义吧。奏效了。

他最有力的行动呼吁是对白人特权如何从幼儿教育一直延伸到高等教育的详细剖析，以及如何着手转变并消除其中最具歧视性的价值观。要改变花旗银行或壳牌石油公司高管对可持续发展和正义的责任感，不能从这个层面开始。这必须从小就树立起普世价值。

奈尔的这本分析著作，以通俗易懂的方式，首次清晰地描绘了西方白人主导的商业、政府和学术机构在全球占据主导地位的复杂网络。尽管偶尔带有争议性，但他的论点令人信服。这本书值得在权力中心广泛传播。

撰稿人罗宾·V·西尔斯曾于1990年至1995年担任安大略省驻东京亚洲总代表，之后在香港私营部门工作。他目前是渥太华的独立危机公关顾问。

Dismantling Global White Privilege: A Roadmap for Change

https://www.policymagazine.ca/dismantling-global-white-privilege-a-roadmap-for-change/ 

Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a Post-Western World

By Chandran Nair  Berrett-Koehler Publishers/2022

Reviewed by Robin V. Sears

July 7, 2022

One of the few uplifting political trends of the past decade has been the growing strength of movements for gender equality and, even more surprisingly, the demand for racial justice. But a higher-level structure of discrimination governs both racism and sexism: The global dominance of a white power elite in virtually every arena of human activity.

Chandran Nair, one of Asia’s most respected public intellectuals, makes a powerful case for the existence of a white thread connecting sectors as diverse as sports and finance, and seven others, in his new book Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a Post-Western World. Chosen in June by the Financial Times as one the best books of the season, Nair’s thesis weaves an undeniable tapestry of  how the McKinseys, Deloittes, the NBA, and global media are connected by the dominance of European and North American leadership and Western values.

Nair is an engineer by training, so his acute analysis of systems in not surprising. But he was also one of the most successful environmental consultants in Asia for more than three decades. He is now CEO of an Asian think tank, the Global Institute for Tomorrow. He has advised governments around the world, and as a senior board member of the Club of Rome is personally acquainted with the global club of white senior executives.

In sector after sector he points out the dominance of Western white-led organizations, from the World Bank to the big four auditing giants, to the Ivy League, to fashion and publishing. He challenges the liberal democratic narrative  of our system of governance as being not only the best, but the only workable one in the world.

From my conversations with him, he refuses to take sides between China/US, for example. Acknowledges their racism and other dysfunctions, simply observes the West still rules, and China does not, and probably never will. Nair does not advocate for an acceptance of Chinese or any other authoritarian model. He focuses on the West because that is where the power and the problems are today.

He takes swipes at Western liberals’ willingness to take tough stands on racism, while failing to promote non-white candidates to CEO level roles.

What makes his thesis so compelling is that he connects the elements that underpin global white privilege not only by sector and geography, but by history. He draws a straight line between early European traders in Asia, to colonialism to today. The legacy of decolonization, he maintains, is the appearance of independence and self-government, but the reality of white privilege continuing to control economies, alliances, and trade relations. He also connects today’s American geopolitical strategy, so often grounded in the use of its military dominance, to the maintenance of Western commercial interests, most famously, of course, in oil.

He cites as well the casual dismissal of non-white deaths in such interventions, quoting former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, stunningly answering a question on 60 Minutes in 1996 about the 500,000 civilian deaths attributed to post-Gulf War sanctions against Iraq saying, “We think the price is worth it.”

As a sometime academic and frequent speaker at university forums, he wonders why the American Ivy League and Oxford and Cambridge dominate global academia to this day in power, wealth and rankings. He observes that the rankings are done by groups dominated by Western white privilege as judges, using factors of assessment uniquely suited to the established big universities.

Nair is, perhaps inevitably, a little less granular in prescription, than in critical description. He acknowledges that there are many sectors – finance perhaps first among them – that will be deeply resistant to his demand for greater equity for non-whites.

Nair grew up in Malaysia and cites his own experience moving from a teen addicted to British and American rock and roll to an adult realizing that despite their “revolutionary” stance even the Rolling Stones were merely another evocation of the life of Western white kids. He grew into a music fan and musician now focused on Asian, African and Middle Eastern musical giants. He wonders why they do not get the same attention, even in their own countries, as the Anglo-American superstars.

He questioned as an adolescent why a Malaysian of Indian ancestry was studying Shakespeare, to the exclusion of Asian literary giants such as Omar Khayyam, Laozi, or the Upanishads. He links this to continuing colonization of the minds of too many Asian students in a white Western literary and historical narrative. He calls, quite reasonably, for non-white students not to have to ingest these constructs as the price of their entry into and success in Western universities and commerce.

Given his 30 years of experience in environmental practice, Nair’s critiques here are especially biting. What he dubs the “Whitewashed Environmental Movement,” is guilty of many obstacles to a real path to sustainability. Challenging the role of the green public rockstars, an entirely white global leadership, he asks why this is so. The only possible explanation he claims is that we in the West believe non-white communities and organizations do not really care about the environment, or that they don’t have the ability and resources to make real change, or that by keeping non-white critiques out of the green spotlight we ensure that white privilege’s climate guilt can be deflected.

Whether you accept this searing critique or not, his citation of the games with numbers that rich societies play about environmental virtue are unchallengeable. Conceding both India and China’s ongoing pollution and emissions issues, he points out that China is still the world leader in solar energy installation at 205,000 megawatts (2019). More than three times number two,  the US at 62,000.

Nair is, perhaps inevitably, a little less granular in prescription, than in critical description. He acknowledges that there are many sectors – finance perhaps first among them – that will be deeply resistant to his demand for greater equity for non-whites. And he concedes the kinds of changes that he is calling for may require decades, even generations.

However, underpinning his entire thesis is not a naive assumption that the powerful will generously cede their power. That will never happen unless they are persuaded that failing to do so risks violent resistance, and the potential to lose much greater power. History offers support for such an approach. It was, after all Franklin D. Roosevelt’s private message to American capital: accept my social justice reforms or risk communism. It worked.

His most powerful call to action is a detailed examination of how white privilege is built into early childhood education through to post-secondary study – and how to begin to transform and roll back its most discriminatory values. Transforming the attitudes of a Citibank or a Shell Oil executive about their responsibility for sustainability and justice cannot begin at that level. It must be set as universal values among the very young.

Nair has produced the first analysis, accessible to all readers, that clearly delineates the complex spider web that tightly binds the global dominance of Western, white-led business, governmental and academic organizations. If occasionally polemic, his thesis is compelling. The book deserves a wide audience in the corridors of power.

Contributing Writer Robin V. Sears served as Ontario’s Delegate General to Asia in Tokyo from 1990-95, and later worked in the private sector in Hong Kong. He is now an independent crisis communications consultant based in Ottawa.